Waiting for the estimate

If you look at the hard, cold numbers, it should be reassuring. We can build for about the price of constrution on a square meter basis, but I am riding the roller coaster, I'm on pins and needles, I am exhilarated, I am anxious. In short, I am not finding that particularly reassuring.

It's small. What can it cost? 

A lot. 

It was hard to go to sleep hyperventilating quietly on my side of the bed. I managed, though.

It's all relative, isn't it? Actually, maybe not. There is a logic in there that can't be so easily defeated. I want to say that if you have the money, this is simply not a problem. You book a table at your favorite restaurant and enjoy your aged malt scotch before, and after, dinner, returning home to tuck into bed with a satisfied soul. But, if you had that money, what would you be doing here, owning this wreck that you have watched tank on your very beautiful property, when someone has the time to care for it. Its ruin is now about complete. The builder looked up at the ceiling yesterday and pronounced that one more winter, one good wind, and that roof is coming down. I think he is exaggerating just a little bit. It's bad, but collapse is maybe a few more good soaks and a solid blow a couple seasons away. Or, I am overly optimistic about the mess.

"D'un autre côté," he mused, "ça fait moins de travail en dépose."

It falls on its own, and there's less demo to do.

There is always the bright side of things. Moins de travail equals an uptick, however subtle, in savings, but don't get ahead of yourself, because there is always the highly doubtful foundation, and you can't know about that until you get at the work.

That is a contingency. Typically, add 15% to the estimate and bank on spending it in a case like this.

That foundation occurs along this wall, which evokes something from industrial Newark or Rouen, not the charming villages of the Ile-de France. Can anyone, anybody at all explain to me how in God's name you build anything like this? For any purpose? I swear I am going to catalogue every blasphemy of construction before it is dismantled, and carted away; another fortune, unless I get a jump on it and start taking it, trailer load by trailer load to the dump. I have done just about as crazy stuff before. My husband is convinced that if something is built, and it has withstood at least three decades, that it must fundamentally be alright. We can keep that back wall, certainly, he says. What I want to know is why clients always understood what husbands don't. The only possible explanation is that clients go to architects and pay them, and so they respect what they are told. If my husband doesn't have to pay his wife, the architect, then he does not have to. She is wrong according to his comfort levels, or right according to the same.




A quick round-up of the structure should be enough, except, that would be to anyone who builds things. This is the wall. It is built in brick and 10 cm concrete block. It is cracked all the way through at 3 locations. This probably has to do with the insufficiency of 10 cm of concrete block and the roots of the tree I cut down on the neighbor's property, with his sanction and help. Of course he should have done it or had it done, since it was an issue for our building, but now, when we will need access from his property to carry out the work, we are much more likely to have his cooperation. The stump is not dead, it is massively complex, and I have to keep trying to kill it. Until I succeed, it will continue to disturb the structure.

I have never built anything out of 10 cm (4") concrete block. Just typing that, I cannot believe that I am. 20 cm of reinforced (vertically and horizontally) concrete block is the minimum. But, it's not carrying a lot of weight, I hear. It doesn't work that way. It is also subject to forces, carries its own weight, and supports the loads on the roof, plus the dead weight of that roof. But, it has stood up all this time, comes the response. That doesn't mean it's going to continue to. See the cracks. It is continuing to, the argument goes on. Yes, it is, but you do not build a proper, new roof on it. Nobody in their professional capacity and right mind would ever do that, and it's not because someone else did sometime before that they do. This place was built by God only knows who, and on the fly and the cheap.

I was not helped by some guy, who came here for something, and who said, when I showed him the wall on the other side of the garage part that is literally made of stacked bricks only, with some sort of grey stuff covering it on the inside. That sort of trowel-on stuff actually thickens the wall at the door and window framed to handle their depth.

I kid you not.

That guy said, "Oh, that can work." I wanted to strangle him. We didn't hire him for whatever job he was there for, so, why would we listen?

My husband looked at me and said, "See? That can work," and nodded at the guy with authority.

I judged better than to comment. There is no winning some arguements. The builder will have to sit him down and lay it out. There is another argument, and it goes that building is faster when you get rid of the old and build from scratch, foundations not counting. Faster equals less labor equals less costly. Concrete block is not expensive, and working around problems, finding solutions, reinforcing with pillars where needed, and so forth costs time and money. But, why replace concrete blocks with new ones that cost whatever they cost? We just went over that.

Never mind. I just keep plodding along the path I have to trod, knowing that he will follow.

For now, I wait for the estimate. We talked over the structural issues, and how to build it. A new slab will sit on the old one, and bring the level of the ground floor, and the mezzanine and roof with it, 25 cm, not 10 cm, as I had planned. He wants to bring it out an additional 20 cm into the garden side. These two things will have consequences for the ridge height and the roof pitches, which is fine, except that there is this existing window. We'll figure it out.

He is also pricing the same treatment for the building exactly as it is so we can compare the cost and decide if we go forward with the bigger project. It has two tremendous advantages. First, it connects the two structures, which permits us to count the three new rooms created with the existing rooms. That is a major factor in the appraisal of a home's value. Second, it could be adapted for us to live in when we are very old, wheelchairs excepted. It's too small. Beyond that, there is the aesthetic value: it creates interesting spaces and some of the good sort of drama.

That said, either would be a huge improvement in aesthetics over this.

The gutter decoration is cute, though.

...

Straight lines through managed chaos

I love these pieces of paper. If my house were to burn down, and I had to save one thing (pets and humans not counting), it might be these sheets of notes and sketches, of calculations and measurements and bits of cream trace covered with sketches, cut from the roll with the edge of my ruler. It used to be a scale, but nobody uses those anymore. Not even me. I suppose they would be second, after the photos of my son growing up. Beyond the obvious sentimenal reasons, he keeps sending me text messages asking for photos of him aged 5 to 8 for work. They like attaching the people who work for them to who they were young. One was for each person's coat hook in a long line of them in the hallway. Like kindergarten. 

