April, 2016

See, we don't just work, we take time to goof around too.

For several years, I had written about the forge I spent endless hours at in our old village of Langoat in Brittany. The blacksmith there had taught me some rudimentary forging techniques and allowed me to putter at projects every year when we were there. This month, a friend told me that a film crew from Paris had come and shot a segment on him and his forge, as he is the last of a dying breed. I have posted pictures before but they do little justice to the medieval environment where I had the pleasure of transforming raw metal into something of use or beauty. It is a short but quite impressive clip and can be seen by clicking  HERE

Working with the master

This month I managed to get the doors to our 'wine cellar' up that I had forged a few years ago and brought with us when we moved. This is just inside our front door where there had been a closet of sorts that we converted into our wine cellar.

Mayday!

We woke up one morning last month to witness an impending ship wreck. A few sailors misjudged a raging storm in the Mediterranean and lost control of their sailboat. It landed up on the rocks below our garden and I rushed over to see if I could help. Fortunately, they had had gotten out on the rocks safely where their boat had beached itself before I arrived.

 

We spent the next 36 hours watching it getting pounded on the rocks mercilessly every 5 seconds or so by one wave after another. This now being an insurance issue, they had to decide if it was worth paying for a salvage operation or if it would be cheaper to write it off, destroy it in place and haul out the pieces. 

It was a little harder to get to than it looks in the picture because after the storm, the boat was high and dry on the rocks in a difficult place to access. Another first for us was to discover that after big storms we have to go around and wash all our windows as the sea spray leaves a coating of salt on all our windows.

What a problem to have...:)

 More of the usual

Month after month I write about our projects and the progress we think we are making in improving the home we are at. It would be easy to mistakenly think its always smooth sailing and that we really know what we are doing since in one way or another, we are always at it.

Time for a reality check. Take the plumbing I was doing earlier today for instance. I have done plumbing for decades. What you may not know, because I have never written about it, is the simple fact that I am no darn good at it. Friends that have helped me with other projects would be quick to point out, given the opportunity, that there are a number of other skills I am no darn good at either. But I digress.

You would think that doing something for decades would slowly improve your skill set. Balderdash! For me, plumbing has always involved 6 old bed sheets to sop up the inevitable ‘few drips’ as a result of my fixing things, and a whole slew of words I learned in prison. 

You would also think that at some point of being a dismal failure, you would throw in the towel (I could have used one of those too), but noooooo, I am nothing if not persistent. As I have told my kids many times, “half of success in life comes from just showing up”. I will not quit. I will try again. Maybe someday I will solder a joint that will not leak. Apparently, just not today.

Are we done yet?

In a word: no. But, we are almost ready to start! Hard to believe that we have been here over 3 months and having worked our buns off, we would be right on schedule, if this was February 1st. In these kinds of projects, the old axiom is that everything takes longer that expected, costs more than planned and is far more complicated than anticipated. This project is following that to a "T".

In January, I wrote about my building a poor man's workshop. This month saw it's completion. So here is how to build a workshop in 4 easy steps.

One of many building material deliveries made this month. Step one was getting the sand and gravel to make the cement.

Step  two: get a competent, knowledgeable  inspector on site.

Step 3: pour the stab, seal with black waterproofing (in background) and gather a little wood.

Step 4: simply assemble, tile interior, add finish and roof. Bingo, time for lunch.

Having come to grips with the fact that we will not come close to completing what we had planned and hoped to do this season, we have doubled down in ambition and pushed ahead with adding considerably more to the mix. We will focus on getting the ground floor of the villa, the exterior and the grounds in tip top shape, then do as much as we can on the lower level before we leave.

A little terrace tile

So, what's left to do? Well 770 sf (70 sm) of terrace tiling for one, 710 sf (64 sm) of Travertine stone tile for floors for another and another 330 sf (30 sm) of kitchen bathroom and assorted tile [not shown] in the living room and bedrooms, for starters.

Travertine stone floor tile

We'll need a few bags of tile adhesive to start...more to follow.

All this work doesn't just create a mess but at some point it begins to amount to something as seen in the pics below.

As always, all work / no play makes for boring grumpy people so we were fortunate enough to have Island friends Ian and Lyne drop by for a few days away from their French home in the medieval hamlet of AUDABIAC in the  Languedoc-Roussillon part of France to give us a break.

