2011 for us was going to be a holding year, with planning permission granted and a new baby on the way we’d decided to stop the renovation, save the money to get more done in one go and enjoy the first year of our daughters life. Unfortunately things didn’t work out as planned.

Charlotte was born Dec 21st at 19:19 but suddenly passed away 23 hours later. As you can imagine this has shaken us to our core and we are devastated. During this time we’ve of course done a lot of reflecting, wondering, soul searching and crying but out of it all we’ve found strength as a couple and as a family to carry on. For us to “carry on” means now to push on this year with the renovation and make it the family home we want it to be. We intend to try again for a family soon and through all this we know the house in Montpillard is where we want our children to grow up enjoying the nature and peace it provides.

So here’s the plan (as of today)… Remove the side building and repair the wall to create a bigger access area plus this area needs to be prepared for an extension. We’ll also replace the existing shutters to match the new windows, finish the rear bedroom and have the outside of the house rendered. All this is to make the house marketable as a holiday gite while we plan with the builder to remove the cow shed, and start on the mezzanine.

With a wonderful lake and forest less than 5km the area is perfect for mountain bikers to holiday, and the barn will make a great bike workshop after a hard days riding.

So that’s where we are today. Over the coming weeks we have some personal things to sort out and then we’ll be going to the house to enjoy the things we love about it. Hopefully this time you’ll get a bucket load of updates to go with the new found energy we have for the project.

At this time we would like to thank everyone for all the support they’ve given us during 2010 and we look forward to achieving great things to celebrate the year that our beautiful daughter started.

Lee

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 home.

Don’t worry all the work we’ve done on the inside of the house isn’t going to go to waste, we’ll be doing this for a few years yet so we’ll be renovating from right to left so we can still live (or rent) the flat out for some time.

You’ll now start to see more and more detailed plans on the site but below are the ones we sent for approval and we got everything we asked for, not a single change was requested and not a single question about the plans. The architect really did a fantastic job considering the CAUE told us the we MUST leave the concrete stairs, we would never be allowed to change the outbuilding design and the house had too many windows.

Thankfully they weren’t speaking for the planners in our area.

So here comes the open plan house with a suspended mezzanine first floor and with a new useful side building and lots and lots of light.

It’s been a very big week for us, with the 1st baby kicks, completing on the new family home and now this. We couldn’t be happier at present. More plans when we get our breath back.

If at the start of the year you would have said i would be in a new job (yep i changed jobs), we’d be moving to a new area (yep we have bought another house) and that we’d have a baby (didn’t we tell you about that?) on the way, i would have said you were smoking something herbal but that’s exactly what has happened.

The new job keeps me away from home 3 or 4 days a week and while we’ve been looking for a house to resolve this Dawns bump has been getting bigger and bigger and when i’m at home i just haven’t felt like writing but now we’ve past the 20wk pregnancy mark and we know we are having a girl we also have a date to move into the new house and with those two things sorted there is once again some space to be able to share everything with you.

So while i get my writing head straight here’s what has also been going on and what to expect from me this week :

The new English family home :

Final plans are in and have been for a good few weeks now: Rear bedroom is 99% renovated, just paint to go : New floor laid in the rear room : 2nd part of the kitchen built : Appliances arrived and installed in the kitchen : Final plastering on bathroom finished :

All these are going to take me a few days as there of course has been a lot of work around the quick pictures posted here so i look forward to sharing them with you. If you can’t wait then click on the Flickr gallery link on the right as that’s were most are. Once again thank you to Dad who spent another couple of weeks in the house and made massive progress, the last visit in France really felt like home.

A long drive last night after work in London meant we arrived here at 03:30am French time, so it’s a day to recover, appricate the house, land and scenary and then i’ll get back into painting, fixing, gardening and blog writing.

WOW

• Bathroom now finished & painted, there’s even a toilet roll holder to add some luxury to the experience
• 2nd kitchen sideboard & cupboards installed ready for new appliances
• The rear bedrooms new ceiling is up & plastered
• New lights & power sockets run into the new bedroom
• 1st wall totally pointed ( this is VERY time intensive )
• Old electric, phone & data points replaced & secured
• 4 new windows ordered to replace the current rotting ones
• 1 new stable type door ordered. Delivery & fitting the windows & doors should be 4/6 weeks
• Roofs on the grange & the house repaired (again)

I’m sure i’ve forgot something but i’ll be speaking to dad in length tonight when he returns from his mammoth renovation trip (it’s Good Friday today), the write ups, photos & podcast will be hot on the heals of this post.

There’s at present no further work planned for the next 4/6 weeks until Dawn goes to the house to supervise the windows being fitted but we are on the cusp of achieving what we wanted to for this year and IT’S ONLY APRIL

This week top of the hit list was the bathroom, while the shower has been in for a while we’ve lived with a few bare wires hanging out of the wall for light, no loo roll holder, no mirror and the toilet seemed to buck like a bronco if you sat down without thinking and then there was a gaping whole in the top of the wall so privacy was always a premium.

It’s a real shame we never got any good photos of the old bathroom as it’s hard to explain how horrible it was, how (or why) anyone used it before we purchased the house still a mystery. Sure the new shower made a massive difference but you needed to be a member on MENSA to work out how to fit it in such a small space and the somewhat fitted new toilet made life liveable but it was never quite like it should have been. Now with the new accessories fitted a proper light finally fitted and the wiring channeled into the wall and not forgetting that the toilet is now anchored down it’s fantastic but to top that all off the opening in the wall had now been sealed so that is very much job done on the temporary bathroom.

