New Build - Diary of a French New Build (Iss 189)
One by one, the rooms in our new house were starting to look finished. Walls changed from plasterboard grey to vanilla ice-cream, banana yellow, minty green and lavender blue. They looked really great.
One day, while we were out making one of many trips to the DIY stores in Poitiers, the floor-to-ceiling sliding wardrobe doors appeared. These came ready for painting, which I promptly did to match the walls.
Behind these wardrobe doors, we fitted shelves and hanging rails. There was a wardrobe in each bedroom and another near the front door to hide the 300-litre water-heater and provide storage space. We painted the six internal doors with two coats of creamy-white blanc cassé, giving them a pleasing wood grain texture. Light fittings and curtain poles were chosen, bought and gradually installed.
Wood flooring
As agreed in the detailed spec, all the floors had been laid with tiles except for the bedrooms. We didn’t want to have carpets in those rooms, so we opted to lay some laminated wood flooring ourselves.
Although we’d never attempted this before, we decided our level of DIY competency was high enough to have a go. We chose wide-plank light oak finish and after reading all the advice we could find on the internet, we started on the guest room.
Fortunately, both rooms are rectangular with no awkward shapes to cut and being a new house the walls were pretty straight and square. It was a bit hard on the knees but it all went together well. Of course we didn’t quite have enough to finish the last edge, so had to make another trip to Poitiers to buy one more pack of laminate.
We fitted matching skirting boards all round, laid flooring inside the wardrobes, and finished with aluminium strips in the doorways. We were enormously pleased with our efforts and declared the bedrooms completely finished.
Connecting up
By contrast, we saw very little activity from the building company, considering the completion date, fixed in the contract at 14 February, was approaching fast. We’d given them lists of outstanding tasks and phoned frequently but had to suppress our frustration when calls were not returned and workmen did not appear.
We even called in the company director who came, heard our complaints and took many notes. A few days later the site manager arrived with the electricians and by the end of the day the house was connected to the electrical supply – finally we had power, and heating.
They tidied up some of the ugly pipe work in the shower-room and loo. They also drilled new holes through the outside wall for the water supply pipe, since the conduit laid in the concrete floorslab was kinked and unusable. So now we had water too. This was more like it.
In mid-February, a team of men came and gave the exterior woodwork a coat of dark oak lacquer, which looked very smart with the black ironwork on front door and shutters.
But so far the waste water emptied into a puddle at the back of the house; the pipes had yet to be connected up to the main drains. We’d hoped the village’s new tout à l’égout mains drainage system would be completed by the end of January as planned, but as it turned out it wouldn’t be ready for us to connect into until Easter. To save the expense of having a fosse septique installed for such a short time, we decided to wait.
For that reason the house wasn’t habitable yet, but there was still plenty of work to do. One by one, the outstanding tasks and snags were attended to. The leaks were fixed, the water heater was replaced – someone had switched it on while it was still empty and burned it out – and the plasterers reluctantly returned to clean up and finish off their work.
The interior was now looking great, freshly painted, clean and ready to live in – apart from not having a kitchen that is. The exterior too was complete, at least above floor level. The doorsteps were still a metre above the ground, the house still half-surrounded by a muddy moat of February groundwater, and the topsoil still stood in great mounds waiting for drier weather to be backfilled. The end of our house-building project seemed so close, but we had to be patient a little longer.