I can't even begin to name every reason I think this is just plain brilliant, except that it comes down to the very straight line between who we are when we are very young and who we are grown-up. We ask kids, "What do you want to do when you grow up?", but all we have to do is look at what they do and talk about the most, and not argue when they answer and say, for example, that they want to be, say, a fashion designer, or an architect. I'll grant that I'll warn anyone about doing the latter for a million very good reasons, the first being that if they think it's glamorous and that they will be famous and have Rizzoli calling to prepare the coffee table edition featuring their work, and be able to have a Porsche and a house they design for themselves, when a car payment and an apartment might be a bit of a stretch already, they are sadly mistaken. Do it if you are driven, if you are passionate, and if you cannot imagine doing anything else, no matter what, no matter the cost to you. 

I don't think anyone goes into fashion with such pretentions, and they are much nicer people, I'm sure. 

It's a reminder to remember that child and keep him near. I use the male because my only child is cis-male, and he is even more cherished to me than I and the little cis-girl in me are. To let him be and make sure he has enough crayons and blocks. 

Actually, I thought he was going to become an architect, when at some crazy precocious age -- like under two -- he sat down at his little desk next to mine and started drawing perfectly straight lines down the sheet of paper with a pencil, all the way across it. They were closely spaced, and he did it easily, methodically. It was actually his OCD tendency that he was expressing. But hey, I was disqualified at the age of four for cheating on the corner grocery store's coloring context. They said no child my age could possibly color so perfectly within the lines, complete with color coordination and shading. They were mistaken and a great injustice was committed, but I felt rather fluffed up by that, until I encountered modern art and felt -- conventional and lacking in exuberance. 

Maybe that's why I love these pieces of paper. They are like showing the inside of my brain. The mess of the process that produces the other thing I love, the result, the neat print-outs of carefully coordinated drawings, with excellence of line weight. 

It's like when you look at something, and you see immediately that it's not right, even though it took an unspeakable number of hours to create. My mind does an automatic calculation of the additional hours it will take to fix. It's tempting to cheat, except that it's wrong. Wrong now is disastrous later. It's like when I set out to make a carnival mask for my 5 week-old son his first Halloween and started cutting, hoping that he'd be able to see out of it, and breathe. The proportions mattered, if I didn't want him screaming. He sat in his little seat on my desk at work, where he came with me, and I put it over his tiny face, the face that I had spent 5 weeks gazing at, and it was perfect. Proof that there is a connection between the eyes and the brain that goes straight to the hand. It matters what you look at because it will inform your brain. 

And we're back to childhood again, and what the child, the little person is looking at and does, and that it matters. 

When my son was not quite two, I took him to Rotterdam and to Paris. We took a train from Brussels to Rotterdam, and he sat on my lap and looked at the countryside sliding past the train. The houses and the barns, the cows, and he pointed, and said, "Buildings different here." His English was good, but not quite fluent. 

"Yes!" I told him, delighted with his observation, the fact that he was looking, and seeing, and that he was mentally comparing it to what he knew. Also that he was not falling over from jet-lag. 

In Paris, he made me take photos of all the equestrian statues and scultures. Outside the Grand Palais, he pointed up towards the sky, and told me to take a picture. I didn't even bother to question him. Of course there was a horse sculture up there. I scrutinized the freeze at about that level, and there it was. 

A year later, I wanted to see Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in "Before Sunrise". Being an architect, and an unemployed one (one of the most common sorts of architects), on top of being a single mother, a babysitter was a luxury we didn't know. I didn't to drive up I95 to take him to my parents' house. He was little. If I went to a matinee, he'd nap through it, right? No. He watched the movie, and his little hand went up and pointed to the gigantic image of beautiful 19th century palaces in Vienna.

"Paris!" he announced to the entire darkened movie theater. 

I stopped breathing. Not only did he remember the name of the city, but the buildings did look just exactly like the Grand and Petit Palais on either side of avenue Winston Churchill. 

More reason to worry that he was heading to a future in my profession. Imagine my relief 14 years later, when he decided to go to law school. That lasted not quite a full year before he tried something called "applied foreign langauges". I mean, do you do anything with languages other than apply them? That lasted almost two years before scary psychological symptoms were triggered by any mention of the future. When you have to go lie down and take deep breaths just thinking about your future, you're maybe not on the right track. 

So, how do these parents who kind of program their kids do it, exactly? Having been the kind of kid who colored inside the lines in shaded tones of Crayola, who dutifully did all her work, granted, with a naughty independent streak that exasperated my kindergarten teacher, who told me we learn to read after we learn to tie our shoes (wrong thing to say to me), and who did not appreciate my delight at sending hundreds of little pieces of colored construction paper into the air with a gleeful laugh, when she was mentally praising what she had been taking for an totally unacticipated effort to help clean up, I knew what that gets you, and what it does not. At least in my case, all my self-direction usually went along with my teachers' expectations. Not so in my son's case, but I didn't want him growing up to please people and harboring romantic expectations. I certrainly didn't want him lying in the dark, using deep breathing to cope. 

"Stop. You have to do what you love. Choose. Fashion photography or fashion design. Pick one and do what you love."

"Fashion design." 

I breathed a sigh of relief. Short-lived, for and, so began another messy process, the inside of the brain spilling all over the place, the indomptable self resolutely refusing to accept mediocrity and others' exigencies, when they do not match one's own, to arrive at what looks like a tidy, straight line to the result. The job. The job. That first one that matters so much and makes you in other minds what you are in your own. That's why resumes exist. Padding and lying are inadmissable. Tidying up, however, inside the lines is a very good idea. I breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction, and I looked back over the signs that pointed to this future. They were there in abundance.

