Wednesday 17 October 2012

Renovation project - we finally unpack hooray - Friday 12th October 2012


Renovation project - we finally unpack hooray - Friday 12th October

Today is a big day as we finally get to unpack, this is the first time in over 3 months we will have clothes to choose from, up until now we have just had work clothes and a couple of nice things in a suitcase, but today we fill the wardrobe, I’m so excited.

First of all its back to scrubbing the floor, I didn’t see your comment Rynd2it, until after all the scrubbing had been done, but thank you for the tip. The wardrobe floor comes up a treat.


All the clothes are set out, but then we realise we have only 5 coat hangers (for some reason coat hangers are very expensive in France) I still find it strange on some price comparisons, here is an example it costs the same to buy 30 sets of 4 coat hangers as it does to buy a large luxury shower cubicle with seat, power shower and massage jets! It makes me think back to before we came and people told us how expensive it was to live in France, yes there are some expensive things but, as I have said before if you shop around, or weigh up the expensive items (yes a bit of plastic is expensive!) against the not expensive items, your standard of living is much better (well than it is in the UK anyway).

I move onto the bedroom floor and John comes into point out that the old varnish is coming off and as we won’t be able to seal it the floor could get marked (so glad he didn’t point this out before I had down the bathroom and wardrobe as it is great to spend so long doing pointless things) so we decide to just try to feather in the part that has no varnish, and wait until we come back to do the floors fully as then we can empty the room and seal all of the floors at the same time.

You may be wondering where John has been whilst I have been working hard, I was! John has been scraping the floors in the 1st floor bedroom and it turns out our wood worm problem is worse than we had thought, so we spend some time wondering what to do, we decide that it is going to be easier and less expensive to remove the entire floor and replace it with new floor boards, this way we will be able to treat all of the joists, as we have also found some more dry rot. The new floor boards only cost 7 euro’s for a square metre and we will be able to recycle the old floor boards into new furniture, I will finally be getting my handmade bed (John has been promising me one of these since the day I met him!)






If you decide to try this yourself, you will find that your plans will change regularly, either because you come across a new problem or because you find a new solution. Do not have set plans, lots of people we have read about have set idea’s and state that you need to spend a long time planning everything before you make the move, we don’t recommend this as you can become quite despondent at the things that go wrong and the sheer size of the project, if you remain open minded you can adapt as required and it also makes it much more exciting as every day can bring about a new opportunity, rather a new problem.

We sit and discuss the changes late into the evening, this is helped by some nice wine and good food.

Top tips

1.       Be adaptable
2.       Be adaptable
3.       MAKE SURE YOU ARE ADAPTABLE!

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