The next job that is coming along nicely is the 2nd part of the kitchen. You’ll remember THIS POST i wrote about fitting the kitchen and while we were in the house every few months it was fine,  I even cooked Christmas dinner (link) on the current stove so there is no complaints, but there isn’t is a washing machine or an electric oven (we’ll use the gas one as a backup) and that’s now whats being worked on.. A €100 new work surface from Brico Depot, some leftover cabinets from MFI (UK) and now it’s time to buy a washing machine and small fridge. This will be luxury like we’ve not experienced before.

So 1 week in and that’s the bathroom finished except a bit of painting and the kitchen is ready for appliance fitting…

FANTASTIC for just 5 days from my Dad working on his own.. Kudos Papa

So after the enforced winter’s break we finally have a break in the weather from high winds (more roof damage), very low temperatures (no frozen pipes this year is a WIN!) and a generally very tough European winter.

Hopefully the weather station has survived and we’ll download the data when we get there to share with you, but for now the outlook for the next few weeks is looking bright and it’s time to make the dash over to the house and roll up ”our” sleeves. I say ”our” rather lightly because really it’s my Dad! Yep it’s once again time to throw the big guns at it and he’s come up trumps again and will be doing most of the work we’ll be talking about (we need to keep him topped up with good food the odd beer & lots of English tea - then we stand a fighting chance of achieving some great things).

Here’s the plan!

• Put the finishing touches to the bathroom
• Repoint the interior walls in the kitchen area
• Remove the rear ”bedroom” ceiling
• Insulate & plasterboard a new ceiling
• Run electrics to the new bedroom
• Create a new floor for the the rear bedroom (lots of levelling to do here)
• Order new windows (more about this soon)
• Order new custom front stable style door (more about this soon)
• Fit new kitchen appliances

Now of course some of this is going to take more than the 3 weeks my Dad is on site but you’ll be pleased to know we aren’t flogging him to death; there’ll be builders in and then after that we have some tenants for 2 months, in Dawn’s parents, so works will continue with and around them, and both Dawn and I will be going to the house as well so it really is a full-on affair.

What does this all mean?
Simply put, by the summer the house will be in a totally liveable state. There’ll be no more rustic ”slumming it” in a house with holes in the walls, ill fitting door & windows and a rear ”bedroom” that’s currently really just a room in the barn we’ve thrown some beds in. From this point on it means we can concentrate on getting all the plans through and the major renovation started on the rest of the house knowing that we’ve always got a water-tight, warm, accommodating  and really rather nice cottage for us and everyone else to go out to without worrying how cold it’ll be or if a window has fallen out. So keep your eyes peeled as there is going to be a flurry of posts, pictures and we’ll even grace you with Episode 7 (or is it 8?) of our podcast..

Thanks for hanging in there, it feels so good to be back..

Here are some before, during & after photos with the bigger sets below.

With the roof now cleared you can really start to get a sense of size of the space we will have available to us. The timbers that we removed we are offering for free to anyone who wants to collect them (see HERE) and the cattle feed rack on the left we’ve given to Jean Luc our farming neighbour so he’s got use out of that. We are also trying to rescue the trough (at the bottom of the picture) that has a water irrigation system still fitted but given the time it’s stood unused and the rust its infested with it looks like it’ll only good for junk, which is a shame. Also not sure what we’re going to do with the old tiles as yet but i’m hoping i can at least crush them down and use them as hardcore rather than taking them to the dump.

Below are the remaining photos from the work carried out by Dad and I, unfortunately the two photos which would have proved popular if we’d captured it we don’t have…

These were :

1. I slammed my head off the main roof beam
2. One of the beams rolled and slammed the side of my head…

How i wasn’t knocked spark out is beyond me, but more to the surprise of Dad i didn’t lose my rag.
There must be ZEN in them bits of wood

And that’s it. That’s where we are at the moment, we’ve got the wall to remove of course but i need to figure out what to do with all those bricks we’ll remove. There isn’t such a thing as a skip hire company around here and taking it all to the municipal dump is going to take many many trips with a car and a trailer so I need to get my thinking cap on!

Do you have any ideas?

In all the time we’ve owned the house Dawn and I have never actually spent a single night in the house with just each other. With all the work we’ve been doing my dad has thankfully been able to help, then in the summer Dawn and Cas were here a few weeks before Dawn and her parents but just Dawn and I it’s never happened!

Time to rectify that then

With all the hard work that’s been put in this year the house is not only weather proof but actually quite comfortable. Last year when Dad and I were out here late October it was -10 and we had no heat… This year the weather station is telling me it’s a barmy warm 13 inside the house and -1 outside we have the log burner going, the wind is kept outside and with the lights, stockings and “Fred” the house is looking very homely.

We’ll keep you up to date with a few things we have planned like a meeting with the Architect on Monday, but we really are planning a holiday and not a renovation week. There is a nasty rumor that we may be going horse riding with Dawn God daughter but we’ll wait and see

Also i’ll be posting a round up of the year, some interesting news on “Petite Assistante” and of course lots of photos from this week. I will confess however to pulling a fast one and already installing the weather station to start to get some stats on the amount of wind & rain we get up here and i’m fitting the solar logger so as much as i want it to be all rest you know what they say about idel hands being the devils work etc etc

And on that note from Me, Dawn & Schubert (on his 1st trip to the house) we bid you Joyeux Noël

Update 28th Dec
I remember why and how much I LOVE BEING HERE!

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