to move up and down
Finished?
Well, we are nearly done - our ferry is booked for the return to the UK and we leave first thing in the morning, hence the flurry of blog posts. Today has been a beautiful sunny day, leading us to think that we really have visited the cottage for the coldest part of the year! Hopefully tomorrow will be similarly bright for the drive back up to Dieppe.
We’ve had an interesting time here - at times challenging, tiring and (not least) cold! Ultimately, though, we’re really happy with the work that we’ve done, with much assistance from Mathieu and Andy. So we can justifiably say that overall it’s been rewarding, moderately restful and even (latterly) warm. It can certainly be a very relaxing place to be.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our blog. The whole reason we made this trip - apart from in order to have an excuse for greatly increased wine/cheese consumption and because we think job security is so overrated - was to make Lavergne a nice, cheap place for family and friends to use. So if you fancy a bargainous holiday in rural seclusion, please do get in touch with us and we’ll make it happen! Ryanair fly to Limoges, which is about an hour away, and we have managed to get return flights for £15 including everything, so it’s eminently doable.
Anyway, here are some final pictures of what you can look forward to from the Kay house at Lavergne.
Rob & Jenny x
Work work work!
So as ever there has been plenty to do on this Lavergne visit. Here are a few edited highlights. Jenny has re-covered our Brocante chairs in smart blue corduroy.
New lights fitted in the bathroom.
Jenny has stained the new woodwork in the kitchen so that it matches the older wood of the ceiling and furniture.
A new light has been installed over the dartboard, and curtain rail added to make a cupboard under the stairs.
Lovely old furniture, polished up.
Elsewhere in the kitchen, many changes as well as the super-warm new stove. Jenny has finished the gloss work and white around the kitchen window. The kitchen area has been painted a loud 70s orange. We brought some cabinets for the kitchen back from the UK after Christmas and mounted them on chain from the beams above. With all these different bits done the kitchen really feels like a proper cooking area. If you look back to the 2009 photos there’s quite a change!
The microwave is staying - the wonders of the steam age!
R
More appreciation of nature and that
There are lots of lovely things to see around this part of France. Here are a few…
Sunset on the road from Étouars to Lavergne
We found this chap under the woodpile (outside the house!). He is a fire salamander and can apparently live for up to 50 years.
Lord Of The Rings-ian landscapes at the Grand Etang de Saint-Estephe
Teh fluff
R
The guestbook
Rather than operate a traditional guest book, this is the one for the cottage at Lavergne. When you drink a bottle of wine (which you should do once a day at least if you’re on holiday), think of something you’re celebrating, write it on the cork and drop it in the jar. Have a browse through the previous ones and see what we’ve celebrated! (There may be more than one saying “Tuesday” or something similar.)
Visitors!!!
A momentous occasion for early 2011. Lavergne gets some non-Kay visitors! Both got into the swing of things straight away, sleeping 12 hours a night and playing much Scrabble. Laura in Edwardian pose:
Steve in “Ooooone huuuuundred an’ aaaaiiiiiightyyyyyyy” pose:
R
Welcome back!
We arrived back at the cottage on a bleak mid-January night. Frosty wind was making moan round the roof, earth stood hard as iron, and if the loo seat here isn’t the coldest I’ve ever sat on, it’s definitely in the top five. After around 10 hours in a warm car the chill of the cottage was a bit of a shock - we headed straight to bed and hibernated for the weekend. Jenny picked up a nasty cold in Bristol and we had to rely on the electric heaters all weekend to heat the air in the main room. But not any more! Since the very cold spell in December, we had been hunting for a suitable woodburning stove to install in the cottage. The open fire looked lovely but needed constant babysitting, smoked frequently and required the door to be left open to create a through draught - which meant that often, one ended up sitting in a draught. We eventually found a stove listed for sale by an ex-pat near Calais; it was the right size, a reputable make (Godin), and didn’t look brand new - we knew it wouldn’t suit the house if it were new and shiny! We picked it up on our way back to the South and brought it down, managing to just fit it in the front of the Saab (Jenny was chauffeured down in the back). This morning, the local ramoneur (chimney sweep and general fire/stove technician) arrived and changed our chimney from this:
To this;
OK, hardly night and day, but it’s an improvement, and safer. As soon as he’d gone I got to work with the checkerplate, Unistrut and jigsaw.
This is for the register plate that seals off the chimney. Hopefully just doing this will significantly warm up the room! Two or three hours later, the flue was installed, fire in place, joints sealed, and a test fire was started…
Well, five hours later the “test fire” is still burning nicely, the room is warm, the door is closed (no draught) and the stove has used around a third of the fuel that the open fire would have done in the same space of time. Result! It looks like it’s always been here, too…
R
An unexpected bonus
Whilst looking for the Christmas market (see below) some interesting cars went by, and then on our way back from the Christmas market we noticed that the local restaurant had a very full car park. As we drew nearer the car park looked more and more interesting… so we stopped and found the following! Maybe today is some sort of national rally day in France?