I realized that fashion isn't a slave maker or something dreamt up to inflict shameon those who have a knack for getting it wrong, or being a little too short, or shapely. It's not only what you see in the pages of Vogue. It's design. It requires as much of the wearer as it does of the designer. It takes courage, and creativity. It's the twin sibling of architecture, involving an identical process to arrive at a product that shares the same tension between art and functionality, both requiring significant means to produce, and to acquire. He borrowed and read my architecture books alongside BOF and profiles on fashion designers, and he quit fashion school when it insisted he betray purity of line and architecture of clothing, or be considered lazy for not complicating things. While I sewed my own clothes, that was not his thing, which is fine. I don't, after all, build my own buildings. 

When I finaly get through this renovation, I will tidy up all those boxes and folders of photos and sketches, calucations and notes, and maybe make the perfect scrapbook story of who we are, past, present, future. 

...

Busta plans now, huh huh, gotta have it

Sometimes you have to relativiser, after a good long "Noooooooooooooooooo."

I don't cry anymore. Like ever. A beloved pet or human would have to die before I cry again. Over plans? No way. That's one thing that moving to France taught me, the fine art of relativiser. The French have everything in perspective, except when they are indulging in massive histrionics. It's one or the other really. Some aren't above manipulation of others, while the art of the manipulation of the self is raised to heights all of us should wish to attain, for others' comfort, along with that of tying the perfect scarf knot. The nec plus ultra being the sassy small scarf, tied around the neck and framed by a sensational blouse collar. OMG. I ache to be able to pull off that look.

Anyway, I have parfaitement relativisé the multiple (it turns out) things I messed up and/or assumed were just fine in my excitement to wrap my plans up, and I did not give up. No way am I giving up. What do they say? Where there's a will, there's a way? Yes, there is. And like the gym walls instructed me in elementary school, When the going gets tough, the tough get stronger. I am the tough. Who knew? I certainly didn't feel that way back then, but I guess I was pretty badass. That's what Birdy said when she looked at my 6th grade class photo the other day. I saw angry and depressed, but badass is so much better. I am no whiny bitch.

I sharpened my determination and got badass.

So, how come? It's complicated, but, in short, first I discovered that I had attributed about 12.5 centimeters in width to an already very narrow building. This is catastrophic, but it was also a fact. Deal with it.

Thank God I went out and checked one more time, just to be absolutely certain because this is a Golden Rule of construction, never to be messed with, ever: never carry wishful thinking into bids and construction. You have to know your plans are as close to absolutely and divinely right as is humanly possible, and you have anticipated every last issue, or you are to pay and pay in cash money. All of the consequences of those missing 12.5 centimeters cascaded through my head, like those numbers on old adding machines that turn and turn until one by one they fall into the result.

That result was that the other end of the building, which was absolutely and very definitely 336.5 cm wide, is not, outside to outside face of concrete block.

The worst of these consequences would be on the stair wall location, making even the Japanese stair for tiny houses unrealistic, short a brilliant and complicated solution (cash money).

The other was headroom under the sloping roof at the mezzanine level.

And, the problem with the Japanese stair and the wall behind it was further complicated by the location of the heat pump unit (Awesome. Hitachi, high temperature) and all the very beautifully wrought copper pipe connections to the existing underground radiator pipes for the house. I can hear them breaking out in their best Busta Rhymes, Don't touch me now. The guys who work with him are in awe of his work. Orfèvrerie they called it. We paid cash money for those. Not touching them now. Unh hunh. Not now. Huh huh, huh-huh.

So, check it out, I think I found a solution now 'cause it's my duty now. It's some real shit, now.

Hunh huh. Huh huh, huh-huh.

I sat down and I thought, and I sketched, and I came up with alternatives, and I balled them up, and I drew some more, and I thought, and I said oh shit! Hey hey hey let's go, and I won't ever stop. I'm trying to keep up with the pace because I GOTTA HAVE IT. Oh shit!

O-M-G.

Here we go. Violence.
Steady on the left.
Hey y'all, calm down.
Steady on the right.
Hey y'all, calm down.

I am pumped. I got this 'cause I gotta have this.

So, I am back at the drawing board, and I'm gonna make this work now.

....

Waiting is hard

Tell us about it, they say, and hurry up with the carrot, already. The. Carrot. Now.

I know. I know all about carrots. I can see a truckload of them on the other side of contracts and construction, and it also terrifies me because for some reason that totally escapes me, I feel the worst after an accomplishment. I could never run for President. Travel all over the country, compulsively shaking every hand I can find completely genuinely, and trying to schedule time for campaign induced bulimia to rid myself of all the fair food, but not because of that. No, because if I lost, I’d fall apart, sinking into a depression of immeasurable depths and end my days in level 1335 of Pet Rescue. If I won, I might, too. Someone asked Pete Buttigieg how he managed emotionally after losing his bid for Indiana State Treasurer. He had a great answer, but I can’t remember it. 

I am going to venture a guess. An idea that suggests itself as I type (another reason to write a blog), the mistake is investing oneself too much in the process. That sounds the opposite of Zen. More like anti-Zen. But, no, it’s not that you neglect the process. You pay attention to it and you do it, faithfully and rigorously, talking yourself down from every thing that starts a cold sweat and makes you want to reach for the Atarax, but you think bigger than the process all the way through it so that it doesn’t become your reason to live. 

It can be like a cancer of the soul, the thing that animates you to lift a hand, to grasp a mouse, to double right click and type, to get up, to eat, to sleep and to toilet, and — nothing else. The process that is supposed to help you takes over the ordering of every neuron in your brain, redirecting them from previously passionately held pursuits and towards its own ends and no other. 

How ironic that it was my doctor husband who correctly diagnosed me. 

“It’s a funny thing about you. When you get doing something, you do it 100%, to the exclusion of everything else.”

“No. No, I don’t. That’s not true.”

Yes, it is. Yes, it absolutely is. Getting the laundry and grocery shopping done do not count. Don’t even bother. 