Full disclosure: I took ALL the pictures seen here this month. 
Eh... except for the good ones that Ian took.
When I have 7 picture books  published and I get a bunch of awards for my photography like him and spend what little remains of our children's inheritance on cameras and the like I will take great pictures too.

Picture Ian took from our terrace at night

March, 2016

Our garden goes down to the water

Life on the 43rd parallel

Shortly after we arrived, we noticed an issue that we had not anticipated. A good deal of the furniture we had moved from our home in Brittany was not appropriate to the region or the style of this home. Bummer, dude. We also realized that it was 12 years old and of rather 'entry level' quality, a practical requirement brought on from our initial purchase in Brittany, showing up in France with a suitcase each with the need to furnish and decorate a 4 bedroom house from A to Z, right down to the last knife, fork and spoon, and our meager budget at the time.

Brittany is a unique area and we chose to furnish in keeping with the regional style. That was all well and good but moving that stuff here was like moving a house full of Texas ranch style furniture to a New York Manhattan penthouse apartment. That longhorn wall ornament and cowhide sofas just ain't gonna work, if you know what I mean. Besides, we were due for more grownup furnishings anyway.

As we continued cleaning up the property, I found lots of half buried trash. Odd pieces of metal, part of a garden hose, a bicycle wheel, old fencing, plastic bags, broken pottery and even a 20 foot (7 M) aluminum sailboat mast which we are considering turning into a flagpole. Oh yeah, and an elephant skull.

Excuse me?

It seems that two owners previous to us was a South African lady who had a little voodoo action going, chanting to a black Madonna in a small crypt in the yard. She had apparently brought the skull over and kept it in the garden. Whatever gets you through the night, lady!

This is the first time I ever had part of an elephant in my back yard!

 
Another little treasure was pruning our cork Oak tree.  The bark is the cork that is used in making wine bottle corks. So, the next time you pop a cork, it might have come from our tree! Speaking of trees, we continued cutting, pruning and clearing the property as if we were homesteaders. Having a dumpster available nearby, I would pack it with branches. Janice and I then drew straws to see who would get to dumpster dive to crush all the branches to the bottom so we could keep packing more in. 

Janice lost, but by some form of logic I was not familiar with, this apparently meant that I 'won' the task of climbing in to do the nasty. Somehow, I still feel like I got had. Still, I filled a dumpster a day (we have daily city trash pickup here) for a month before a neighbor clued me into the fact that that was illegal and would shortly face the wrath of the local authorities in the form of a stiff fine. We shifted to plan 'B' and have been burning our daily harvest since.

Our first 2 months here were a blur of activity. We would work in any and all directions feeling like we were running just to stand in place. When 20 things are priority #1, you can do little more than pick up the thing nearest you, fix it, paint it or put it where it belongs. It feels disheartening because you have little or nothing to show for the effort. But, this is not our first rodeo. If you persevere and do what you can every day, at some point the pieces begin to fall into place.

Lately, we finally started feeling like we are getting somewhere. The guest bedroom on the ground level had an old cast iron radiator which I removed (there are 11 of them throughout to be taken out as they were disconnected years ago when the previous owner went to a modern heating system). This left an unsightly area  with a different texture on the wall behind them that could not be duplicated, plus pipes and supporting brackets sticking out which I cut off. This was an issue which simply couldn't be fixed as any patch would stand out like a sore thumb.

Guest bedroom wall where old style cast iron radiator was removed (AKA: before)

Ceramic tile with wood texture

Janice's solution was simple. She found an Italian ceramic tile with a wood look that is so life like you have to touch it to know it is not real wood. Even the texture is wood like with ridges and knots. Plus, unlike any tile I have ever seen, these pieces are not like square floor tiles  but they are 3' to 6 ' long (1-2m) and the width of a piece of wood, adding to the realism. Each room will have a feature of some sort, giving it its signature. This was room 1.  Box ticked... next! 

The headboard is olive tree wood which I made from a raw slab a friend was going to dispose of.

(After) with new windows

If you promise not to tell, I will let you in on a little secret. 30 years ago when we were building our house in California, we were facing a similar 'this can't be fixed' issue. I was installing a 9' (3m) hexagon shaped mirror on the kitchen ceiling in an alcove of sorts. (Janice refused to let me put it on our bedroom ceiling) The installation consisted of gluing the mirror to the ceiling with supporting framing while the glue dried. Unfortunately, I got a little enthusiastic in pressing it to the ceiling to ensure a good bond...and cracked a corner.