Jenny’s favourite - beautiful DS
An Alpine something…
Traction Avant, possibly the most French car ever made?
Matra Rancho - you don’t see many of these any more.
Something red, loud and American.
Spectacular 190 with red leather. Drool.
And my favourite - R8 Gordini, or possibly it’s called Alpine over here.
R
Well hello there Christmas.
It has been a refreshing change to be tucked away from all the premature Christmas build up this year. However, today it felt about time to embrace it, and immerse ourselves in the feeling. Firstly, let me thank the Browns for sending us a little bit of Christmas in the post, they were very much appreciated! Today we went in search for a Marché de Noel (ding ding, round two…). After a winding drive up to the village we wandered round the rather deserted picturesque centre, following hand made signs.
About to give up, we returned to the car for a last drive round only to fall upon what was pretty much a typical community centre hall full of stalls. Before long it was clear that 80% of both punters and sellers alike were British!! Well, we do love our stalls of tat.
This afternoon I have been sat in front of the fire, listening to Christmas music and making Christmas cards, and tonight is the compulsory viewing of Elf! We start the trip home on Thursday with a little detour via Paris by Christmas light before London, Manchester, Ledbury, Devon… then back onto French soil having soaked up the company of family and friends, enough to keep us going through our return trip in 2011.
J
Brocante love
Brocantes are French bric-a-brac shops. Unlike English ones there are loads of them, and there’s a huge variety of stuff to be had. The main fayre is furniture, but in our local ones you can also find all sorts of other stuff. In no particular order, we’ve seen vintage sewing machines, equestrian equipment, dentist’s chairs, motorbikes, retro computer consoles, stoves and flues, Victorian telephones and suspicious wines. We tried a 1999 Bordeaux from one a while ago and it was actually pretty good! On our way to Chez Kay (France) the other day we saw a handpainted sign for a brocante in a village we hadn’t visited before. We had a look on our way back through. It was deserted as we pulled up, but on exiting the car the proprietor appeared. Basically it was someone’s garage, filled with junk… but good junk. After being entertained by the aforementioned telephones, Jenny’s eagle eye happened on these lovely chairs at €25 for the pair, which are now installed by the fireside.
And while Jenny was negotiating a sale, my own eye happened on this (1970, we are assured by the seller…) lovely lamp with FREE BULB! It’s the kind on a spring system you can raise up and down, which I have a fondness for. Now installed in the bedroom!
R
This week we have mostly been decorating
Yes, we are delighted to report that we have actually finished some sections of the cottage. Jenny has been painting her heart out and I have been plastering, carpenting and odd-jobbing. (Jenny has patience for detail, I don’t.) Having finished the bedroom painting, Jenny mounted one of the patchwork quilts on the wall there - an explosion of colour!
Here are the before and after shots of the bedroom: before…
…and after;
Improvement in the main room, before…
…and after;
We have also painted the whole of the main room, which actually makes a huge difference - it feels a lot nicer. Surface space was minimal in the kitchen area so we have put in a new surface, extending it off the end of the sink too, and boxed it all in. The plan is that when we treat/varnish the ceilings throughout, we will also stain the pine to match, so that it looks a bit more in keeping… rather than like a sauna. Anyway, here is the before picture: this is from our first (2009) visit, so Mathieu - the French builder - has to take credit for removing the dangerous gas heater and putting in a proper distribution board;
But we are proud of the new bits we have put in, seen here! We haven’t painted the wall behind the sink, by the way, which is why it looks grubby - we’re going to look for the correct ’70s colour when we’re back in the UK for Christmas. Classic brown, or maybe loud orange.
Finally the hall. This area has been a challenge, as we kept finding more and more bits to improve, and uncovering some bodges! We ended up replastering the whole of the right-hand wall, including reconstructing some parts of the rotten doorframe in plaster, painting the frames in new gloss, plasterboarding/plastering/painting the end wall, installing the dartboard, and putting in a rail and curtain for the cupboard under the stairs. Before (though after some plaster removal, hence the terrible mess on the floor):
And after;
Heading up to Christmas, and back to the UK for a few weeks, we have two cubic metres of wood left to last us the trip. I’m planning on chopping it all up and stacking it indoors by the time we leave for good, so that future visitors have a ready supply. Let’s see if I can get this pile to the ceiling…! (All cut with a handsaw and split with my £9.99 Aldi axe, I’ll have you know!)
R
Oh, the weather outside is frightful
…but the DIY is so delightful…
SNOW! The time of year when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… snowmen and 4x4s? If Radio 4 output is anything to go by, it’s also the time of year when a journalist’s fancy turns to thoughts of endlessly running the “London carpeted by over 2 inches of snow” story rather than finding any REAL NEWS. (read the real story here: Britain trapped under two feet of global warming bullshit.)