But, I insist. I need really badly to be right about that, or project being right. Why? Because — I need to be right? That’s it? That’s all it is? Shit. I thought it was untrue! 

I thought I was better than that. More valorous. 

Face it. A year ago you vowed to get this done, and everything else disappeared simultaneously from your life. You thanked your lucky stars that the man who runs your boarding facility is an angel for the horses, and recounted the anecdote about the vets saying that when there is a case of colic there, they know it’s very serious and prepare to handle the emergency. 25 horses and one colic in the 5 years we have been there. That was an elderly horse with other issues. His time had come. That anecdote was your justification. Monsieur is your insurance policy. 

And the garden? Ok, credit where it’s due. You killed ourself out there. You even gave your right elbow to the effort, but what was behind it in large part? The work on the house. Things that had to be done, trees that had to be felled, cut up and trailered to the dump to let the work move forward. you mowed the lawn, but that is like doing the laundry. 

The weeding and the pruning?

Shame is a powerful motivating force. 

And wait. Shit. Isn’t it right there at the bottom of this blog page? What Camus said? 

“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

Why does my heart feel so empty in the waiting days? The days when a packet of work is done, and celebration would make more sense than the fog and the fatigue of some sort of exhaustion blanketing me? 

Yesterday, I struggled beyond it and drew the plans to make the floor area and lot surface coverage calculations that would tell me whether we will need a building permit or “only” a declaration of work at the mairie. The magic number, as I understand it from our mayor, is a total not in excess of 160 m2 of habitable floor area because of our PLU, or plan local d’urbanisme. 

I drew the polylines around the areas to calculate, and noted the numbers to add and to subtract. The total came to 160 m2. I should have been delirious. Punched the air like I do after vanquishing an especially difficult level of Pet Rescue. I just smiled and felt satisfaction. I knew this was the right solution. It just works. 

And today, thinking, Finally, today, TODAY, I will feel sharp and on point, I felt the let-down. 

What’s left is to keep on moving. Keep on. This time, I am not waiting in uncertainty. I know the contractor I prefer is coming next Wednesday. I have plans that only need dimensions and notes to take to the mairie to confirm that we’re good. I am a little worried about the roof overhang projecting over the property line. I don’t think our neighbor will object, if it can work that way, à l’amiable. There is also the little matter of the cladding doing the same... but surely, 3 cm or so can’t be a project stopper, can it? 

I can fix the overhang problem, if it is one, with a change in the proportions of the elevations. Not that I really want to. It makes the whole thing taller. 

The difference between the animals and me is their only expectation is immediate. Carrot. Now. It requires no effort beyond a contortion of the neck (not actually necessary at all, but they seem to think they need to come down to the height of my head on the other side of the bars). Their disappointment can be forgotten easily in a distraction, a neighbor, their hay, a nap. 

For me, it is otherwise. Disappointments have to be transformed into new ideas and more work, a continuation of the struggle that not only makes me happy, but fucking exhausts me. 

Manco, on the other hand...

....

All before the coffee

I was greeted this morning by a tremendous ruckus in the garden. Wings flapped and raucous voices squawked at each other. Fia, who I was letting out to do pipi down in the bottom garden, took off like a shot. I heard wings beat harder and looked in the direction of the noise, somewhere down by the (completely empty!!! Argh!!) pool, and not far from the tulip and birch trees, in time to see a massive feathered body with long, long wings rise nearly vertically into the air and settle on a high branch of the birch. A pheasant. 

I stood stock still and thought about the wonder of a pheasant choosing to visit our garden. 

It is behind walls, along a cultivated field and trees by the Seine. The local hunters release birds, like pheasants, grouse and partridges into these fields to hunt. I have become more familiar with these birds from my long rides with Fibs along the fields and bosquets near where I board him with a grain farmer. Their specialty is taking fright as easily as my Thoroughbred, and suddenly flapping up a storm in the  wheat, the barley or the cornstalks just by his feet, where they go unseen until they lift up in a burst of flapping wings and scare the life out of him. 

It’s always fun.

And, now, here, in my garden, on our enclosed property, a pheasant had just nearly done the same to me. Fia ran about, the usual aviary residents were taking off in all directions, including a second pheasant, also rising nearly vertically to make his escape over the garden wall. I looked back at the one perched in our tree and noted a large nest just above the pheasant, where the turtle doves have been busy without my noticing them. Another sign that I have been neglecting everything that usually occupies me. 

Yesterday, I had a clear sign of that neglect when I opened my box of grooming brushes. It was a mess in the box. I knew the “booboo” cream has leaked all over the toothbrush I use for — I forget what now (see???), but the hair from the end of his tail that I had trimmed and bound with a rubber band was all picked apart. 

I did not do that. I absolutely definitely did not do that. I picked off a bit and threw it into the wet hay at our feet, noting it was kind of less clean and had to have rained hard there. I absent-mindedly opened the little compartment near the tail hair, and there was a nest. It was unmistakably a nest, beautifully rounded, and made of the rest of the tail hair, bits of chewed off plastic (the same color as the surgical gloves in their box I also keep in that box, but I didn’t verify), some white fluff from one of the greys and a little hay.

I felt like shit.

I had been absent long enough for some mammal to locate my grooming box, manage to get into it (how?!?!) and determine that it was the perfect place to nest. As if the damp and pitiful state of the curry glove, the sheepskin glove and the brushes weren’t enough. 

See? I brought it home to clean. 

I looked back at the pheasant and realized that I needed a photo. I ran to the house, Fia in pursuit -- we were going to DO something! No --, grabbed my iPhone, and returned. The branch was empty. 

