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‘Little bird’ mornings

Saturday was one of those mornings at home when all the little birds were out in force – sparrows, tits and robins – flitting around in the dappled sunlight under the box tree. There must be plenty of seed heads in the garden for them to enjoy, and I was pleased to see that the grass is recovering after the neglect of a busy August, and that this year’s frogs are starting to look for winter hideouts

The chickens have finished the last few blackberries in the front garden. We haven’t eaten many of the berries ourselves, as the girls love them so much and it’s so much fun to watch them indulge in a healthy delicacy. They’ll enjoy some warm mash in the mornings this autumn as the temperature drops

Percy says Relax
Percy says Relax

Percy is happier now that it is not so hot. He picks his way over the pebbles at the pond’s edge to lap up the water, a proper tiger who doesn’t mind getting his feet wet. Charlotte and I watch him when he’s asleep on the sofa, snoring and dreaming, even though it makes us feel slightly stalker-like

The brick shed now has a new window and paintwork, though I still have the rotten door to replace. Baz says the cheerful green gloss on the windowsill (‘Garden’ by Little Green) reminds him of Granny Dale, his maternal great grandma who would from time to time choose to paint everything the same colour, an outrageously loud pink or a bright green like this. I think I would have liked her

Any more dry weekends will be used for mowing and tidying the garden, painting the windowsills and the front door and fixing guttering etc. There’s just nothing better than a borrowed autumn day spent getting the house and garden ready for winter …

Formica – it had its place

I promise I will not normally post EVERY day, but this week is an exception.

Quillan is a town haunted by the loss of major industry – and amongst those in recent memory is Formica. Many people remember this particular product with horror, but one local lady is leading a crusade to collate memories of Formica from local people, and she was one of the lovely characters we met this weekend. When I told her that our kitchen table was made of Formica she asked me to send her some jottings, and I was surprised by how happy it made me to remember, and how clearly and easily it all came back. Indulge me:

Late 1960s in Southgate, London. Our kitchen table had a pale red Formica top with white flecks in it. It had a metal trim around the edge with various dents and scratches. We ate all our meals together around it unless we had guests, when we would be in the dining room next door. My mum sat at the end to my left and my place was next to my dad, opposite my brother. It was quite snug. My favourite meal was Sunday lunch, when I would help my mother to make sauces and desserts and she would serve up a plate of meat and dishes of vegetables along with my favourite part – roast potatoes. I was the youngest and I had my own smaller plate and set of cutlery but I had a huge appetite. My dad and I would share the last of the potatoes after everyone else was full and as a ritual after dessert I would sit on his lap, squeezing his arm muscles and practising joke-telling.

It was my favourite time of the week. The table top is etched on my subconscious as clearly as any other element of my childhood. Whenever I see a similar table it takes me back to this time, when I could cuddle up to my father whenever I wanted and when eating a big meal was something to be congratulated.

My dad worked at the London meat market and we would always wait for him to get home before we had dinner during the week. He would bring the cold into the kitchen with him after walking a mile and a half from the station, carrying bacon, lamb or gammon in a cardboard box tied with string for the next night’s meal. As soon as he had taken off his coat and kissed my mum I would call my brother and sister down for dinner and they would thunder down the stairs, starving. After dinner it was my job to clear the plates and push the chairs under the table.

My parents remodelled the house in the early 1970s, my older siblings became teenagers and mealtimes became less rigid. The table may have been used later by my brother in his bedroom, where he dismantled car and motorbike engines at weekends. I think he possibly took it with him when my parents moved away soon after 1980 and we all moved apart. I asked him the other day if he still has the table, but he doesn’t remember what happened to it.

While I realise that discussing the Formica table was only the catalyst for all this, I see how the dinner table was central to our family, and when I picture the colour and finish of the well-worn table top, it also brings back very exact visual pictures of the coloured napkin rings, which my mother still has, and the serviettes we used to have. I can actually feel the atmosphere and the steam in that kitchen, see the ginger tom who often sat at the sash window and our own black cat with her basket in the corner.  I can see the old grey and blue vinyl tiles on the floor, the floor to ceiling white painted units with the (1950s?) pull down sections and the coke-fuelled Aga. It is a sense of well-being and childhood that I rarely think of, and I am grateful for the unexpected meeting that led me to revisit that time

Wine, Weather and Woodworm – 4 nights in Quillan

All 3 of us camping together in one room was the practical solution as none of us knew what to expect from a night in such a large and totally empty old house. Even the slightest noises we made echoed, so we assumed that we would all get fairly spooked during the night. In fact, we were surprised that there was no creaking and no strange sounds at all overnight, other than on Sunday night when some drunken neighbour played his music until 3 am and occasionally added heartfelt vocals

the Jewel Room - chaos
the Jewel Room – chaos

The house definitely has a sunny disposition. Because of this, even the enormous spiders didn’t freak us out. I tried to sweep our bedroom using the broom which was in the hallway, but my heart wasn’t really in it so Baz took over. As he swept the handle snapped off and we saw that it was riddled with woodworm….

