Our House is Not in Paris (9 page)

A further translation of the list for this day reminds me that just one word,
Etam
, spelt for me a ‘whole' forty minutes racing round one of my favourite French shops. I learnt very quickly that, on June 30 every year,
Solde
season starts. I may not know much French but I do know this means ‘sale'! It was an exceptionally hot day and I struggled in the changeroom to try on masses of winter clothes without the benefit of air conditioning. Conscious that Stuart was impatiently waiting in a nearby café to continue with the day of lists, I frantically asked the assistants to check the sizes and prices as, of course, I didn't have my glasses. Quite how I accomplished getting sizes and prices checked with my limited French is another source of astonishment for me. I can only say again that my sense of the dramatic is always a significant advantage. (I am also quite sure that I am a source of considerable amusement.) A bag full of bargains and then off to two more huge Trocs in Brive. I didn't even have a chance to look at my beautiful French clothes for about two weeks. Simply far too busy every single day.

Then we were searching for the perfect dining table: old with character at a bargain price. And we were spoilt for choice. Loving everything old as we do, the
Trocs
were simply our idea of heaven. While we seemed to be spending copious euros as if we had our own printing press, sometimes we also went a bit wild with items that were quite unnecessary but that we simply couldn't resist. The stuff of dreams — we didn't even have a kitchen and yet here we were buying furniture for the barn that we didn't even know we could ever afford to renovate.

But back to the list. Clearly the list reminds me that we had to spend the morning working before letting ourselves have a break and then go on an outing. Call Erick to ask about borrowing his van to go on an all-day IKEA trip and enquire whether he had the legs for the bed, which he had previously delivered and we had discovered were missing. Then an absurdly eclectic shopping list and, surprise, back to Cuzance to continue planning the kitchen. Planning the kitchen meant endlessly consulting the IKEA catalogue, lots of measuring, and then the Post-it notes: sink, hotplate, stove, fridge and benchtop. We then stuck these on the wall and moved them around to get the correct layout and measurements. We have put in a few kitchens at home and, as anyone else who has renovated and had a new kitchen knows, this usually takes months of meticulous planning. Not this time; in a mere three weeks we had given ourselves to do as much as humanly possible. No, this kitchen was designed, measured and planned in about three days!

‘July 14th: FULL DAY WORK.' Well, certainly, that seems to be a clear enough command for the day. Under this is underlined: ‘paint kitchen', followed by, again in capitals, ‘KITCHEN CHOICE — to be finalised'. Surely there can't be any confusion about this imperative. Then a heading, ‘PM*: ring Erick', followed by Brigitte's birthday. ‘PETROL' and next hardware: paint, ceiling paint, feature paint?', gloss white (underlined), ‘fine brush' (again underlined), paint stripper, extension cord and last of all, barbecue and gas bottle. Now there's a story in itself: the search for a barbecue and the intricacies of getting a gas bottle in France. You can buy a barbecue in many
supermarchés
and
bricolages
. However, to get a gas bottle you have to go to a service station, and there you have to sign a contract for the gas bottle.

The above notebook notation translates to yet another full day's work. Once again, though, it fell to Stuart to do all the requisite running around, decision-making in the
bricolage
and the endless quest for the right barbecue. Meanwhile, for me it would have been another day of up and down the ladder for me, strip the wallpaper off the first wall, throw the paint on to check if it was going to be the right choice for the old stonework, strip more wallpaper and basically just keep going and going and going. By now I had got wallpaper stripping down to a fine art after our bedroom debacle, when we were reduced to peeling it all off in tiny pieces. I quite clearly remember my utter jubilation when a strip would come off in an entire sheet.

Without all our usual backup renovating materials that we would have on hand at home — that is, everything — we became increasingly inventive and resourceful. Thus, the sheets of wallpaper became our improvised drop cloths. In the absence of a wheelbarrow, we used the large plastic garbage bin to load up the bricks when we knocked the wall down between the living room and kitchen. At home we would have had a skip lined up. In Cuzance, I simply staggered across the grass in front of the house and made a pile under some rosebushes on the other side of the garden. No time to think, improvise all the way and deal with it later.