On my way back inside to return to feeling a bit depressed in the let-down from my months of work on the house plans (waiting is the worst), I stopped to take more photos that I don’t need of a couple bright orange-pinkish red Christopher Marley blooms that had opened, the verbena in the angel hair grass, a bee in the lacey, daisy-like flowers that bloom in the autumn like the lilies in the the fish pond, where I disturbed a frog where he had been sitting in the yellowing reeds and grasses, hearing his plop into the water, and I thought about how smart these pheasants were, to find a place where they could be safe from my neighbors with rifles and a license to kill. I have no problem with that, really. They eat what they shoot, and there is much worse in the world. 

But, when I miss a photo, it bothers me. I needed to find the pheasants. They don’t travel, to my knowledge, based on my intimate, but still pretty limited, observations, very far. Also, I can deduce that in releasing birds, for which you have paid good money, the hunters have a reasonable expectation of finding them nearby when they go out with their rifles. 

I opened the gate, neatly avoided a dog poo (someone lets their dog crap right in front of that gate, and it’s very annoying), and saw the chestnut horse in the pasture look up at me, surprised by my emergence. 

“Hi,” I called out, raising my arm in greeting, as if he couldn't hear me and need help understanding that I was addressing him, “It’s me.”

He returned my gaze. Friendly, but not very impressed with me and — there was a slight, very rapid — nervous even? — movement in the grass between us, not far from where I stood. Something was trying to hide. It was a roundish thing, deep chestnut. The pheasant’s head? I trained my phone on it, and BOOM!!! An explosion of feathers and wings and he flew off over the field. I hit the button that is not a button as fast as I could, hoping for one decent photo.

They really are such beautiful birds. I am not even sure they have a reputation as such. Kind of like how I think people think of turkeys. Food. 

Turning back to the gate with my photo of a pheasant in flight over a field of canola flowers, the petite maison caught my eye. 

God, it’s really, really narrow. How can something SO petite be worth the investment of rebuilding?

Those are the forbidden thoughts. It exists. It was useful. It will be rebuilt. 

By the way, I remembered how to ride, and for all his doing nothing, he held himself up pretty well. I hated myself even more when I saw him, with a noticeably reduced top line. He cut his turns on the right reign and needed help, but he was born that way. I’ll do what I can.

I don't know which is worse, the heat pump unit or the embarrassing overgrowth. I can camouflage the heat pump. The stuff never stops growing.  

....

The process

Estmates compared for contracts

That the colored folders are closed and stacked neatly is a very good thing. Today, anyway. Some days, they were stacked and waiting, making me nervous. If folders could talk, they kept telling me to hurry up.

"I'm doing my best."

Are you? Are you really? 

"Yes, honestly, I can honestly say that I am," and it was true. I was doing my best. I was actually pretty happy with myself. I was doing the one thing I knew would save me from their doubts and mine, not to mention my husband's. Quite a crowd, really.  I was using process. The process we use when we accept a client. Wait, who am I kidding? When fall to our knees, grateful to have a client. Becoming my own client was about the worst thing I have ever had to face. I can compare it, I think, to being a surgeon alone on a desert island with gangrene setting into one's lower leg, and a decent sized knife in your hut nearby. You know it's going to hurt, and you know that nobody else is going to do this for you.

But there was so much! And, before, I always worked for the best firms with the best contractors and suppliers at their disposal. That meant that I had learned the process well, and because everyone was quite happy with me, that meant that I really did use the process remarkably well. Now, it was like my first days living in France outside of a Paris apartment, when my needs got a little more difficult to fulfill, and just knowing what store sold what and where to find fairly basic items was a challenge I'd have rather died than admit. No, no, I'm fine, I know just where to find a charger for my American computer... oh, I only have to switch it to EU current?

Oh. 

Now, it was the big leagues. We weren't talking chargers and house paint, things I can find in my sleep these days. No, I had to find contractors, non, entrepreneurs, capable of telling me if I really needed to underpin the foundations, and feel capable of believing them. I couldn't call my engineers. Even if I found any, that was budget that I had to protect like Gollum on his pile of gold. Preciousssssssss.

Years before, when we had a plumbing crisis and water started shooting out of the outside wall by the garden hose spigot, we ended up with the plumber's and our insurance experts (mon oeil) here for an expertise. It was anything but, on our end.

His whatever you call these people, appraisers, told me that he had a degree in engineering and had started this as an end of career move, and our insurance company's appraiser was the guy you call to say the carpet hadn't burned at all, when it was charred and melted, with soot licking up the walls, everything saturated with water from the fire department's visit. He pointed out where the limestone cliff behind the houses across the street could fail at any moment, falling on them, with imagineable consequences to our own, and the micro cracks here and there that indicated that the planet is a living organism. He didn't seem very worried.

A few days later, we received the judgement. It was absed on a final bill the plumber was able to pull out of his pocket, while I had searched for days for ours. I knew it was somewhere because I don't throw bills like that away. I was incredulous: he had brazenly added in ALL CAPS a statement that HE KNEW THAT OUR RAIN WATER SYSTEM WAS NOT CONNECTED TO THE CITY SEWER BECAUSE HE WAS WAITING FOR US TO GET BACK TO HIM WITH THE MAYOR'S APPROVAL, HENCE HE WAS IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER RESPONSIBLE.

I looked up at him from the paper he was holding out for all of us to read. He was lying, and still he stared right back at me. I was breathless. What if I had had my copy of the original bill? Did we, a client of 15 years, did decency mean so little to him??? I am sure I saw a smile play on those lips I'd smack off his face if I ever saw him again.

Of course, he didn't say it that way. That was what it meant. What he had added to the file before he printed out a brand new final bill was that the client was to inform them when they had the mairie's approval to connect to the public drainage system. I think I might have given him the idea. It's possible that I mentioned to his wife that I needed a copy of the bill.

The conclusion of our insurance company, bien evidemment, was that there was no fault on the part of the plumber. Oh, and our home insurance was revoked. The house presented to great a risk of falling down. Do the work, and we'll talk about it again.

I hated our plumber with a white hot hate. I hated the expert from our insurance company. I had a lot of words for him. I fell into a depression I was sure would last as long as I lived. Every time I looked at the house, I thought, "You are worth nothing, and yet we have to spend a king's ransom to save you just to ever be able to sell."