Note to self - get a plastic broom
Note to self – get a plastic broom

We slung a line over the stairs for our wet clothes and towels from the swimming pool. Luxury it wasn’t, but there was nowhere else clean enough to put anything, so we felt it was excusable

the courtyard was converted into a slum
the courtyard was converted into a slum

On Saturday we all pitched in and scrubbed the floor of a smaller bedroom and we moved our stuff into there on Sunday so that we could start removing the filthy artificial silk fabric off the walls of the Jewel Room. This took us to a whole new level of grime, as we were engulfed in filth. I was gagging, desperately trying not to vomit. Some of the electrics have been positioned over the fabric so we could only do some of the walls, but clearly there is more wallpaper than plaster underneath. We have found patterns from the 50s and the 30s so far, and it is something of a miracle that the chimney breast had not caught fire at any time, because the entire thing appears to be charred and brittle throughout.

Yes - she's wearing pants as a mask
Yes – she’s wearing pants as a mask
Lumps of plaster fell off, but the jazzy papers remain
Lumps of plaster fell off, but the jazzy papers remain

In other news, the cellar is flooded. Baz and I ventured down the worn stone steps on Saturday morning to trace where the strong ‘damp’ smell was coming from and Voila! – several feet of standing water. It doesn’t seem to be effluent and it can’t have been flooded too long because someone has been in there to replace joists below the ground floor within the last few years.

Now this might all sound a bit doom and gloom, but it’s really not. This was an initial fact-finding mission and were will re-group and return to face up to the problems. The important thing is that Baz and C have now seen the house – and they love it. It’s summer now so they didn’t care about the lack of home comforts or the inches of dust everywhere, just the sun and the atmosphere in the town. And they know, as I do, that this house has a beautiful bone structure – despite the inevitable osteoporosis

Bienvenus et bon camping!

The three of us have just returned from our first visit staying at the house. We owe a huge thank you to G and T who ensured that we had electricity and collected us at Carcassonne. The estate agent promised that water would spring forth (albeit through condemned lead pipes) as soon as we opened the water meter within the garage or just outside the front door. We hunted high and low for this meter, but it was getting late and we chose a room to blow up our camping mattresses, knowing we would have to manage until the next day without. T handed Baz an unopened envelope from the estate agent, which he assumed was the purchase ‘attestation’.
The next morning I opened the envelope and found that it was actually an estimate from the water company (495 euros), for pipe replacement at pavement level. I asked the gentleman in the office next door if he knew where our meter was, just so that we could use the loo etc over the weekend, and he very kindly called his friend at the water company, who knew all about us and explained that the water supply along the entire road had been condemned and closed off some years back and a new supply had been installed in its place in the road at the back of the properties. Because our house had been empty for so long it had not been connected. In other words, I had bought a house with no mains water, despite it being on the main road in the centre of a main town, and the estate agent had apparently just been covering this up! Still, the man from the water company could not have been nicer, he is getting us sorted out, and no doubt we will laugh about this in the years to come.
eaupotable
Anyway, we had a great weekend. We got the front door open, found a public tap, chucked buckets of water down the loo and showed some enthusiastic locals around the house. We were grateful to be 5 minutes walk from the outdoor swimming pool, which meant that we could clean up and bask in the 35 degree sun as well. The people of Quillan made us feel incredibly welcome, coped brilliantly with my rusty French, and reassured me that we have done the right thing. It felt as though every time we opened a window or showed someone round was breathing life back into the poor old house. We even had a visit from our lovely Dorset neighbours, R and E, who made a point of ‘passing by’ on Monday to see our project before we returned to the rain and the boring old functional plumbing of the UK.

Looking forward to the past

In this beautiful post Colin says he hadn’t realised how much he likes ‘to see the murk of history.’ I know what he means and I fear rubbing away the lifetime of a building. Patina is so important and I would hate to have an old house that did not reflect its journey. That is my goal – to allow the wear and tear to sit alongside the additions. We bought this house because I love it, not because I want to make it like other houses. Conformity is simply not for everyone!

Colin Bisset's avatarColin Bisset

This week’s Iconic Buildings on Radio National’s Blueprint for Living highlights the wonder of Chartres cathedral (see here). I mention the recent contentious restoration of its internal painted walls which supposedly takes them back to the original colouring of the mid-1200s. I wasn’t sure if I liked that idea but shortly after recording that piece I was on my way to France. I hadn’t planned to visit Chartres but somehow it just became inevitable.

