Last night after dinner I was sitting here typing something for the blog when a frighteningly-loud crash seemed to be happening right beside my head. Instantly the thoughts of an airplane going down or a car wrecking or a building collapsing filled my brain. Then in the next few seconds I realized that the reason it sounded so close was because the sound had indeed come from an arm’s length away: part of a wall cabinet had come loose and had fallen towards the floor. Luckily a table was directly below and helped to cushion the fall. But what made all the noise?

Horrors, this was the liquor cabinet! Bottle after bottle smashing into each other created a terrible sound and yet somehow nothing broke. Had this been in Atlanta where we had a full bar in our British pub in the basement, it could have been a disaster but since downsizing this was more of an inconvenience but still a scary moment.

So who’s going to fix this? In France, when you rent an unfurnished house or apartment the lease is usually for three years and it’s generally up to the tenant to make any repairs that are necessary while living there. We’re in a kind of different situation since we have a one-year contract on a holiday home that would typically be rented out on a weekly basis to vacationers who wouldn’t be expected to make any repairs unless they did the damage themselves while on holiday.  Our landlords are very generous people with plenty of other concerns so we’ll be fixing this wall unit ourselves.

Handyman Bill was already formulating the repairs soon after we cleared away the bottles and took the dangling shelving unit from its precarious position. I think it was really just an excuse to make another trip to the hardware store, or as I see it, his toy shop. From what he has said at this point as far as what tools and supplies we’ll need, the only new words we’ll need to know how to say are “gorilla glue”.  All part of life’s learning experiences.