I felt so sorry for us all.

But, that was not going to solve the problem. You can only refuse to address a problem for so long before finally coming to the conclusion that you have only wasted time. That was in 2013.

Wait. That was about when I stopped writing here. Wow. I didn't realize. See? Blogging is worthwhile! You figure out why you stopped blogging.

If I already wasn't young in 2013, by October 2018 I was a full 5 years older, and my husband was extremely close to his last years prior to retirement. This is not the optimal moment in ones' lives to take on the total renovation of ones' house. If it wasn't, then waiting another year even was a terrible idea. I'd had enough of those. I cannot tell you how difficult it was. I didn't even know what you call half the trades we needed in French, at least not how they are called in things like the contemporary version of the Yellow Pages, although I used those, too. I had so much to learn. It was like I knew nothing, but I had to keep reminding myself that I knew enough to know what I needed to find, even if I didn't know if it existed. It had to, right? People build stuff here. Differently, granted, and I'd have to face that, too.

The whole thing was like what I imagine swimming the English Channel to be. You start out, feeling rather excited and confident, and after swimming beautifully for a long time, you look under your arm and realize you still see the shore behind you. There is water all around you, deep water, and waves, and there is no sign of any land, at all, anywhere in front of you. This actually isn't much fun.

"You're not seriously going to give up, are you? You can't. You know that, right?"

Maybe. Who cares if I never swim the Channel?

You, though, you are going to have to face having to sell your house one day, and if our expert was right, it might even fall down before then. Failure is not an option.

There was also the little matter of the tax credits and even the rebates from the electrical company for some of the energy efficiency work we needed to do. That was motivational. The government changes these all the time. We'd already missed the one for the windows (it took me a long time to get over that). And, how long coudl I continue to tell people that we couldn't put them up because water was literally dripping in the guest room every time it rains? The roof of the petite maison had already failed from water. That, we kept saying, was a project for later. No, it was time. Every sign was pointing in that direction.

The house had to be documented and drawn, all of its puzzles resolved, alternatives considered and drawn, drawings coordinated, and then contractors found to bid on the work. Everything has to be sequenced, in order of priority and work. First, confirmation that the house was or was not going to fall down. Because that's kind of elemental. No sense fiixing the roof leaks if the walls are going to bring the roof down! It's easy! The trick was to get enough people, with enough experience in that area of construction to come and give their opinion. Guess what? I found quite a few, and not one of them was the slightest bit worried. I was able to call off the contractor that actually does underpinning, and breathed a huge sigh of relief, and stuck aother pin in the effigies of the plumber and the expert. Really, this was HUGE. I could move onto the roof and get the window replacement rolling.

A dozen roofers later, I had those who did not care to bid (very hurtful), and a good 7 or 8 bids ranging in price from the equivalent of two round trip flights to Dubai to a year of tuition at Harvard, diving roughly in half between those who felt a whole new roof was in order and those who felt that repairs would see us through a good long time. I was even nearly totally taken advantage of! I played along. N'importe quoi. I felt like we should report them as thieves. My husband was inclined to think, "Hey, more power to them. Bet it works often enough to make it worthwhile. Suckers!" I often feel like I will never truly know my husband.

Having started with a house inspection, I knew that we had the beginnings of insects burrowing into our nearly two century old roof beams. Several roofers having tried to convince me that the condensation having wetted the slats that hold the roof tiles in place, they were RUINED and HAD TO BE REPLACED (translation: you need a new roof), I decided to do some more internet searching to find corroboration of the opinion of the two I liked best, who seemed honest and experienced, even though one was young; he had learned from his father. I stumbled across like the one person in France who is an expert, an actual expert, and not an expert, in wood. Yes, he would come and prepare an estimate, and once he got here he said that, yes, we did have insects in our roof structure, but the slats were just fine. YES. He got the contract for the wood treatment, and one of those other two guys got the one for the roof repairs. It was such a pleasure to write to the others and say, "While I would really like to pay you a fortune for a new roof that would be lovely, I think we'll be passing. Thanks!"

It only took some four months to get the roofer here, but I can say that they did excellent work, efficiently and cleaned up after themselves. On the downside, and there is only one, I could have lived without the foreman narrowing his eyes and saying that we really could use a new roof one of these days. The wood expert was a little more timely, but it all got done, and the bonus was that the attic also got emptied and cleaned in preparation for their work. It was hell. You don't want to know what several decades of spiders can do. I'll just say that much.

During one of those dump runs to get rid of old dust-covered crap we never should have put up there in the first place (Listen folks, pro tip! If it is not seasonally useful, do not put it up in the attic. You don't need it. Marie Kondo is right.), my cell phone rang. It was one of the window people. I had completely forgotten him. He was waiting at the house. No problem, he'd wait for me to get back. OMG. Just OMG. Who takes a shower and washes their hair before climbing up into the attic to wallow around in cobwebs and exposed fiberglass insulation and dirt? And then there was the trail of filth, all the way from the top of the stairs to the door. I said, "Great!" and took a deep breath.

Incredibly, I also have a good dozen estimates for the window replacement, and down to the final three contenders all this time later, his is one of them. In fact, I know that I should award him the contract because I can get exactly what I wanted, with the best thermal coefficient of the three, and it was easy. I only hesitate because one is the windows I always wanted to use because I love their site and the projects featured that use them, but were they ever hard to find. I actually stumbled across them taking one final sweep of my laptop search engine. I had even called the manufacturer, and they couldn't get me in touch with anyone in a position to sell me their windows! That is how much business they all have right now. Even the ones making excellent product in France, like they are. I'm sorry, but I just cannot bring myself to install the Polish knock-offs here. That would be painful, despite all the money we might save. I have my principles, along with the process.

