au milieu des vaches

Déclaration de travaux

Day one: today… theoretically.

After a meeting with the maître d’oeuvre and the maçon last week, we thought the schedule was set to (finally) start today. So, as required, we passed by the Mairie de Briennon to lodge a déclaration de travaux (in triplicate, naturally). After that, a quick trip to the barn to oversee the beginning of the action phase of the project.

Mais… personne…

]]> Calls to the maître d’oeuvre and the maçon revealed that “this week sometime” was about as close as the agreement had actually been. In the end, this week is not bad, given that we signed up to buy the place in October 2003…

This Thursday we have a meeting onsite with all of the contracters where we’ll tell them which bits of their obscenely expensive quotes will have to left out to come in under budget.

Speaking of budget, we’re still waiting to hear back from the bank and the mayor about whether or not they’ve been able to change the title on the permis de construire so we qualify for a 0% loan, but that, i feel is a story for tomorrow.

State of the play

The builder has been to visit with the maître d’oeuvre and is due to start work in early June, roundly contradicting the predictions of all and sundry that we’d take at least a year to find available artisans, and then they’d probably be cowboys. The builder himself is experienced and serious—just what you’re looking for in shoring up crumbling pisé walls.

So our choice to have at least the formative stages of the project managed may have cost us a little more, but we now seem to be in the position where the project will move steadily through to the point where we take over (i.e. finishing and decorating).

If you’re planning a building project in or near Roanne, drop me a line and I’ll pass on the coordinates of the people who know how to get things done.

Flood

The flooding of the Rhins at the bottom of the street last weekend presaged the unblocking of our home building project. After the arrival of the permis de construire, the maître d’oeuvre told us that he had the builder lined up to start some time in May, the bank manager told us that we qualified for a zero percent loan for part of our budget and the wife’s cousin in public works invited us over for coffee to tell us how much it would cost to run a water line up a 300 metre long driveway.

It’s looking like we’ll have something to write about around here — sit tight!

How delays work

Today we had notification of the reception of our application for a building permit. Or rather, a “NOTIFICATION DU DELAI D’INSTRUCTION” (their caps)… In other words, we’ve waited two months to tell you you’ll have to wait two months.

It’s like this: the official allowable delay for a permit de construire is two months after the receipt of the application—if there’s no word after that time, the application is deemed successful and you can start work. The problem is, the paper pushers have a clever trick to knock your schedule on its ear.

]]> Just before the expiry of the two months after our application, we received a letter explaining that they didn’t have enough information regarding our plans for waste management, and needed a study of the soil type etc. We passed it all on to the maître d’oeuvre who blew a gasket—he’d noted in the application that since we have clay soil, we’re obliged to include a specific European standard sand filtration system with our septic tank. In other words, we had already accepted the need to follow the most stringent course of action.

They (naturally) apologised profusely and accepted the application. Dated from their receipt of the information they already had (and the blast from the m.d’o.). So our new date d’instruction is May 4…

Waiting

We are learning patience.

It seems that at every turn in this project there are delays. We continue to wait for the permis de construire, due at the beginning of February. Today we called the maître d’oeuvre to find out about progress on the plan d’execution to find that his lead draughtsman has been off sick for the last five weeks and we shouldn’t expect the definitive plans before mid-March.

And you wonder why there’s not much happening on this site at the moment?

Agenda Roannais

A month into the project and the audience for the Agenda Roannais is building steadily. Already we’ve contacted a good number of the associations in the area and faxed the 115 communes in the arondissement de Roanne, and the calendar is starting to fill up. The next step is to present the site to the tourism office and see if we can’t get a little bit of support…

Visit the Agenda Roannais »

Reading

The current status of the project is that we await the permis de construire or building permit which, in a good year might only take about two months. We’re hoping for mid-February.

]]> In the meantime we’re reading as much as possible. Mostly a pile of back issues of Art & Decoration and Maison & Travaux — the former for design ideas and the latter for a bit of guidance about putting up internal partitions and permeable wall coverings that will enable the pisé to breathe…

Budget

It’s been a stressful Christmas break, since we received the maître d’oeuvre’s estimate for the total cost of our renovation. Turns out that what we thought was an ample budget will cover about two thirds of the finished product.

So, dear readers, you are hereby notified that what we hoped would be a piece of photo reportage—where I would just take pictures of and describe what the professionals were doing and why—just became a full-on do-it-yourself adventure.

