WHERE'S MARY?

We had found a furniture store and a DIY type store.  All stores are shut on Sundays and man on Monday mornings – the Tourist Information is closed all day Monday in Vire, our nearest city.  Some stores close from lunch-time on Saturday.  The majority of stores, when open, close for lunch between 12 and 2 (some till 3) and open again until 7-8pm.

 I walked over to the Mairie (mayor’s office) to see if we needed an appointment to see the mayor on the following Wednesday.  It was lucky I did that, as that was the last day the Mairie would be open until September.  Most of France takes the annual holiday in July and August and many large companies close completely. 

The mayor was just leaving his office to visit someone but I managed to tell him about a tax form we had mislaid, and also about our collections/museum.  He thought a museum would be a wonderful idea and told me to that his Secretary, Mary, who spoke some English, would be able to help with the tax forms.  The mayor spoke very little English and I wondered if he understood what I meant about our collections.

I went looking for ‘Mary’ and found a lady cleaning the office – she did not look like a secretary.  Then I realised, the mayor had said the Secretary of the Mairie!  ‘She’ was a man!  He told us we would not be paying the local taxes until we lived in the house but the other form could be sorted in Tinchebray.  The office in Tinchebray said we would have to go to Domfront and find the Cadestre – another type of legal person.

Bastille Day was on the Monday.  Everything stopped on Saturday at noon and re-opened on Tuesday – no-one works at all on Bastille Day as this is a holiday throughout France.  (Fete National)

The following day we went to Vire and bought some real beds and 2 clic-clac sofas (banquettes).  The store wanted to charge quite a lot for delivery but I pointed out that we had spent a lot of money with them.  The lady said she admired the English “cheek” and cancelled the delivery charge.

Everything was delivered the same day we bought it and at no charge.  The man who delivered it all asked if we needed help to put the items together but Andy said he could manage.  The delivery man left his boards on wheels (for transporting heavy items) and as he did not come back we returned them to the store next time we were in Vire.  The sofa beds will seat three and will sleep two people each.  Goodbye camp beds!  Before he left, the delivery man put the cushions on the sofa beds in a flat position.  He told us that the French way was to have them flat, the English prop them up.

Our plans for a new kitchen did not work out very well at first.  We had measured everything out in units of 500 or 1000, as in the UK, but the French have units of 40, 60 and 120!  Back to the drawing board.   We found some nice units which would fit, but different styles of unit came in the wrong sizes and we had to carry on searching.

I had drawn out each of the rooms in the house on graph paper and made cut-outs of all items to go in – a lot lighter than shifting furniture then finding it looks dreadful!  As I did everything to scale, this made buying flooring etc a lot easier.

THE PLUMBER

We found a heating/plumbing store in Tinchebray and went to ask for a quotation for our central heating.  The lady said that the manager was the only one who could give estimates on work to be done and he was on holiday the same time as us.  She said she could send a man to see if he could help with our problem of the hot water and was apologetic that he would not be able to come before lunch!  She said she could arrange for him to visit around 1.30pm.  Knowing French timing, I had a feeling he may be a little later than that (in the UK it could take weeks!) and we waited until around 6.15. 

By that time Andy had decided that the plumber was not going to come, despite my argument, and decided he would walk to the end of the village, to the gardens with the statues,  to take some photographs.  He must almost have got there when the plumber arrived.  I telephoned Andy and he had to come back.  Luckily, I had only just showed him how his mobile worked.  I could phone him, although he couldn’t phone me. 

If you ask a French worker what time he is likely to arrive – watch his hands – the higher he raises them, the later he will arrive.  The young lady said “1.30?” with her hands almost at head level!

After a lot of indicating and “pah ici sil vous plait” (this way please, hopefully) Andy showed the plumber the overflow tank in the roof, the boiler/immersion tank in the extension (cave) and the water taps.  The plumber eventually went to a cupboard under the sink in the kitchen and turned a tap!  Voila!  Hot water!  He also showed us how to work the heating as well as the hot water. 

Andy checked out the heating and that worked too.  We had to see if we could get the oil tank moved to one of the outhouses and filled with oil before the winter.  We also needed more logs for the fire.

There are two meter readings on the electricity meter.  One is for heating, the other for house electrics.  We hoped the heating system was economy type.  It wasn’t!

By 9pm the water was hot – hot showers at last – no more boiling the kettle to wash up.  The plumbing engineer would be eating out for ages!  “I went to the house of the English, they had no hot water.  They hadn’t turned the tap on!”

We had thought that the tap under the sink controlled the tap in the garden for hoses etc.  French plumbing is still an enigma!

On 10^th July there was a heat wave locally.  We still went out.  (‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ and all that).

We found some kitchen units which we both liked in a large furnishing store in Vire.  We paid a deposit and we would have to pay the remainder at the end of August by which time the units should have arrived.  As we had intended to pay for the complete kitchen and had taken the full amount of cash with us, we used the remainder to buy a nice cooker – electric, with one electric ring and three bottled-gas rings.  There is very little ‘mains’ gas in France and it is usual to use bottled gas.  Strangely, although the oven is electric, the heat indicator is the type you find on gas cookers so I had to consult my cookery books to find out what the corresponding electric setting was for Mark 4!

