Englishman Buys Bar 7 - Getting into the groove, and making a few holes

By John Harries-Harries

.... read on.

Dec 10th. 

We have been here 3 weeks to the day, and have a routine. I wanted to leave ‘routine’ out of my life, but it is insidious. The start of the day revolves around getting Lucy to school. This has to be done so that her arrival enables her to reach the classroom just in time to greet her friends and classmates, but is not so early that she has to stand around listening to chatter which she doesn’t understand. Of course, she mustn’t be late either, so I find that allowing plenty of time but altering the route to town can make the  necessary fine adjustment. (Is Lucy twisting him round her little finger, or are Dad and Daughter rather special people? Keep it up, both of you. You're doing well - and the fact that Chris is quietly holding all this together hasn't escaped our notice....) 

I can then get on with whatever project is most pressing. At the moment it is the bathroom. The existing bathroom is on the ground floor in the location we would like the kitchen to be. On the first floor is a room constructed last summer to form the ‘new’ bathroom. As I have also to convert le grenier (the attic or loft) to the suite of rooms that will be Lucy’s area, she is using the new bathroom as a temporary bedroom. (I'm sure readers will all remember playing that game where you slide the numbers round the square, trying to arrange them in the correct order. How many of you took the game to bits and re-assembled it with the numbers in the required order? It's OK to do that these days - they call it Thinking Outside The Box.)

This is fine until I actually fit the ‘working’ parts, particularly the WC, and the time is close. I have excavated the existing exterior drainage system that runs to a fosse septique (septic tank - don't even think of DIY building in France unless you're an expert on fosses septiques) on the ‘foul’ side, and to the village storm drains for the sink wastes and rainwater. We will have mains drainage in about 11 months time, so everything has to be modified with this in mind. Simple it ain’t.

I also had to excavate below the house wall where the pipes enter. The walls are 90cm of granite. For a while, I felt that I was ‘Big X’ tunnelling out of Colditz. To accommodate the 100mm pipes running vertically from attic to below ground level, I had to remove part of the wall in the entrance hall. (Now you know what the picture above is about....)

It was while I was demolishing the inner wall that the man from France Telecom arrived to fit our phone lines and sockets. He was rather a dour guy in his early 30s, who refused any sort of liquid refreshment and was singularly uncommunicative, which struck us as odd, considering his profession. He was in the main bedroom, fitting an extension, when he asked if I could make a small hole in the lounge wall so that he could feed the cable through and down to the main incomer position.

Now a careful study of the pictures will reveal the construction of my inner walls. They are a honeycombed terracotta block about 30x20 cms, and quite tricky to make holes in. I gave a light tap with a normal hammer and cold chisel to the most convenient block so as to form the desired hole for the cable. This resulted in a complete block being dislodged. Well, it made threading the cable quite easy - but the Telecom guy's face was a delight, when he came to look. 

He stared at the hole (see above), his jaw slackened, his eyes widened, and I thought he was about to burst into tears. I really thought he was going to turn tail and do a runner.

I reassured him telling him ‘tout les Anglais est crazy’, and he got on with the installation.

Those of you contemplating fitting curtain rails in French houses should beware, too. Some modern houses have a steel I-beam  (an RSJ to the Brits)  above the wide windows, with the hollow filled with these honeycombed bricks, rather than the reinforced concrete lintel of a typical UK house. In the UK, you end up with a pile of shattered carbide-tipped bits and a hammer drill with no bearings. In France, you need to buy a selection of fancy rawlplugs in the hope that one of them will give your screws enough grip to support the heavy pelmet and double curtains your partner took three weeks to find.

It was then lunch time, so he went off to the next village to lunch at the bar (ours being still shut of course). I would love to have been a fly on the wall. I can just hear him telling them how he wanted a small hole for his cable, and the mad Englishman practically demolished his lounge wall supplying one! I bet he drinks out on the story for weeks. At least he was more cheerful when he came back, but that could have been due the alcoholic component of his lunch.

Being on the ’phone has changed our lives for the better. To be in full contact with friends and relatives, and with access to the net, is an almighty step forward. We were beginning to be a little ‘detached’ in more ways than one, so we are much happier now. Our advance from the bank has also arrived, adding further to our happiness.

Christmas will be upon us in a fortnight. Our village has taken external lights to dizzy heights. Quite literally when you look at the church spire! They have used the ’new’ tubular lights in various colours to form animals, holly, bells, triskels etc, and hung them on all the houses and posts from one end of the village to the other. The church has all its front architecture picked out with variously coloured tubes of light, and it is all so impressive that streams of visiting cars come from the nearby town of Rostrenen and from the surrounding villages, just to see the display. It is quite the most stunning communal display of pride, and I am delighted to be part of it.

You will have noticed that I have made little comment about the bar. It is because there is nothing to say yet! The seller has had to get another Notaire, as the ’family retainer’ is no longer retained. Rumours are rife about the Notaire, but I feel the subject is best left without further comment. Suffice to say that progress is slow. No, progress is nil. It gives me time to work on my house, but does cause me a little concern. I really need to have the 3 bedrooms ready for letting from Easter next year. 

Although the time seems adequate, there is a lot of ‘official’ stuff to be done. We have to get cartes de séjour  to run a business in France (the prospect of anything like these official residence permits - plastic ID cards which contain photos and other extracts from the information recorded on a central database - make some stay-at-home Brits foam at the mouth), and we need to become members of the local Chambre de Commerce. We also have to get some training so as to sell Tabac products, and to learn the licensing laws. Of course, all these are inter-dependent and have to be applied for concurrently. With all the areas there are for things not to fit into place, I see a ‘catch 22’ situation in the near distance.

Of course, it could all go without a hitch……….

* * *

Like all countries, France has its rules and regulations, and a bureaucracy to implement them. However, it also has a strong Alternative Society culture. To simplify installation of WCs in ancient buildings made from lumps of rock, builders' merchants sell a gadget known by the trade name of 'Sanibroyeur', which fits on the WC outlet. It contains an electrically-driven shredder, allowing you to connect the WC to the same size of pipe as that used for the sink and shower outlets. I once lived in a cottage in an expensive suburb of Paris where the landlady's illegal Portuguese workers had joined shower, sink and WC outlets together and fed the whole lot into an open ditch which ended up in the road drain, having irrigated her orchard on the way. Since her grass was rarely mown, it formed a natural filtering and purification bed.  There was no smell, and her apples were excellent, like the watercress we used to harvest from the gutter in nearby Chambourcy. 

* * *

If you want to congratulate or encourage John (or sympathise with Chris and Lucy)  e-mail me with your thoughts or advice, or better still, write to the Notice Board.

Have fun.

Next Instalment

Previous Instalment

Back to All Articles Index