Anyway, I have been tempted to award him the contract for his sheer decency and respectful attitude in the face of my presentation that first meeting, everything else being pretty good. Here's another thing: they are like all the same price, when you get the detailed info (I do not hesitate to harrass them) and compare it, which brings me back to my neatly stacked closed folders.

That is what I did yesterday. I know this is long. Please bear with me. I have already not said so much that you might really have found entertaining. I sat down and compared the estimates for the windows, and the estimates from the three contractors for the renovation and the addition that I advised us not to do, in the end. It's kind of great, actually, because you see what it would have cost, and what it might have netted you in increased value on the house, and you get to feel like you're saving a fortune not building it! A fortune you never spent, nor had to. If you had, it would have been because you had it to throw away, or because you were actually going to get it all back in resale value. Don't burst my bubble! I am feeling virtous and proud of my hard work!

To step back a bit, the idea was to draw up the plans for an idea I'd had, get the estimates, and while waiting for those, have some real estate agents who are likely to sell to Parisians looking for a weekend home, in addition to those looking for a primary residence, and see where the chips fell. I'd already totally fucked up with the choice of the guys who did the exterior renovation in 2008 and 2009. I was not going to repeat that mistake. Never again will I betray the process.

That I felt relief when it turned out we wouldn't get as much back as I felt was necessary and so we wouldn't build it spoke volumes. I realized I had never actually been enthusiastically committed to my idea. My husband went along with it. He has been amazing, actually. I have resolutely told him nothing more than he absolutely needed to know, and he has actually respected that approach. No news means I am working, and I will let you know when there is enough information gathered to make a presentation and take a decision. My bother said that sounded unhealthy. It probably was, but it would pretty certainly have been a lot worse any other way. I am a grown-up. I can manage my feelings and my stress. Sort of well enough.

Anyway, the point was that one of the two agents said something that I rejected out of hand, and like any really good idea, it hung in there and refused to be ignored. I just had to think differently. Wasn't that why I had asked them to come here in the first place? Here she was telling me exactly what I needed to hear to turn the whole thing on its head and end up happy as a clam. If you're going to spend money, spend it in a way that makes you happy. Spend what you need to spend and make it make you happy.

That was in August. September is our vacation, which was pretty much going to be ruined this year by several things, including the house, estimates, the need to draw plans, my sister-in-law needing a break from her mother, moving her against her will into yga new residence for October 1, and my brother-in-law getting married again. I had a deadline in October in order to get the maximum zero interest loan for energy saving work. Pressure. Nonetheless, it was too awful to imagine working on this with my husband wandering around the house, so I got us out of the house. I'd just have to double-down on our return and enjoy long walks on the Brittany coast. It would be good for me.

You know what? It was.

In the week after MIL moved, I got my new plans drawn, and I got the dawdling estimates in. The water-logged and mildewed petite maison that everyone had waved off as a later project was on center stage. Where the new kitchen with master bath and dressig above was to have been, would become place to park next to the existing kitchen door. That was the agent's idea. My husband was shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

"No," I said, "Listen. She's right." Incredibly, our friends backed her, and me, up, including one who recently sold his real estate agency.

"But, you'll see cars in the garden."

"We won't because we don't want to, but someone in the future might very well want to. I can make it work."

That meant no need to park even a motorcycle or figure out how to get a compact car into the "garage" at the end of the petite maison in with a shoehorn, and a friend's comment from some 17 years ago floated to the surface in my brain right about the same time my husband said the same thing, "It would be good to be able to connect the petite maison to the house." Trust me, I had thought about that ever since. It's not something that can be done without some major work, and a stair and toilet are in the way.

"Yes, but it's lower than the house, and the stair and the toilet are in the way."

"We could put the stair down into it on the other side of the landing." I stared at him. "Do you remember that woman's house in Follainville? You know, the one who was president of the association before you? Do you remeber that they had a corridor that had stairs in it, between different levels like that?"

Vaguely, but that didn't matter. He had just solved the problem. He had gone from being a worrier and a panicker to a participant. I can't tell you how big that is. I drew the plans up, and after a week, I left them on my closed laptop.

"You finished the plans?" he asked one evening. I detected a very slight tone of nonchalence.

"Yes, basically. Do you want to see them?"

"I have looked at them, and --," he launched into his questions. I wanted to laugh. I answered them.

"I am actually excited for this," I finished. "It could be like our weekend house, if we wanted to get away," I added, laughing. That idea had been amusing me.

"We could live in it when we are very old," he said.

And, so, after nearly dying a million deaths from stress and worry, and never telling him the worst until it became an anecdote that made us laugh, yesterday I received confirmation that our rebate is being processed by the electrical company, I think I know who is getting the window contract, and my calculations showed me that the company I want to build for us, like a general contractor, thank the Lord, a rare enough bird here, is not that much more than the guy who can't seem to get me all the estimates beyond the work he does, and the electrician is his SON. Does not auger well, even if the roofer recommended him. I simply do not want to have to chase after anyone. That is worth a few thousand euros.

We are 5 years older than we were, and we are heading toward retirement. I want to enjoy life, after years of headaches and heartaches, and therapy and thinking. I want to know what life feels like when your house is not your biggest problem, taking up all the space.

We'll probably need a building permit. It will cost us money. But, it makes sense. After a year, I know where we are going, and I know why we didn't go any of the other places. I don't know if I have found the best contractor, but I am sure, also having visited one of their jobs, that I have found a good enough one.

Feet, don't fail me now.

Oh, and a year after the insurance appraisers met the plumber and me here at the house, I found our original bill. There was, of course, nothing written in ALL CAPS on it. Our insurance company said it was too late. Désolé.

You can get away with murder, and ripping people off for roofs they don't need for some 15,000 euros more than the competition, using manipulative tactics. C'est la vie.
....