Anyway, as you may have gathered from our past few posts, it’s getting colder and colder here - winter attire is required:
Today was probably one of the coldest so far, though mercifully there wasn’t much wind. I dug the car out in order to get to Piégut.
OK, maybe “dug” is a bit of an exaggeration but I did need to shovel the snow off the road. After the first snowfall we only had to get as far as the nearest D road to find solid ground. The most recent snowfall meant that the roads were sheets of ice as far as the outskirts of Piégut. Around here the locals sneer at the notion of the council providing snowploughs. They would probably deign to give a surly look to one if it drove past wearing English number plates. (Immediate neighbours excepted, of course - they’re all lovely!) Despite the Saab being Swedish, the lack of traction control and ABS made the journey a bit hair-raising.
For all my whinges, it really is rather beautiful here at the moment. Let’s hope that we can get out in order to get home for Christmas…
R
PS. DIY photos coming soon, I promise. We’re waiting until we’ve finished some sections completely until we put photographs on the blog, but it’s going well. I have learned the ways of plasterboarding and even used (well, “found a coping strategy for” might be more correct) the super-bargainous, dries-in-under-3-nanoseconds French plaster.
PPS. If you’re not reading The Daily Mash then you really should be. Some recent highlights: Just because we’re crushing wikileaks it doesn’t mean you’re next, say governments; Children run out of things to do with snow; Premiership reaches new heights of epic 110 percentness.
French coffee shops and 1970’s kitsch
After an unsuccessful hunt for a Christmas market the other day we ended up in a little café-brocante in St Estephe (approx 4km away). Two hot chocolates later we were sitting back admiring a café/bar/flea market (well that’s the direct translation but it can mean anything from junk shop to restored and staged antiques, the latter being more appropriate here). A pleasant surprise and a good hot chocolate was had whilst warming by the fire. It had the feel of The Art of Tea in Manchester, random bits and bobs hanging from every hook and occupying every inch of surface, including an impressive collection of teapots and a puffer fish! Today, after much decorating and the ever frustrating challenge of keeping warm chez Kay, we went in search of a relaxing afternoon. Le Sens de la Terre - Salon de Thé (in Piégut-Pluviers) was our destination.
Turns out it is run by an ex-pat family who have been in France for 20 years. More hot chocolate, some tea, cake and a roaring fire; perfect. What I love about this one (aside from the carrot cake) is that they have used only reclaimed furniture, found in brocantes, and have ended up with an eclectic mix of 70’s furniture and patterned fabrics.
It was only last night that I was dreaming up how I would love the bedroom to look and I had imagined the very same. Nothing crazy, but centering round the lovely patchwork quilts Rob’s grandmother made:
I can imagine a smattering of clashing prints, primary colours and a comfy chair, all of it second hand. A couple of weeks ago I was feeling rather disheartened; the inevitable “will we ever feel we are making a difference” feeling that anyone who has done up a house will know. However, now the bedroom walls are plastered and painted, and the gloss work nearly done, it is nearly time to do my favourite bit…making it all look beautiful and homely!! I can’t wait.
J
And to prove we haven’t just been holidaying
We decided that this week, since we’re halfway through our pre-Christmas visit, we need to start properly getting on with the decorating. It’s made pretty difficult by the fact that it’s so cold that every coat of paint takes two days to dry, but we’re pressing on. Jenny has mostly been sanding and painting - here is the bathroom progress report: new loo seat fitted, walls painted, woodwork has had first coat…
Door cleaned (big job), sanded and painted. Mathieu the towel rail heats the room nicely.
Jenny’s other mammoth job has been cleaning the fireplace stonework, using an eco-friendly, save-the-whale, tree-hugging mix of baking soda and vinegar. Here’s the before shot…
During (yuk):
4 hours afterwards:
Rob has mostly been plastering - note the brand name of the first-coat plaster: very apt, believe me. Once it’s mixed, you have around 14 seconds before it’s gone off and you have to chip it out of the bucket. This should allow you to reach the top of your ladder before you realise it’s useless.
A typical problem of the sort we keep running into. The walls in the bedroom were in a state and needed replastering. Here’s the wall over the window. As well as the obvious damage from damp, there were a load of polystyrene chunks stuffed in the cavity between the roof joist and the wall. Not a problem, we’ll just pull them out, fill the gap and plaster - bish bash bosh, JOB DONE.
…or not. Each time I pulled out a chunk of polystyrene it was followed by a huge torrent of dust, dirt, broken glass, spiderwebs, spiders (living), spiders (deceased)… and, weirdly, walnut shells. So once I’d got rid of all the bits and pieces I was left with this on the floor…
So a plan was hatched. Reclaim some wood from upstairs, cut to shape and length, install to block the gap. Cement and then Joker plaster up to the wood, smoothing plaster over the top…
Not a totally professional finish, but a lot better than beforehand. Bedroom is now totally plastered and ready for painting to begin tomorrow. Onward!!!
