Or in English : The building permit is GRANTED! FANTASTIC! It’s been a long hard road and we’ve made many mistakes but today we had some fantastic news and now we can really start to get together full quotes, project plans and time scales to turn our current 1 bedroom flat into a rather large open plan 3 bedroom family

With the groundwork already done by Dawn & her Dad (Eric) (in this post : HERE) it was now time to get the tiles removed, the roof opened up and wooden beams taken down so we can really start to see the potential in the space we then have and that was a job for me and my Dad! Here

We’ve achieved a few milestones on the renovation of late with the roof being finished and the dog getting his passport so we can all spend our first christmas as a complete family in the house and to celebrate we wanted to share the love so we’ve made Petite Assistante FREE for the festive period. No catch, no reduced functionality

To make way for the new floor we are planning to put in requires the creation of one large open space in what we call “The Barn” . This is the space to the right of the living quarters which currently incorporates our bedroom to the far left of the building. In order to start this we need to empty

Planning the layout of the house has been the hardest thing we’ve had to decide on.  Do we go for high style on the inside which ultimately affects the look of the outside or do we stick with what we have and compromise on size, light and what we see as quality of living space? This was a hard exercise

Get the balloons, party poppers & the orange juice as we are about to have ourselves a wrap part! Introducing little Miss “Petite Assistante” your personal French renovation dictionary, translater and all round life saver. The app is a dedicated English to French to English translation dictionary however this IS NOT your normal batch of French words. You’re not going

This week my father and I are over in the house for seven days, this will actually be the longest time we have spent here in one swoop and it’s borne out of the frustration that my wife and I have that we just can’t tinker with stuff on the odd weekend. A quick recap : While we are finalising

We are just watching on TV “Grand Designs“, a UK based building program, and watched in horror as one mans dream home fell apart due to a lack of written agreed planning consent and neighbours who threatened legal action through to  judicial review. A judicial review would have tied up planning for a decade and the proposed solution was to

PLAN, PLAN & PLAN, any renovation needs clear planning. If watching all the renovation programs and disasters has taught us anything it’s that “failure is not to plan; planning is not to fail” (sorry for the fortune cookie wisdom). We’ve watched in stunned silence at the way some people have run their renovations, with all the good will in the

Please note there is an update at the bottom of this post dated 21 Jan 09 It’s no secret that we feel we’ve had a total disaster with our first architect and while i want to vent my spleen and name and shame there comes a point where you have to accept that people run into unexpected circumstances that impact