MY EXCITING ENCOUNTER WITH A FRENCH PUSSY - MARVEILLEUX

Ellpus
How did it take so long for me to discover this wonderful thread. Outstanding. Makes my back hurt just to think of all your hard work.

The last time I visited Europe, I was invited to have lunch with a family living in an "old country home" in England's Lake District. Being a yank, an old house meant to me one about 100 or 150 years old.

I was surprised and delighted to find a wonderful renovated large house with updated kitchen and mechanicals. One part of the house was 500 years old, the other part was 700 years old. It nestled in at least five acres of garden and forest.

I was so in awe of the loving care the house had been given. It was beautiful and comfortable as an old shoe.

American is too young to have many of such examples.

BBB

Welcome, BBB! Nice to see you.

Ah! The Lake District...where all the clouds go to refill. It's one of the most beautiful places I've seen in the UK, but now gets very crowded with tourists during the summer.

We're trying to do the "loving care" bit, but obviously have to look at budgets, and more importantly, whether we can source the stuff that we need.
The nearest large DIY store is in Macon, about 90 mins drive away, and apart from that, all we can buy in the local area is Chevre (goats) cheese, wonderful bread and basic groceries.

We'll get there eventually.....

so... when is the next European A2K gathering? It is, of course, taking place at your by then newly refurbished mansion, right? RIGHT?!

Is it on Rue de la Madeleine? Or Rue des Epauliers?

I was just browsing online, is this your castle?



What a beautiful area, town, castle, even cattle. Hmmm, that makes me hungry. Off for lunch.

Miniature ferns like these ones, GW?







We love the look of these front walls, and won't ever touch them, unless something nasty gets in there that will evntually cause damage (like a six inch cherry sapling that we yanked out)

Nice castle! Nope, our neighbouring castle is a ruin, Dag. Just as an aside, I bet one of the main things you found, when you googled "Charolles" was reference to their god awful new metal flyover that they built a few years ago.

They're so proud of it, they even feature it on tourist postcards.

OOH! Me tea's just pinged in the micro!

Sorry, by that I mean that le dejeuner est cloche'd, dans la wave de micro!

Back later.......

Meanwhile downstairs, all the wiring was placed in position and cut to rough length, ready for channeling into walls.
These walls are pretty rough stonework, with the odd patch that is good, here and there.
The mortar is pretty crumbly, and to leave all of it exposed a) wouldn't look that good, and b) there'd be a permanent deposit of mortar on the floor, even minutes after sweeping or vacuuming the place.
So....we are going to screed and plaster about 50 - 75% of the walls (the very worst bits) and leave the really nice parts exposed. It'll end up as a wall of nice, smooth plaster, with various odd shapes of exposed stone showing through.

This will also allow us to hide any wiring/trunking under the plaster.

Wires....this clump is nothing, compared to the maze that lurks on the other side of the doorway, just out of sight.

Once all the wiring was done, and the insulation was in place, it was time to get cracking on the floor itself, starting with the blockboard.

This stuff is the waterproof variety, which is also "extra" compressed to make it very dense, therefore as hard as nails and no bend at all. We didn't want a floor that bounced.

Once this is all in place, the next stage (next holiday, probably) will be to cover the blockboard in the best material we can source.
If we can find some genuine old floorboards, that would be ideal, but we'll probably end up putting oak parquet flooring down, or maybe even just some nice carpet.

Work area (mezzanine) with blockboard.....




Halfway through......

Almost finished, and we found we needed ONE more sheet of blockboard!!

Bugger! So, we made a day out of it the following day, as the work was almost finished, and so we took the opportunity to actually start having a holiday (two days before we were due to come home).






We went into Macon for the day (in convoy - two Dutch people, four English, one French, one Bostonian who still spoke with a funny accent)
and had a plat du jour in what turned out to be an excellent little restaurant. I wasn't driving, so slept most of the way back to Charolles, after buying our ONE piece of blockboard.



FINISHED!

......We even cleaned up after ourselves!

Lookin' good, Lord. Damned good.

I'm very impressed.. but not clear - are these photos from your summer visit, or were you just back there again?

OK I can understand removing slippery moss, but where I live moss can sell for $20 a square foot. I love the ferns you already have, but I was thinking of these British natives:

These are from the summer, Osso.

I filled a memory chip in the camera, and put in a new one. When I got back from holiday, I couldn't find the full one anywhere.
I asked my brother to have a look round when he next went to the FH but he kept forgetting. This time he phoned me whilst he was there, purely to get my OK to go ahead with paying for roofing repairs.
I reminded him to have a search, and as we were talking, he spotted the chip on one of the kitchen windowledges.
On that chip are about 200 or so personal family stuff as well, so I was very relieved to get it back.

I've got about six pics of a day out to Suin (pronounced swann, but with a softish n). When I first saw the place name, I immediately thought that it would make a great place for lawyers to buy a holiday home.

I'll post them later, as Suin is a lovely little commune, with some stunning views.

Pronounced swan, good grief.

My english is sufficient, my italian is to laugh, and my french cannot make up a sentence, never mind being able to pronouce one. My spanish is elementary and can be effective if I have, perhaps, a beer, as I have language performance fright. I took a semester of german, so I have faint memories of reading the old script, and some vocabulary.

Should I waddle out in the world, I need a keeper.

Glad you found the thingy.

Are these ferns expensive where you are, GW? They grow all over the place here, and if they work out the same price as moss ($20 a sq foot? Blimey), we could make ourselves a fortune.
I could rape the British countryside and pack it all in bubblewrap, and you could unwrap it at your end, while a queue of ardent gardeners shuffle and count out their dollar bills, eagerly waiting for you to open your shop.

I'll dig one or two out the next time I go down, and insert them in that front wall.
The only thing I'll check out first though, is whether I'm allowed to do this, as it would mean taking soil across borders and I think there may be some regulation against that. I know we have to go through a rigmarole and stacks of forms if we want to take saplings down there.
The French have plenty of trees of their own, granted, but we wanted to take some really ancient varieties of English apple tree down with us, as they're not available over there.
Strict rules and regs, due to possible spread of apple blight across borders etc.

Maybe we'll just smuggle them in.........

Well, I'm ignorant on all this, being from Los Angeles and all, but why would you put something with enthusiastic roots in a very old wall on purpose?
Are not walls beautiful alone?

No, they're not large ferns, Osso, just small decorative ones. It's a bit like creating a vertical rockery, with various alpine style plants dotted here and there.

During the summer, it was lovely to walk along and just look at all the different varieties of plant and flower that were managing to thrive in the wall.

Like I say though, if an "ordinary" plant gets in there, one with invasive roots, I'd pull it straight out.

Just an aside....I was reading a story not no long ago, in one of our daily newspapers.
Apparently, a couple (in the UK) were rebuilding their dry stone wall which had partly collapsed.
Right down in the middle of the wall, in amongst all the waste stone and rubble that got packed in there when it was first built....

...................was a fossilised Megalodon tooth!

I wonder what the original builder, some few hundred years ago and before Darwin was around, I wonder what he made of it?

My son has a few Megalodon teeth in stock...I'll post a pic, just to show you the size......

Oooh, wheeeeee.

I am not as experienced in dry stone walls as the rest of you. I just know Ficus, which can just about lift a house.

Carry on, nurses.