Playing Catch Up...

So, I finally figured out how to blog...only took me two years. I posted my last entry, which had actually been written as a 'comment' on houseblogs.net, not realizing this isn't how you blog. So...a year later, and a little wiser. Our great adventure of the last summer was marked by tragedy...our crew of 9 became 8 when my best friend (age 26) fell ill just before we were scheduled to depart...her illness turned out to be a terrible type of cancer and she succombed to it within months of her diagnosis, dying in November of last year (2007). We're all still reeling from her loss. At the time of our trip, however, we didn't realize quite how serious her illness was, so we completed the trip as planned.

We accomplished much. Prior to our arrival, my husband Patrick and I had one of the local contractors install the basics...plumbing to the house, electricity, a shower, a tiny washroom sink (which served as our only sink throughout the stay), a toilet....and that's about it. The rest of the house looked remarkably just like we had left it, with the exception of a few key appliances purchased through http://www.ebay.fr/ and delivered for a fee by the kind sellers - a fridge, a stove, a washing machine and dryer (both of which are painfully slow and hold so little compared to their American counterparts...but at least they're functional and came at a great price). Other new additions to the house included some furniture kindly donated by a French relation who lives nearby, and other friends of my grandparents. It wasn't the Ritz, but it suited us just fine.

We tackled the scraping and painting of the main entrance room, kitchen, and upstairs bedrooms...all that nasty lead paint came off in chunks and was quickly sealed over with cheap primer from Leroy Merlin. We scraped wallpaper and plumbed the other two bathrooms (and when I say 'we,' I really mean dear hubby Patrick and his Dad). All was going fine until my mother-in-law and I were beginning the wallpaper removal in the master bedroom, when suddenly millions of tiny little biting gnats poured from the wallpaper. We didn't even realize they had emerged until we looked at our arms and felt little stinging sensations from the black dirt that seemed to have covered us...it didn't take long before the entire house was taken over by these little monsters. We all jumped in the van and raced up to my grandparents house to quickly jump in the pool, clothes and all. An hour or so later, much wetter, itchier, and a bit grumpier at having lost an entire day of work, we headed off for the local hardware store to inquire about bug killing options. The girl at the counter just laughed at our story and nodded knowingly, saying yes, there are definitely little gnats, but she insisted they didn't bite "ils ne piquent pas"...ok....tell that to my arms...and legs...and face. Then she handed us a can of ant killer and wished us good luck with that....

Another trip to LeRoy Merlin for bug bombs....and that was pretty much the end of our working on the house, only 1 week into our 2 week stay, since none of us wanted to be in the house with that insecticide wafting everywhere. Did I mention I was 3 months pregnant at the time? Bug bomb and lead paint, definite no-no's. Good thing we had the grandparents' house to stay at.

In the meantime, we're planning a trip back for September '08. A little trickier now that we have 4 month old baby Marc to consider, but we'll figure it out I'm sure.

Love is in the Air...or is that paint dust?

It all began on chilly Frebruary day last year, around Valentine's Day 2006. My husband had just returned from Iraq and we decided it was about time we headed over the big pond to give him the grand tour of my family's place of origin. So we hopped on a flight and a mere 20 hours later (allowing for the missed TGV, his hilarious first attempt at ordering a sandwich in French, which came out as a sputtered 'une sandwiche por favor!', and other little adventures), we finally arrived in the beautiful countryside of the Poitou-Charente. My grandparents picked us up at the station and shuttled us back to their lovely maison near the village of Lencloitre. Ours was to be only a week stay, so we did the typical sight-seeing stuff: visited Normandy, checked out the local chateaux, puttered around in the marchet Saturday morning....meandering over to the real estate office window, naturally...just to see what was being offered. Nothing that spoke to us. So on day 4 of our 8 day trip, we were driving through the little village of Savigny sous Faye when Patrick (that's my darling husband) asked, "doesn't 'a vendre' mean for sale"? Our heads swivelled immeditately toward the house he was indicating and we gasped at its beauty, its perfect form rising from the frozen ground, the arctic wind gently playing with the half-hung shutters...it was love. We stood on tiptoes to see through the windows, our eyes feasting upon the old guichet that reached from the floor up to the 14 foot ceilings, the winding oak staircase that teased our imaginations as to where it led...we raced to the immobilier office.
After a crash course in french legalese ('Pierre -that's my grandfather - how do you say 'interest rate'? mortgage? fixed and adjustable?) we managed to settle upon a price and our adventure officially began. We cancelled our trip to Paris and instead visited the local notaire to create a power of attorney for Pierre, met all the lovely people at Credit Agricole who helped us set up our bank account, prepare the mortgage documents, acquire insurance, and all the other necessities of home ownership...After four days of taking as many pictures as our camera would allow and oggling the structure which in our minds was already fully renovated and decorated, we returned home to the U. S. of A. to begin the transatlantic mail tag which was to dominate our lives for the next 2 months. In the end, we were the proud owners of an old train station in France - three stories, four bedrooms, 3 WC's, one "kitchen"...nevermind the lack of electricity, plumbing, plaster, windows, flooring, or insulation....or the abundance of lead paint, mold, dust, broken glass, chunks of wall, and ancient sagging wall paper (some of which was holding up the ceiling!)...we bought a house in France, and everyone's invited to come and stay there with us! You can imagine that most responses were not so enthusiastic...especially when we had to explain that there weren't any beds, per se, no...no shower either...toilets, nope...not yet!
One year later, here we are, gearing for our first trip back in June (with a crew of 9 others!) to survey the progress and put our own muscle and sweat into the house that we've fallen in love with.