July 15th. Heading for the day: ‘IKEA'. It may seem like quite a straightforward statement, to go to IKEA for the day, to buy the kitchen that had been so carefully planned. What it meant, in fact, was an exhausting sixteen-hour day driving to Villefranche to borrow Erick's van and remembering to take Brigitte's present for her birthday on Bastille Day. So, up very early yet again to drive there, an hour and a half away, then another couple of hours to drive to Toulouse. We had a hasty second breakfast of
croissants
and Brigitte's delicious
abricot confiture
, served at our own private table on their balcony while they served
petit déjeuner
to their paying guests. Quickly on to the computer to print directions to IKEA in Toulouse, then off again for another massive undertaking and huge expenditure of more euros. My notebook for the day shows that we finally arrived at IKEA at 1pm after getting somewhat lost on the outskirts of Toulouse. Naturally, not only was I not confident about attempting to drive in France but I also couldn't navigate to save my life, so once again it was all down to Stuart. We raced to the kitchen section and checked and ordered the kitchen within a mere hour! We felt very proud of this significant accomplishment, particularly as we had to add another freestanding bench after suddenly realising that we had designed a kitchen without any storage whatsoever. After throwing in a few baskets for extra storage, we felt that we fully deserved lunch. And lunch at IKEA became a highlight of our time in France. Much to our delight, there was even wine by the carafe or glass. I have to confess that I was so excited by this that I emptied my water bottle and filled it up with the rosé that was left in our carafe. Now that was a decidedly unsophisticated act. By the time I went to revive myself much later, the rosé was ghastly from the heat; it too was then tipped out ... Then it was off to the warehouse to load the kitchen into the van in the searing afternoon heat. By now I was more than ready for the long drive back to Cuzance. However, as were heading out of Toulouse we saw an enormous
bricolage
so naturally it made sense to stock up at the hardware again. We stocked up on extra paint, including a lovely dark brown that I thought would be perfect for a feature wall over the fireplace in the kitchen. As it turned out — and again, at home, selecting a feature colour would involve us making a number of careful selections, painting samples and then making a final choice — this colour turned out to be ghastly as a feature colour but just perfect for the skirting boards. As for the sights of Toulouse, well, the motorway was not attractive.

In the experimenting we did manage on samples of wood, we thought we had discovered a fabulous high-gloss paint for the skirting boards. However, a very strange thing happened when it dried. It was completely transformed into an utterly lacklustre finish; not at all the look we were striving to achieve. We simply couldn't understand it all and our lack of French made it impossible to convey to anyone the strange mystery of the complexities of French paint. The afternoon Stuart took Erick's van back, after doing some more paint stripping round the window frames, at 7pm — yes, just when you should be winding up for the day — I then embarked on the skirting boards. I had been very excited about the high-gloss finish I aimed for and simply couldn't understand why it dried in a flat, dull finish. It was at this point that Jean-Claude dropped in and by now I was nearly crying with frustration. Taking my consternation immediately on board, Jean-Claude was ready to whisk me off there and then to see Michel LeBlanc, the man in the village who just happened to sell paint. Common sense prevailed — or, possibly, sheer exhaustion — and I decided to just use the paint I already had and simply finish the skirting boards in their lacklustre state. By now, my spirits matched them perfectly.

Friday, 16 July, another jam-packed day of frenetic activity. It started with a question:
Follow up roofer?
This seemingly simple question in fact indicated a whole world of queries and phone calls in our attempt to find a roofer to give us a quote for the barn roof. If you are looking for a lucrative career change, I would highly recommend that you become a French roofer. They are in extremely high demand and are very hard to track down, let alone get one to come to your
maison
to give you a quote. So, that quest continued. My notebook for this day featured a different style. Today there weren't any capitals to indicate the outstanding importance of the day's allotted task. Today I had numbers next to our names to indicate what I seem to have decided as the order of importance of the tasks we were to undertake. So Stuart's overall directive was to clean and paint the kitchen ceiling, and mine was to finish painting the kitchen walls. Not quite enough for one day? No, then there were the numbers.