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Tuesday afternoon brings an inability to concentrate

I had a ton of things to do today but it’s been very hard to apply myself. We set up our account with Credit Agricole, Baz having had an ‘interview’ on 27th July. He just told me off for putting our French address on the payment instruction to the bank, as we don’t actually own it yet. I know he’s right but I just couldn’t resist, so I hope it doesn’t bite us.
internalcourtyard
We are very aware that August, the month of doing nothing in France, is almost upon us and we still don’t have a date for completion. On top of that I am away for a week. In the absence of real progress I’ve been struggling to keep my mind on work so I occasionally break off to Google stuff. It’s mainly harmless, but it can lead to me buying bits and pieces, as well as to schemes in my mind becoming grander. Or more time-consuming, at least.
We have both looked at the photos so many times now, and despite having quite a lot of them, it’s all getting a but tiresome. I wish I had taken a bloody tape measure with me to the viewing as we are constantly trying to guess the dimensions of rooms. Last night we were trying to figure out what size the courtyard is, based on various possible dimensions of the floor tiles. Obviously we don’t actually know the sizes of the tiles, the doors, or anything. So we’re still none the wiser…

Chinoiserie. Wild about it

Gill(coteetcampagne) and I have been discussing chinoiserie and she sent me this lovely picture. The sweep of the staircase is so elegant and the wall design is stunning. Gillschinoiserieinspiration
Chinese handpainted wallpaper for one of the bedrooms would not only be wildly expensive, and the preparation of the walls is beyond us. Rather than give up, I am looking into various stencils and have found several which are almost there, but not quite:
http://www.stencil-library.com/chinesestyle-panel-stencils/003488-CHI0013-1/panelno1stencil.html
https://www.hennydonovanmotif.co.uk/chinoiserie2.htm
But I want something all-over and cohesive with a variety of intensity in the pattern while still forming a united design, rather than just stand-alone panels like these stencils. I may put the elements together from smaller stencils instead. Obviously this would be time-consuming and we would need to plan it thoroughly, but I need to find all the right stencils first. And do some practicing, as I have not stencilled since it was last fashionable – in the 80s!
The great thing about this style is that it can suit so many tastes – light and airy, dark and brooding, vivid monochromes. The colour possibilities are endless: yellow, green, blue are all favourites of mine, and for our house I want quite an intense background and perhaps a touch of bling to set it off. A silver ceiling?

A bit of a scrub

I spent some time this weekend with my beloved ten pound chandelier. So far I have removed quite a lot of rust and am starting to experiment with finishes. I bought a product on Amazon called Rub’n’Buff which is intended for use on porous items, but I couldn’t resist giving it a go on the chandelier as I sat on the decking in the sun. It comes in a tiny tube and I started applying it directly with my finger, but as I went on I found the best method was to apply a small amount to a soft cloth and wrap the cloth around it, then rub the item until the paint gently comes through the cloth. I definitely got better at it as I continued, but the areas where I used my finger looked very ‘painted’ rather than metallic (first picture) chand first paint
because I had used too much, so I had to get the Wonder Wipes out to scrub off the excess (second photo) I am struggling to get some of the initial paint out of the details in the metal so I will get the non-scratch scourers out again.
after polishing
This stuff is going to be very useful for anyone distressing frames or similar. I was very impressed with the coverage I got and the way it hasn’t obliterated the delicate pattern on the metal. It behaves more like a dye than a paint.
I have asked my brother to bring his soldering iron the next time he visits as the frame has been dropped at some point and one corner has two very clean breaks which should be invisible once mended.

Are we talking 1975?

BernardThevenetHaving only visited the house once, and that was now months ago, I want to know more of the history and how it came to be empty for so long. A friend who also has a house in France described the remote buying experience as feeling unreal and dreamlike. You are so right, Gill!! (coteetcampagne). In our case Baz hasn’t even been there and I feel a weight of responsibility. While obsessing I noticed a magazine called ‘Jours de France’, on the floor in my photo of the ‘Club Room’. Google tells me the magazine went out of business in 1989. The front cover shouts ‘Bravo Thevenet!’ and the picture is of Bernard Thevenet. To be fair he was easy to find as he hasn’t changed much (see recent photo below). He is a renowned cyclist and won the Tour de France in 1975, so I will check the publication date once we get the keys, but it looks like the last time anyone spent any time there was around 40 years ago, which would explain, but not excuse, the hideous insane clashing décor in that room

Thevenet2015