A quick decision had to be made to either take it down before the glue set or leave it up and figure out what to do about it later. We chose to leave it. Later, we utilized one of the fundamental principles of magic: hide it in plain sight. Janice placed thin copper tape that is used in soldering stained glass windows over the crack and created a few 'veins' around it. It looked better than ever! Everyone who has seen it since is none the wiser and loves it. To this day, the friend who helped, Janice and I are the only ones who have ever known. With you, that will now make 4.

This was the month we also had all the 10 remaining windows and 5 French doors replaced, plus a skylight added in the garden level kitchen.  

Out with the old...

...in with the new

Next, we got the ground level kitchen (new fridge, oven and dishwasher) and bathroom set up, and some of our bedroom. Last, we got the dining and living room in acceptable shape until we have the time to return and put the finishing touches on them. 

 

Ground floor bathroom

On the other hand, we have yet to really get into the business end of the lower garden level build. Not to say nothing has been done there. We had a 3 man crew here for over a week to rebuild the roof  over a bedroom and part of the kitchen, repair the roof over the main part of the villa, waterproof both terraces as they were leaking water into the rooms below and pour a new cement floor in the master bedroom on the garden level where I had jack hammered the tile out of it. 

"Hey! Where j'a put my roof?"

The floor was laid on a thin mortar bed so it all had to come out to re pour the cement floor and covered anew. I now get to re-tile both terraces and the bedroom, all 750sf (75 m2) of them.The bottom line is that there is so much construction going around here at the moment in so many areas that the place looks similar to the Syrian towns after Assad's troops have dropped a barrel bomb.

Our place under construction

Oppps, wrong picture. My bad. This is the tile removal. It's just that both pictures look so alike.

A rather fun find was being in line at our local grocery store and discovering that two of the postcards of the local area show our villa in them. One is a picture of the bay in front of our window, taken from the bottom of our property. The second is taken from a boat, facing the opposite direction showing the bay in front of our place with our home on the hill. Pretty cool!

We have started making friends and one couple in particular have been generous and helpful to a fault. In an attempt to reciprocate, we invited them to come visit us in California next fall. Three days later, they had their tickets in hand. Seems like the plans are a go!

All work and no play makes us cranky so we have made some time for visiting a bell foundry. They produce everything from the little table side bells to call the maid to the 9' (3M) church steeple bells. Very cool! Today, we were 'kidnapped' by new friends who took us to Dolceacqua, a medieval  town on the Italian border for lunch.

I know it sounds kind of exotic and well....hell's bells, it is! Driving past Cannes and Monaco to have lunch in Italy, visit a glass blowing  museum and return home for dinner is my idea of having more fun that we should be allowed to have.
 

Dolcheacqua

The 'streets' of Dolcheacqua

Is it legal to have this much fun? 

An apology  

It is quite likely that some time last month you got a request to add us to your Linkedin account. One of us (name withheld to protect the guilty)  got a request from someone to do the same which the guilty party in this case agreed to, in order to 'be nice'. This, unknowingly, sent the request out to all in our email address book.

We do not participate in Linkedin, Twitter or any of the dozens of sites that keep up with Lady Gaga, the Kardashians or allow us to send risky photos which will self destruct  30 seconds after you have seen them. 

We just wanted to apologize for this inadvertent boo-boo while I have reviewed our 'safe computing' practices with her. 
I mean the guilty party.

February, 2016

Janice's Sistine Chapel

OK, so we have landed. Not much to report as we are knee deep in trying to adjust to our new home. Last month, I wrote that the ground floor of the villa was ‘turnkey’ and it sort of was. This turns out to be through the prism of a teenager on his first date though. All glossy eyed and couldn’t see a flaw in her no matter how obvious.

The only friends who have been here to date (on the day the sale closed, no less) could clearly see what we saw: the enormous tasks that lay ahead. But to us they were-and are-merely details, that once addressed will be memories of what it ‘used to be’ before we brought the property back to life. That is what these next 4 months are all about for us. No big month long trips for us this winter and spring.

What continues to leave us breathless is to stop no less than 20 times a day and gaze out to the crashing surf that lies just beyond our garden and the snow capped French Alps in the distance.

This is the 4^th time that we have entered a home and begun furnishing it from scratch. This is a 5 bedroom villa when we have family and friends visiting, that can- by merely closing an interior door that would separate the two- become two entirely separate homes, each with their own bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, dining and living rooms. This now requires an additional refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, washer / dryer, beds, linens, furniture and on and on and on. The whole enchilada. To quote a good buddy in California when faced with my lamenting the costs of building our recent deck.. "Michael" he said, "just shut up and write the check".