Here are some pictures to whet your appetite for watching us slave and suffer:

Hiatus over

After a forced hiatus due to setting up a new business, taking an intensive course for new business folk at the Chamber du Commerce et d’Industie du Roannais and building a new project to help publicise everything, I’m now back on deck in time for the festive season, but with a pile of new information about the formalities of business creation in France. A new category to add, then, as we look forward to a new year, and out the window at a bright winter sun that has yet to push the temperature above 0°.

Canal Jazz

Yes, we’re integrating in the local culture. I’m a to-be-confirmed-at-the-next-AGM member of Canal Jazz, the association for the promotion of jazz in the Roannais.

Visit Canal Jazz »

Yes I built the site, yes that’s a bit of an easy link, but look at the programme for next year and plan your visit around the concerts…

Clay & Geothermal Heating

After Saturdays’ visit to the Apromer open day, the whole heating question is up for debate. We have been keen for some time on the idea of a geothermal heat pump, but it’s almost impossible to get anyone who’s in the business to say a bad word about the thing they’re selling (naturally).

So to find an objective viewpoint (sort of), we had to go to someone who’s promoting solar energy. Here’s his take, and an anecdote he told to a visitor without us having even mentioned our situation…

]]> You have to admire someone who analyses the pros and cons of an energy source in global terms, rather that merely appealing to he wallet of the individual. M. Philippe Bertrand, our host on the day, did these sums with the commonly stated energy efficiency data about geothermal heating—that is, for 1kW of energy put into the system, you get 3kW back. It goes like this:

In France, the majority of electricity is produced by heat-producing methods: nuclear, coal, gas…
To produce 1kW of electricity takes 3kW of heat energy from one of those sources, and a corresponding release of various by-products into the environment (heat, CO₂, etc.)
That 1kW is then used to collect 3kW of energy from your garden.
So to get 3kW of heat, you need 3kW of heat…

The question he then asks is, why not burn your own fossil fuels and cut out the middle man? And we had to admit that he has a point, but it was the anecdote we heard incidentally earlier that really made us listen.

An acquaintance of M. Bertrand had installed a geothermal system in a property with clay soil (like ours). In the beginning, all worked as advertised, but after a couple of years, the electricity bills began to mount, and the heating lost effectiveness. The gentleman in question was well equipped with the cash needed to solve the problem, so he had the garden re-excavated.

What he found was that the condensation caused by the captor coils in the ground had turned the surrounding clay to mud. When the mud dried, it caked hard, forming an effective shield between the moisture of the soil and the captors. The system was insulated against itself…

This could be taken as a cautionary tale about ensuring that there is enough sand placed about the coils at installation to avoid the problem, but having to factor precautions like that into a project take an expensive possibility and move it outside budget limitations.

“So what are you going to do now?” I hear you chorus.

I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Renewable Energies

As autumn rains itself towards winter, our thoughts are turning towards heating methods for the house. A series of factors present themselves for consideration:

There’s no town gas network in the countryside
With Peak Oil looming, already here or yesterday’s news, the price of fuel oil is only going to keep rising. In any case, we’d rather find a more world-friendly option
The house faces due south, with most of its 2132 m² in front of it
Apart from the last few weeks, it’s always sunny (Roanne has more sunny days annually than Toulouse — Nouvel Observateur 13 May 2004)
The soil is mostly clay and the water table is unusually high (more about this in the fruit tree planting discussion coming soon)

]]> Thus, the first choice at the moment is some type of geothermal heat pump although the installation cost may prove prohibitive. The EDF advisor confirms to us that while this form of heating is considerably cheaper to run, at 100-150€ per m², it’s also the most expensive to install.

So this weekend we are researching alternatives: solar and wood heating. There is a series of open days organised by the Comité de Liaison Energies Renouvelables (CLER | English summary). Thanks to having a cousin who’s a Green Party representative in the Conseil Régional d’Auvergne, we’re off to Le Mayet de Montagne, to the base of l’association Apromer who promote and apply the use of renewable energies. They’ll be able to tell us about photovoltaic solar panels, solar water heating and wood-fired furnaces. I’ll report back next week.

Taste

In the beginning, there was a little bi-cultural French/New Zealand family. They lived 5 minutes from the centre of Auckland in a 1920s wooden bungalow that they would present for sale like this:

]]> Here we can see suggestions of what they might look for in their dream French farmhouse when they finally made the move. The key things they would look for would be space, light, lush greenery and warm, wood-toned colours (having dearly loved their matai flooring). The challenge would be to find these things in a densely populated country (to kiwis) where the old stone based houses have tiny windows to help retain the heat in winters that sub-tropical Aucklanders can only imagine…

Au Milieu des Vaches

Surrounded by cows? No? Yes. Really.

North, south, east and west. Surrounded by cows. Charolais. Au milieu des vaches.

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