We also got a small rug for the TV room.  We met an English family in the store where we found the rug and I asked if they knew what you had to do when you found something you wanted to buy (meaning the rug).  The lady misunderstood me and said – “Well, we had a small bungalow and sold it, and bought another one ….” at which point I stopped her and explained what I meant.  She said sorry, she thought I was just being nosy!

WOKEN BY A ROOSTER

The night before we left England in July 2003, or a trip for more renovation work, was the last night of the Proms at Portchester Castle, a great evening with loads of orchestral music and fireworks and thousands of people.  We had a very late night and Andy nearly overslept.  I had to give him a good shake to wake him up, even though the alarm was ringing for ages.

Fairy Godmother had still not contacted us since buying the house, despite many emails and we were very disappointed.  She had promised she would arrange the meeting with the mayor of the village, help us find furniture shops, sort out our health forms and tax forms and various other things.  We had not seen her since our day in the Notaire’s office when we bought the house.  The lady waiting outside for her seemed to worry her a bit and we only ever saw her once again!  I was sure we would manage but we believed we would have had her help.

Fairy Godmother actually arrived very late one night after we had moved in to ask if we would like to buy her old wood-burning stove.  This was the one and only visit since we bought the house.  We said we would like to have the stove but that was the last time we saw her.

We hung a bamboo fly curtain on the front door, (the box it came in was ideal for storing the long French sticks of bread) so we could leave it open to work.  Andy laid out all the wood for repairing the front windows in the front garden and creosoted it all.  A passing driver stopped to speak to us.  He had been fumigating the house across the road ready for the new English owners to move in.  He was English.  He said he knew we were English too, as the French did not often appear to repair and paint their windows.

                We were woken at 2am by the loud crowing of a Rooster.  It would not stop.  It turned out that it was Andy’s Rooster alarm clock radio.  We must have pressed the alarm down by accident whilst we were moving it.  I went to the bathroom and the seat of the toilet banged down when I lifted the lid.  I jumped in surprise and woke a couple of flies which were sleeping there.  I tried to swat them and sent the toilet roll hurtling onto the landing and on down the stairs.  In the dark I mistook the bedroom door and ended up in the wrong room, groping around for my bed.  This is a large house and quite easy to get lost – especially in the dark!

The next day, I painted the skirting boards with a primary coat in the TV room whilst Andy attacked the large front windows.  He let me do the glossing as well – I am a terrible gloss painter.  Luckily the skirting board needed two coats of gloss so Andy did the second coat properly.

A small refrigerator, that we had bought with us to use until we bought a larger one, was not a lot of good but was to be fine for use in the Games Room eventually, to keep beers cool, and the box which held the bamboo fly curtain was perfect for keeping the flies off the long French bread.

MEETING THE MAYOR

The mayor of our village called at the house with a letter for us, from the water company, asking if we could pay by direct debit.  We had decided to pay the bills as they cropped up and perhaps pay by direct debit when we were in residence. 

The mayor was not at all as I imagined.  He called as Andy was sitting on a chair in the front garden with a can of beer and smoking his pipe, whilst I was dressed in cut-off jeans, hair pinned up, scraping paper and covered in paint and with bits of wallpaper stuck on everywhere. 

Andy managed to get his ‘heureux de faire’ bit in but I was totally tongue-tied!  Andy had been practicing his ‘party piece’ of greeting the mayor for weeks.  The French phrase books usually give the pronunciation of the full greeting for the mayor.  We did not really say much to him, although we had wanted to ask many questions including, “Help! The windows are rotten, do we need permission to replace them?” or, “We have two collections of things which may be of interest to tourists to the village, would you like them to be available for visitors to the village?”  We would leave that for a future visit.

On a wander around the village, we discovered that it is a ‘tourist walking village’, with several routes marked out on the notice board outside the Mairie (the Mayor’s office).   There are a few attractions in the village, like gardens full of concrete animals and figures called ‘Jardin Extrodinaire’.  There are no shops or cafes in the village so most of the ‘tourists’ are those who like walking around the countryside.

At the bottom of the lane behind the house is a man-made lake to take the rainwater from the new drainage system.  It was being landscaped and is lovely now it has been completed.  Fishing is also allowed in the lake.

I cleared out the porches, which were full of junk and also several boxes of medicines.  Looking at the medicines I realized that the previous occupants had not lived there for some time, as the bottles and boxes were all for small children, or baby, use.  The children of the previous owners were quite grown up.  I did not think the house had been lived in for some years – not just a year as we had been told.

Under all the piles of junk in one of the porches was a letter addressed to us – this was over 6 months old and was from the removal company asking us to confirm everything and also thanking us for using their company.  We thought the removal men may have left it there. 

I noticed that every time I had swept up, Andy found something to saw or chop, thus leaving yet more debris for me to clear!

FRENCH PLUMBING

As we had still been unable to utilize the hot water, I had a chilly strip wash and Andy braved a cold shower!  I had the feeling that no-one had lived in the house since the bad storms of about 4 years previous, which, we had been told, had taken the roof off.  We also thought the previous occupants were planning to put a wash-basin in the roof rooms and never actually completed the task.  It eventually turned out that the tank we had found in the roof space was a header tank for the central heating, not plumbing for a basin.

As we got so dirty, we decided to check in to a motel for our last night, so that we could get cleaned up, as we still had no hot water.  This was the same motel we had used previously with no problems.  We had previously stayed three nights and paid at the end of our visit.  The Receptionist took one look at our appearance and asked for the money up front!