Firstly the good news.
Louise had her entretien (interview) at the préfecture in Toulouse & it all went well. Our 2 dossiers will now be “harmonisés” & are en route to Paris via Albi with reviews over several stages.
We can now only wait & this seems to be the story with the house as well.
We were in Toulouse when we received the minutes of the last site meeting to discover that because our glass shower wall & door are “hors normes” there’s a delay & we’ll have a temporary fix until it comes. Strange really because it was hors norme months ago & suddenly there’s a delay. Something to do with Christmas holidays. Oh yes, of course. Didn’t think of ordering it before?
We are annoyed because we, the architects, the plumbers & the builders were all on site last Friday & it never got a mention. We read about it in the minutes & then find a shower curtain on Weds when we get back from Toulouse.
However, inside the house everything is moving quickly now.
The granite top for the kitchen has been installed, the cooker is in place & connected. The missing part for the extraction fan has arrived & the unit now needs fitting–negotiations are underway for a date in early Jan. The fridge will be plumbed in this week.
The missing part for the wood burner is on order. Who knows when this will arrive but thankfully the stove is not an essential element towards heating the house.
The TV unit is in place, all the electrical connections are done & the unit has been painted. We just need to wait for the TV to be fitted. We are hoping to receive a TV signal via our telecoms supplier but as yet they haven’t been on site to connect us to the network. Will they come before Xmas–highly unlikely I fear.
Our ensuite area is almost finished, just the mirrors to be fitted this week.
The dishwashers, washing machine & drier & another fridge are ready to be connected.
When we planned the utility room the heating/water designer commissioned by the architects said that there would be a small, low area in the utility room for the heat pump accessories and we assumed that the water softener would be small & discreet. Looking at the photos you can see that this is not the situation in reality. We’ve now lost an awful lot of storage/shelving space in the utility & it will be quite warm without any underfloor heating. Had we realised we could have put some or all of this in the garage.
The underfloor heating has been commissioned & is working very well. We’ll need to have it turned down this week.
The permanent (as opposed to provisional building site) electricity supply is up & running.
The garage door is in the process of being installed & will be finished this week.
As previously mentioned, we’re still waiting for news from Orange for the telecoms.
Outside is a different story. A lot of progress on levelling & defining areas has been made. We have another week with the builders on site & after that it will be 3 Jan 24 before we see them again.
These are our closest neighbours. Murielle, who sold us the land, comes regularly at weekends & for longer periods in the summer.
This is where our other neighbours will be building. They’re planting a boundary hedge right now & hope to start their build in January.
We are, read Louise is, thinking hard as to what to do with our north facing garden. After all the levelling it now looks very big. At the moment we’ll just try to keep it short & tidy. The front garden will take shape once the drive, paths & parking are established.
There is progress but it seems slow. It’s ironic as the weather recently has been really awful, but as you can see from the photos, this weekend is cold & frosty first thing but glorious during the day.
We know that not everyone understands the 35 hour week etc in France. The productivity rate per employee is much higher than the UK because they invest in technology & training. Even so we had a real shock on Saturday to find the front door unlocked. Our immediate thought was that we must have left it like that the previous day. Then we had an even bigger fright when we found the cleaner with the contract to clean the house before handover, working away on a Sat afternoon. Busy cleaning windows. There’s a song there for those of you old enough to remember!
In summary, hopefully we will accept the house (but not the outside) Thursday 21/12 & all work will finish Friday 22/12 for Christmas & New Year. We will be celebrating Louise’s birthday on the 22nd as well.
We will be staying put in the gîte until w/c 15th Jan (fingers crossed) & we anticipate handover of the exterior works by Friday 26th Jan. This is all the fencing, gates, terracing, paving, parking etc.
Are we happy. NO.
But at least we can have some down time just relaxing before moving in January & before Louise has her knee replacement surgery in February. Such is life!!