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Live and Learn , the hard way !!
In the early part of 1998 , my husband Paul and I were running a successful hotel business in Cornwall . Tired and rather disillusioned after a particularly gruelling season the year before, we decided to have one last adventure, throw caution to the wind and move to France, just like that , no planning, no forward thinking whatsoever and, at then fifty years old, you would have thought we’d have had more sense !
Our business sold by word of mouth and much faster than we would ever have imagined , leaving us in a state of shock and with no real plans as to where we were heading in this big country we now call home !
During the selling proceedure, we studied maps and picked on the Vendée as looking a pretty nice place to live , the sea having played a large part of our lives for so long . And so it was that , one morning, I dispatched my husband to go and look, not buy, just suss the region out and report back to me , left behind to run the business and wait, with bated breath for his return . Five days later , the telphone rang, it was Paul calling me from the ferry port at Roscoff , tired but obviously very excited and waiting in the queue for his return journey . We chatted for a moment and then he utterd those immortal words , ‘ I’ve bought a house, you’ll love it , it will be lovely when its renovated ‘ . Silence, the phone went dead as I mulled over his words . I didnt sleep , part of me angry that he had taken this mamouth step without me and part of me excited at the picture growing in my mind of my lovely old French house waiting to be liberated .
I can only describe as hysteria, those sick and stomache churning feelings I had as I viewed the video he had taken and for one wonderful moment, I really thought that he was surely playing a silly joke on me, he wasnt !
Cutting out all the interim stuff , we arrived in France on a wet and windy day in October with two dogs and a protesting cat along with all our wordly goods being driven in a lorry behind us by a friend . Arriving at our home , I was ready to break down in tears , it was truly awful and far far worse than the cleverly taken video ! Here were earth floors , the toilet was in a corner of the room with a curtain around it and there was enough electricity to power a couple of light bulbs and a kettle but not at the same time !
Well, to cut and long and back breaking story short , the renovations which Paul had been convinced would take him six months, turned into four years during which time I very nearly left him on very many occasions ! Had it not been for the fact that this was pre pet passport days, I certainly would have done so ! Living in a major renovation project is no joke , especially at our ages and with an ever dwindling wallet, we realised that the house was indeed a money pit ! Our relationship was tested to the hilt on numerous occasions but one in particular must be repeated as a warning to all !
Paul had ordered a lorry load of cement having preapred the whole of the ground floor area which had been earth floors . He had told me that he had ordered fast setting cement and that although I would be confined to the upper floor of the house with the dogs whilst it set, this would not be for long . So , that morning saw me and the dogs all in our bedroom with coffee and breakfast as the lorry drew up and began to pump out the load.
It had been a horrible day, raining and cold and in a way, I relished the thought of spending a couple of hours in my cosy bed , little did I know what lay ahead ! Suffice to say that this was not rapid drying cement at all and that eight hours later, I was still trapped in my bedroom and the bathroom and toilet were downstairs ! Our house faced the village green and no doubt the pulling up of a bucket tied to a sheet to my bedroom window caused much amusement to all . Worse was to come as the dogs began to get aggitated and I realised their bodily needs too ! First the Jack Russell was lowered to the street below in a sheet hammock but an Alsation ?? By now , people had gathered to watch the spectacle as my husband climbed a ladder and I gingerley passed the big dog to him out of the bedroom window and thankfully , old Ben kept very calm upon the descent !
By ten o’clock at night, I was starving hungry and suspected that my husbands disappearance was due to him feeding the inner man, alright for some ! Eventually, someone thought of me and a plate of food was brought to the window, followed by a bottle of wine and a glass , even more welcome !
Looking back now , I realise that our project was far too ambitious for us and the saying comes to mind ‘ The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’.
Please think before undertaking a major project , be realistic about your own abilities and budget, it is bound to cost a lot more than you originally thought . Old houses can be money pits , can break hearts and bank balances ! But it also has to be said that it is so satisfying to bring old tired houses back to life , to stand back , admire the work and say out loud , ‘ We did all that ‘ .
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