What kind of question is that? If you’d asked that about our house in Atlanta, we would have said “two”—one emergency bar upstairs in the kitchen and a full-service one in our basement British pub. If you go in our kitchen here in France the answer would be “15” because that’s how many bars of pressure our espresso machine has. But today’s post has to do with a third kind of bar and how to cope with thick stone walls that keep you from them. Continue reading “How many bars?”
We’re in. There’s still a month to go on the lease of our rental house but we wanted to be into our own place to start the new year. That will give us plenty of time to thoroughly clean what we’ve called “home” for the last 11 months before we turn it back over to the landlords. It also means that if we get any last minute out-of-town guests before March 1st, they can stay there instead of stepping around unpacked boxes, over cans of plaster and paint, and through ladders leaning against the walls. Just as we did a few months ago, we rented a van, only this time instead of going to the supermarket to pick it up we literally crossed the street from there to a rental car agency. Continue reading “The big move”
The plumber was here the other morning and a bit before noon said that he would be back around 3 o’clock. I told him that was fine since we had to go into town and he then asked if he should come back later. My thoughts were “No, 3 hours is plenty of time and besides, I’m sure that you want to finish the job today” but all I said out loud was “That’s fine.” About an hour and a half later we were surprised to see him pull up in front of the house where our clock said that it was only 1:15 PM. Why had he come back so early? Continue reading “Those pesky numbers”
Like many of our neighbors, we’ve gone paperless. One of the first things that you have to do to establish yourself in France is to open a bank account. Shortly after that your mailbox will contain notices, sometimes several days in a row, from your new bank to welcome you, to confirm the details that you’ve provided, to inform you of the appropriate government regulations, to let you know that a fee will soon be charged to your account and then another after it has been taken. In other words, you are kept very well informed, including a notice on how to receive all of that information as emails. Luckily that option also exists for the various utility companies, grocery stores, and pretty much any other place that we shop. Of course that means that all of those tempting catalogs no longer arrive at our house but when you have a determined shopper around, nothing stands in his way. Continue reading “The kitchen’s in the living room”
Although we bought our house here in Carcassonne a few months ago, I haven’t felt as if we really live there…until today. One of the requirements for getting a visa for our first year in France was to have an address, so we rented a fully-furnished house. It’s really comfortable and truly came with everything we needed to live, down to the knives, forks, and spoons, and the all-important Internet. The only problem is that once we venture outside of our 2-foot thick (60 cm.) walls, there is no wi-fi, so when we go over to work on the house I feel a bit out of touch…until today. Continue reading “Now we live there”
Having a washing machine delivered to our house was a big event in more ways than one. There was one in place when we bought the house but its continued grinding, squeaking noises were a clear indication that we’d have to replace it sooner than later. Whenever we’ve had to buy an appliance here, Bill has done a thorough job of investigating our best options both online and in bricks-and-mortar stores. Once he settled on a specific machine, it was no surprise to me that our local, in-town appliance store that we lovingly think of as Western Auto® ended up being the best place to get it. Continue reading “Coming clean”
No, not what you think; this is a G-rated blog. It’s all about paint, maybe almost a hundred year’s worth. Although our house was built in 1925, from what we can tell, most things like doors, windows, electricity, and plumbing have all been replaced and that’s a good thing. I remember as a child crawling around the attic of my grandmother’s house that was built about the same time as our new place and being fascinated by the knob and tube electrical wiring, a process that Thomas Edison had patented only a few years earlier in 1892. There is one interior door and its frame, however, that appear to be original and we set out to discover what was under all that paint. Continue reading “Stripping”
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