This meant that I had to get real and acquire a modicum of tools to do some serious remodeling around here. To that end, I bought and will erect a 70sf (7m2) garden outbuilding to use as a poor man’s workshop.  If it had a flat screen TV, some Playboy magazines, a Lazy-boy and a fridge for beer, I could call it a man cave…but it doesn’t. What it will have is a 100 item list of things for me to do, with a yellow sticky note attached that says “Don’t come back into the house until this is done!”

One of the things I have gotten a kick out of is how in Europe all tools and appliances come with an owner’s manual, just like at home. The difference here is that all instructions and warnings are printed in all the languages the items are sold in the various countries they serve. I counted 31 languages that my new chain saw safety instructions came in (“Never use this electric chainsaw under water”). The owner’s manual are as thick as bibles. Occasionally, they even have to divide them in several books.

It has taken us weeks to open all the boxes of our stuff we had stored, after doing a DEEP cleaning of the entire house. Just because the place was ‘turnkey’ doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot to do to get it up to Janice's standards. Toilets that leaked were cheaper to replace than to purchase parts for. 

I had to re-plumb for a water softener and washer and dryer as there were none before. It soon became evident that this place had not seen any maintenance whatsoever since Louis the XIV. The two front door locks broke on the same day, requiring us to keep the door closed with a 5 gallon bucket of paint. Electrical breakers needed upgrading and the (yard) garden….HA! Let’s just say that it bore an uncanny resemblance to the Amazon jungle in addition to having palm and olive trees. 

We spent weeks chopping and dicing. The payoff was that we tripled our ocean view. Not to beat a dead horse, but it would be hard to exaggerate the lack of maintenance this property has had. Home ownership is not for everybody. Previous owners bought the place, lived in it and never lifted a finger or spent a dollar (Loonie, Pound, Euro) all the years they were here. 

Interior door latches were broken, 11 old 250 pound (115 kilos) cast iron radiators that no longer had plumbing connected to them were still in place and have to be removed. I even found all outside faucets turned off because there was a burst pipe that was never fixed. Fortunately ;) the price we paid reflected the sweat equity we are investing in it.

I don’t mean to sound like I am complaining; I just want to keep it real. Otherwise it would be like writing about the Titanic but forgetting to mention that it sank. The long and the short of it was that we tweaked our original plans to leave the ground floor alone once we got our furniture set up to begin the task of doing all that needs to be done to get the lower garden level up and running.

We decided that we would do all we could reasonably do in the first 6 weeks to make the main floor as nice as we could. This is not only for our own enjoyment but we are trying to gear up for what to us will be significant rental potential for both, the 8 months we are gone.

Munich or bust!

Seigfried, Markus, Mandy and what's his name in Munich

Daughter Mandy and husband Markus just moved across Germany to Munich, where Markus is working. To avoid our taking it easy, shortly after we arrived they called for a little help with cutting openings in their new counter top for installing their sink and cook top in their new flat. So, we drove half way across the continent from France through Monaco, all of northern Italy, (skirting Switzerland) through the Austrian Alps by the Dolomite mountains into Germany. The Dolomites are a World Heritage Site and became the 131st such site we have visited on the list to date. We spent the night in Innsbruck in Austria on the way back.

Dolomite mountains, Austria

Once at Mandy and Markus's place we got to work on the install and fix-it list. Markus's dad Siegfreid, who does not speak a word of English, took a 6 hour train ride to join in again as he has in the past.  In spite of the language barrier, we work amazingly well together.
  
In Europe, it is typical for people to take their kitchen cabinets and appliances as well as all ceiling light fixtures with them when they move. Don’t ask me the sense of it as previous cabinets will rarely fit in the new kitchen and more damage is done in moving them than it is worth, in my humble opinion. But no one asked me…. 

So, you move into an apartment with a kitchen stripped to the walls, pipes sticking out and two bare wires hanging from where the light fixture used to be. It's a good thing Europe has some cool history going for it because real estate resale ain’t it.

Speaking of history, we went for a walk when we noticed the bronze tile below. Seems that these memorials are to be found all over Germany embedded in the sidewalks in front of homes or businesses where Jews were taken, deported and killed by the Nazi's in one concentration camp or another.