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THE story so far: It has been seven months since Peter Clayton and his wife took possession of the run-down village house 25 miles south of Cherbourg. Although it has been a long and sometimes frustrating haul, work on their `Normandy Gem' is now beginning to take shape and plans are afoot to stay in the house for the very first time...
VISIBLE progress on our French house was painfully slow. When we had first seen the place during our various viewing expeditions, we could easily envisage precisely how it should look, and once we had signed on the dotted line, we became illogically impatient to see it exactly as it was in our minds' eye.
But our team of professionals had other ideas and very tactfully suggested that the work should be prioritised.
For instance, the most mess would be made during the re-wiring, re-plumbing, re-positioning of interior walls, and replacement of various rotten joists and floorboards. After dealing with them, we could then look into kitchen and bathroom installations until eventually getting round to the finishing touches with the aid of a paint brush.
Reluctantly, we bowed to their infinitely superior knowledge of such matters.
We decided that monthly trips to check on progress were too frequent as it was always disheartening to arrive there to witness little visible progress. There was progress, of course, - under the floors, in the attic, in the electricity cupboard - but nothing that made the place look as it should.
Then, after a viewing interval of ten weeks, albeit with constant email and telephone updates, we made the pilgrimage again. We were quite taken aback to be asked by the barman on P&O's Pride of Cherbourg if everything was okay at home because he had not seen us for a few weeks. We hadn't realised that we had become part of the ship's furniture.
We arrived outside the house expecting the worst, but spirits were immediately uplifted when we spotted the brand new front door and the absence of shutters which had been taken away for restoration.
We had light switches, walls where just raw frames of wood had been, pine cladded ceilings in the kitchen and dining room where old wires used to hang from rotten beams, and we had the start of what could almost pass as a kitchen - the carcasses of base and wall units and the luxury of a cooker hood against expertly plastered walls. For the first time since signing for the property seven months earlier,we felt that true progress was being made.
Now was the long-awaited time to start choosing colour schemes and in which rooms we wanted dado rails, polished wood floors and tiles. This was the exciting bit and we were told that if we left it another ten weeks before returning, then we would come back to the Normandy Gem to see an interior at least as good as we had ever dared to hope.
We didn't leave it that long but hired vans for a couple of weekends to transport furniture and other bits and pieces across the Channel. Each time the house looked a hundred times better and we could now very easily picture ourselves relaxing in front of the dining room's cast-iron wood-burning stove (which we had yet to buy), and sunning ourselves on the patio with a glass of wine.
The fact that, after a warm, wet few months we would need a machete to get to the patio didn't interfere with our imaginings.
Throwing caution to the wind, we made definite plans to return six weeks hence when we would actually stay for the very first time in our Normandy Gem...
View comments (1 comment 17/10/2004 at 08:46)