Dear readers,
Chers lecteurs,
A few days ago, I packed everything that was downstairs, until it looked like this:
Rather bare, huh?
Pour le troisième été consécutif, j'ai donc mis toute ma maison, enfin tout le rez-de-chaussée, en cartons en prévision des travaux.
Just as a reminder, the idea was to open the wall between the kitchen and the dining-room, get rid of the awful cupboard in the living-room and of the fake ceiling, remove the drywall on the east wall in the living-room and retile the kitchen, the dining-room and the living-room. Easy, peasy?
Donc, pour ceux qui ont des trous de mémoire, le but de cette phase de travaux était de se débarrasser du placard du salon, du faux plafond, de créer une ouverture dans le mur qui sépare la cuisine de la salle-à-manger et enfin de recarreler les trois pièces.
We stucked all my furniture in the garage.
Tous les meubles ont été stockés dans le garage.
But when the workers removed the the drywall, we discovered that the stone wall was rather wet.
Quand le placo a été retiré, nous avons découvert un mur en pierre très détrempé.
So I asked them to dig a hole in the floor to see what was beneath... Well, pretty much nothing! You can see the not very deep hole above, that's all it took to get to the earth (a wet earth, given the area where it's located).
J'ai donc demandé qu'on casse le carrelage pour vérifier la dalle. Ben, que dalle! Juste une petite couche de ciment...
I knew in a second that I would never retile on that floor. The house, which is very old, needed to be saved first, meaning it needed a drain system of some kind to keep it dry. There were two agonising days when I had to wait for a new
estimate by the contractor. I was parying really hard that I would be able to pay for it and to save this little beauty:
J'ai su en l'espace d'une seconde que je voulais sauver la maison des eaux et qu'il ne servait à rien de poser un carrelage neuf sur ce sol inexistant... L'attente du nouveau devis a été une torture... Mais c'est bon, ça passe: il faudra juste revoir les ambitions pour la cuisine à la baisse.
I'm not going to torture you any longer: we decided on a fairly expensive but hopefully efficient drain system (not sure it's the right word, but dictionaries are in boxes!!!). I can afford it, but it means the kitchen will have to wait for a little more!
In the next episode: how saving a house includes a lot of destruction!!!
Magali, from her parent’s house
Joining parties (though not in a party mood exactly...)
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