Kick-off

Wow, how do I review the last week? So much has happened.

First, the real estate agent who we bought our second apartment from came around to value our place. Didier is a nice guy, ex-cop apparently, doing this job to top-up his retirement package. We had decided to list with him, and also Valerie, who has a large Scandinavian clientèle at her agency. Neither sign-up is exclusive so we are free to find a buyer ourselves and thereby avoid any agents' fees. In any event Didier had already decided he was going to charge us a really reasonable commission, rather than the more common 8%, and Valerie matched it so we are pretty pleased about that. We now have two rather gaudy real estate signs on our balconies but hopefully they will draw the eye of passers-by. There are so many more tourists coming into Place de l'Eglise than even a week or so ago so we're hopeful someone will be keen to buy us out. So we are now in the mode of keeping the place exceptionally tidy each day - not too much of a chore but when we have the washing draped on the stand it takes up a good portion of the living room and is a little hard to hide!

We are now officially For Sale.

Monday was a big day. We met with our builder, plumber and electrician on-site AND they were on-time, more or less. John excelled in talking French with them all and we managed to work through the alterations we had made to the plans with Antoine, discuss in the in and outs of plumbing, and put the sparky on the spot about his stupidly inflated quote. The end result is that Antoine is all set to start work this week, probably on Tuesday rather then Monday because he now has an extra beam to be delivered. We are visiting the plumber's place soon to choose the fittings we want. We will then call in on the sparky, give him the opportunity to substantially reduce his quote (working with the few changes we have made to power points etc.) and hopefully come to a deal with him.

Antoine put us on to a maitre d'oeuvre (master of works) just around the corner from us to help us with our application to the mairie for consent to put in our two skylights. We bravely fronted up to the mairie first, obtained the application forms and had a good chat to the receptionist about how to fill them in. Amusingly, we said where do we need to put in the added square metres we will get. She said we really wouldn't want to do that, zero would be fine! While there, the receptionist from our notaire came in and we ended up having a right old yarn about the All Blacks. It was all very friendly and we are feeling more and more welcome here. We are finding it makes a huge difference going out of our way to thank and chat with people. The old adage about French unfriendliness is untrue here. The only people who are not that helpful are those at the tourist office - a rather unfortunate place to have them placed.

Back home, we managed to fill in the forms and took the required photos. Any concern about the skylights relates to whether they will be able to be viewed from historic square we will front on to. The rules are very protective of the old character of the medieval core of the town and France's national heritage organisation (the equivalent of our NZ Historic Places) has to give consent, as well as the local mairie. Our skylights won't be able to be seen from anywhere as they'll be so high up, so we don't anticipate any problems. It'll take up to 2 months before we hear back though.

Anyway, we called in to see Robert, the maitre d'oeuvre, to make sure we had dotted all the 'i's and crossed all the 't's'. He was extremely helpful, apologetic he didn't have a photocopier so he could provide us with the quadruple copies we needed, and even wrote out an explanatory description of our proposal so we could copy it into the appropriate place on one of the forms. He couldn't do enough to help us, and for nix.

Off to the copy shop to get three more copies made of the application. 13 Euros (NZ$21) later we reeled out of the shop. Some things in France are incredibly and surprisingly expensive, while others are properly cheap. I guess that is the quirky nature of France everyone knows they have to deal with.

Apart from  fiddling around with the plans, meeting the building team and real estate agents John had been busy with paid work and I was once again working on the diary I'm trying to get organised for publishing later in the year. However, we could contain ourselves no longer. After enjoying the Saturday morning market and coffee with friends, we changed into our gorgeously attractive working clothes (not), picked up our tools and headed to Place des Neuf Jets. We did feel extremely conspicuous slinking around the outside of the square to our doorway, with many people still enjoying outdoor dining in the restaurants in the square all around us. 

We closed some of the shutters so we weren't too noisy (or visible!) and set about hacking off the old plaster from one wall and clawing out the plaster from between the stones underneath. Four hours, clouds of dust, four blisters, countless scrapes and one nasty blood blister later, we stood back and were extremely impressed with the chaos we had created. probably half a tonne of plaster and dust at our feet but the stones in the wall look great. This is the only wall we will be able to expose as all other walls need to be covered with new insulation, will be behind the kitchen units, or whatever.  We felt as though we could have been in a Grand Designs programme - Kevin McCloud could have come bounding up the stairs at any time! For those of you who know some of my foibles, I have a thing about making rock walls. The next best thing to constructing one from scratch is to create one by digging out the plaster in a ready-made one and revealing the stones. I was like a pig in mud, except a lot dustier.

At 5.30pm we downed tools, slunk back to our place (the late afternoon drinks crowd had replaced the lunchtime diners), a quick but vital shower, plenty of band-aids and we were off to dinner with our Aussie friends up the road. Some English friends were also there and we had an extremely enjoyable evening, partly aimed at christening the new terrace Ross and Liz had recently constructed (if not quite got permission for yet - long story but one of those French things). A good night, and no doubt there will be a few more before Ross and Liz head back home in early May. They are planning to come out again in November and spend their second Xmas here in Céret.

Feeling a bit beaten up this morning but, looking at the plans yet again, and the new stones we have revealed, we've decided to keep going and pick away at quite a lot more. It's a real bonus for us because we suspected that the stones behind the wall might be just rubble. However we had promised ourselves a day off physical labour today so we caught the second half of the local rugby final at our stadium. It was very parochial, not surprising here, and a decent match to watch, if rather brutal. We couldn't quite understand why the large crowd booed the referee at the end of the match because the home team had won - perhaps it was because he gave so many (justified) penalties to the other team during the match.

We've got the place looking pretty spruced up, all washing dried and put away and we are all set for the week. Last Thursday was a holiday and lots of people took the Friday off work too and the same will happen this week. We are not sure, therefore, how much work we'll get from the builders this week but we're not concerned. Antoine has it all sorted and appears to know exactly what he is doing. I hope we don't eat these words in a number of weeks time but I don't think so.

A few days later now, no builder, as expected, but we have pretty much finished all the hacking on what will be the sole remaining stone wall. We've managed to give ourselves up to 5cm of extra room in some places, and of course what will hopefully become a lovely stone wall.

Before....

... and after.