The Chateau Chronicles – First Night
Struggling to keep the blog up to date. I wish I was writing every day, but the reality is that my days are jam-packed and I fall into bed at night, with no time to write. I have a quiet Saturday morning now, having just dropped my son off at the train station. He’s been here a week, but I have to go back in time to the first night, my daughter and her boyfriend are still asleep…
The first night, I still had no electricity. Luckily, knowing this, I bought a cheap Bluetooth speaker that doubled as a lantern, so it came with me everywhere as it got dark. I had bought a small wine fridge to bide me until my fridge arrived and Wendy and I set that up as a kind of cooler. It reached over 40 degrees (103 F) every day, so it wasn’t of much use, but it was something. That morning I discovered my little local market where I bought farm-fresh tomatoes, cucumber, feta cheese, olives, olive oil, balsamic, sel de fleur, and a baguette.
First dinner
I made a salad with my fixings for dinner and with a glass of (warm) wine, I was content. I watched a movie on my iPad (luckily the 4G signal here is strong) before falling asleep, only half aware that the wind was picking up and there was a rumbling in the distance causing Chloe to shiver at my feet.
At some dark hour, I was awoken abruptly by a violent crash and realized there was a tempest afoot. My huge bedroom window (about 7 feet tall) was banging open and closed as were its corresponding shutters and this was being repeated all over the house, where I had naively left shutters unlocked and windows open. Struggling against the wind and sideways rain, I managed to bolt my bedroom shutters and lock the window before racing barefoot through the entire house in the dark, attempting to bolt shutters closed and lock windows, getting soaked in the process. At one point, I heard a loud crash and it was only when I returned to my room that I realized my window hadn’t actually locked and had crashed open again, causing two panes to shatter. I locked it properly, avoiding the broken glass and fell, damp and bedraggled into bed wide awake to listen for more tell-tale banging.
The next morning a peaceful mist hung over the valley belying the violence of the previous night.
Mist through missing and broken window panes
After a quick breakfast, I was anxious to begin working, but where to start? I sat at my new kitchen table looking over the garden, and suddenly jumped up to begin raking four years of leaf debris hoping to expose a solid layer of gravel or pebbles, but discovered only a hard crust of earth. Still, it was a satisfying job, making the small area I managed to scrape look clean and tidy.
The satisfaction of raking
As I raked, I contemplated the shutters and the color I would paint them. Which lead me to leap into the car for another trip to the local Castorama (France’s version of Lowes or Home Depot) to buy paint samples. I also discovered a local paint store that sold Farrow and Ball colors and grabbed a few small samples and a color card from them as well. I got home and painted stripes of color on one of the shutters.
Shutter color testing
I was also obsessed with getting my ensuite bathroom in working order. First order of business was to strip the nasty carpet off the floor. Why put carpet in a bathroom? And I had to find a way to fix a European toilet. I can easily fix North American ones, but the innards of a Euro toilet were very much foreign to me. The toilet was also coated with a nasty blue substance, which I can only assume was that type of toilet cleaner than makes the water blue. Ick! And although I had double sinks, they both hosed water on the floor when you turned on the faucet. Oh, and the shower had no door and there was not enough of a lip at the bottom to allow for a curtain. Basically completely dysfunctional. Weeks later, it’s not much better, but I did manage to install a brand new toilet (with help), pull up the carpet and paint the floor white and tighten the sinks so that only one leaks now.
Needless to say, I leapt from project to project, cleaning, painting, raking and making daily excursions to Castorama for supplies. I was also grappling with my address which seemed to cause anyone delivering to me all kinds of grief. I finally discovered that rather than give people my actual address, just giving them “Chateau de Borie” as my address ensured my delivery would actually arrive. I had to change my bank address (something I could only do with the dreaded “attestation” from the town) and had to wait an extra week for Internet when the technician couldn’t find the property. But more on Internet later.
After two days, and so much struggle, the major breakthrough was getting the electricity turned on! The little things take on so much more meaning when you don’t have them!
We have light!
Ok, going to post this since it’s getting long and another week has gone by since starting it.