Stuart: 1. Beam down, 2. plaster – wall/wood/ceiling rose. 3. Roller walls 2nd/3rd coat. 4. Trim edges of wallpaper. Susan:1. Rubble/remove/clean. 2. Clean ceiling. 3. Strip woodwork.

Oh, what a surprise. There were some capitals at the end of the day: ‘LATER 2011? Sand wood?'

Seriously: ‘trim wallpaper'? What on earth does that even mean, and, more significantly, why? I think what that meant was: we were starting to take as many short cuts as possible, and round the fireplace — where it wasn't so obvious — the wallpaper was some strange textured finish. This meant that, if you trimmed it and ‘tidied' it up, you could cunningly paint over it.

And so the days unfurled, and so the lists continued.

Sometimes I have to admit to a state of ambivalence. I mean, who renovates two houses on opposite sides of the world while also working full-time? After six weeks working on our
petite maison
, we would return home and then tackle renovating our bedroom. After living in our house for two years, our bedroom still resembles a studio apartment. Previously, the downstairs had been rented as a flat and so our bed still has a sink and kitchen cupboards next to it.

Living in Australia, especially since leaving Sydney, we consider ourselves extremely lucky to live in paradise. We live in a small village on the south coast, perched between the escarpment and the sea. The lush rainforest sweeps down the sides of the escarpment and, in a country that is permanently parched and dry, it is perpetually green here. After escaping from the hectic pace of city life, we often say to each other, ‘Why would you live anywhere else?' and this rhetoric is balanced by our extreme gratitude to have found ourselves surrounded by such beauty. This only makes it even more wonderful to also have our
petite maison
and such a profound love for our other life.

Here we see the sea every day in all its wild and varying moods, the calmness and tranquillity of the ocean when it is as flat as a pond, the angry surging waves that take lives, the brilliant sun, the surfers like black seals soaring across the curling waves, the eerie cry of the black cockatoos, the huge wingspans of the gliding pelicans, hovering helicopters scanning the waves, the escarpment engulfed in the humid mist of summer, pods of dolphins tumbling through the surf, and, occasionally, the joyous sight of winter whales spouting. At night there are often huge oil tankers on the horizon; their glistening lights are like small islands, while, also in the evenings, trains flash across the bottom of the escarpment, carriages shining like a string of jewels, carrying city workers home again after a day in Sydney. All of it is beautiful beyond compare. And all of it makes us feel even more amazed by what we have achieved. Yet there is a lure that becomes stronger every year, taking us back across the oceans to a culture far removed from our days in summer spent relaxing at the beach. So, a privileged life indeed.

The winter element of howling winds rocking the house adds to the desire to escape to the French summer. Our checklist before leaving is quite a unique one and we are, as always, aware that it too is very surreal. As well as all the normal checklist items for a trip — cancel the paper, have the mail held at the post office, organise travel insurance — our list now includes: ring Christian the gardener to have the grass cut, and, in the future, call Piscine Ambiance to have the pool ready. We can scarcely believe it is our life at all. Did we ever think in our wildest dreams that we would have a pool, let alone a gardener? Seriously, we laugh about it a lot, how life had come so far for both of us. It is all still very hard to grasp that this is, indeed, our new ‘other' life.

It was on our last day, too, that Jean-Claude suggested we have some spare keys cut and entrusted to his care. Yet another inspired decision. How else would he have located the dead mouse when the pool people had to go into the house to inspect the pipes? Now the keys, labelled ‘La Forge', hang in a privileged position next to their own keys — a constant reminder of us throughout the year. And as we closed all the shutters to drive away, it felt like the little house would just be sleeping until we return the following year.

We have taken risks — huge risks. We have consciously always asked ourselves ‘What's next?' in a bid to try to move beyond an ordinary life. So, as soon as we finished one renovating project, we've looked around for the next challenge. Always doing all the hard work of renovating virtually single-handedly has meant that we have been able to keep moving and making changes in our lives. Buying our first little ex-government house meant that we were in extraordinary debt, and juggling all the loans was a constant struggle. Yet each project we have embarked on was always an adventure that we shared together, and every step has helped to make our marriage stronger and make life an adventure. We have pushed the boat out in a way that is far removed to how we both started out in life. Now, we are making life a French adventure.