Five years

Esquisse for the "petite maison"

Five years. Five years is a very long time, in dog years and in blogs. Two years is already long. Two years since I last posted. Once. Once in five years. It has been a long five years, and, in some respects, it has been a good five years. They group in various ways: the year I lost the weight I'd always wanted to lose, and the five years I have maintained that weight; the year I got strong; the year I learned definitively, and forever, how to keep my horse, and any horse, from bolting on me; the year my mother spent in a nursing home, and died; the year of working on the house plans, and of practically not seeing my horse. I can look forward to new headings for periods of years, the first one being the year we did the renovations. That one is coming, after 17 years. 

There are many reasons I got quiet. There are few to begin again. More importantly, why did I ever start in the first place, and what was I trying to accomplish? The invitation to write my memoirs, the opportunity to practice writing, outside of my journal, and the exercise of learning to make the personal universal, while pacifying my outbursts of temperament and most difficult emotions by remembering that they are exactly that, and not my personal enemies. I enjoyed it; I was embarrassed by it; I learned its futility in earning me a publishing contract, and even a following; I got some practice writing, and I am far from Jane Austen, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf and The Shatner Chatner. That last was really tough to take. 

I didn't even do a very good job of keeping up in my journal. That felt futile and embarrassing, too. I am not here to document my life, but to have one. Everyone wants attention. Even my favorite Instagram accounts reveal themselves as efforts in marketing, with the curation that requires, and I look at my own gallery and realize I don't get it. I might even reject it. It also takes a lot of time to do it that well. Hats off. 

Expectations. I don't want to set myself up to fail in them. I want praise, not constructive criticism (thanks, anyway). I want to be honest, and I just don't have that courage. I want to be a writer, but I just don't have that, well, courage, nor creativity of imagination. I am adequate, which is enough for life, but a bit disappointing for me personally. I would like to wield more power in my pen writing, and my pencil drawing architecture. I have sudden ideas that are pretty good, actually, but they do not come from that incredible place that leads to really great stuff. I don't really want good enough stuff, but if I am doing it for myself, that is what I am going to get. Budget hurts, naturally. I am talking about our renovation now, by the way. 

I didn't return to talk about that, though. A disembodied friend from across the virtual social network universe said she missed it. 

"Do you update your blog? I loved reading it, and your [renovation] adventures and your bike tours and your horse riding and your adventures."

"No. I think it's totally gone. I never even saved any of it," I told her. 

It's true. I had googled my blog a few times over the past few years and found another page in its place, something on writing the perfect college term paper. Sisyphus for term papers. That made sense. It also meant that my domain was gone. That's what happens when you don't update your credit card information. But, she had gotten me curious, motivated me to dig a little deeper, and so I opened Blogger. First, I tried with the app on my iPhone, and I learned that it had gone the way of the dinosaurs, sometime along with Google+. So, I tried from Chrome, and nothing showed up. I Googled -- I am a total Google customer -- the possible reasons for its disappearance and learned that no, Google does not automatically delete inactive blogs; if I had never deleted it, it was still there on Google's servers somewhere. 

By now, I realized I actually cared, a little bit. A little bit more than I expected to because it was important to an audience of one person half a planet away, who I had never met in person, and who writes better than I do, I'd like to add. Her recall of details and her use of them in recounting personal anecdotes that convey emotion blows me away. That probably helped motivate me to search enough to figure out which Google account I needed to sign in to find out that all I had to do was update my credit card information and remove the custom domain name that wasn't mine anymore, and there it was, what you are seeing.

I felt relief. I was attached to it, after all, or some of it anyway. 

I sent her a message, "It's all still there on Blogger." 

She replied, "So glad you found it. Sometimes it is good to remind ourselves how creative we are. Your blog was/will continue to be a place of beauty, looks at life's foibles, and astute observations."

"I have no idea how anyone else could ever find it."

"I got it from that address. It's just as I remember it. I hope that you continue it."

I considered migrating it to WordPress (the obvious and up-to-date thing to do), and decided I didn't have ambition enough for it to bother. I'd also have to know what it should look like, and that energy must be reserved for our house. Maybe later.

So, here is the beginning of a continuation. I have been measuring, drawing and getting estimates for a year now, the day we returned from a failed bike trip (justement) across the Alps to Croatia that turned into a week with our sick cat in an AirBnb in Languedoc-Roussillon, visiting the châteaux Cathares, Carcassone and hiking, and I said, "Now. Start now."

I'll note in passing that not 10 days after we returned, a nun living in the convent less than 500 meters away, across the field with the two donkeys, who visited us at the fence behind our little wood deck, was buried in the mud from the devastating storms that destroyed parts of the villages we crossed every day that week. The place we rented was filled with that mud. Which alone is pretty strong indication that God doesn't save you because you led a lifetime of prayer and good deeds. It might even argue that chance exists and that there is no heavenly rewards system in place, and that you have to just be a decent person here in this life for the sake of yourself and everyone around you. 

So far, that work led to the repairs on the leaking roof because the first thing is to keep water out of the house, and to the replacement of the old oil furnace with an Hitachi high temperature heat pump system because the new generation of heat pumps work in renovation with the old cast-iron radiators. Hallelujah .We were able to get a new heater for the pool as part of that contract. I cannot tell you how happy that made me. Out with the old, the inefficient and the broken! In with the new!

And never do I stop marvelling at how easy this really is -- for anyone with the means for a comfortable, and even a reasonable, budget. I know because I did it for such people. For years. All it took was a phone call to a trusted contractor, and it was done. Not so when every penny feels stolen from your retirement and last years, when you are left to wonder if you will be afford to eat the food that won you that wonderful weight loss, and what feels like a brand new and functional immune system along with it, but a lesser quality of pet food than you presently feed your animals. Not that I haven't been putting us in that situation for the 6 years now, already!!, that I had had Fibs, who I now think of as "poor Fibs", so little do I see him in the run up to final decisions and signing contracts.

I imagine, then, a future in which my chosen contractor comes when promised, stays on-site and works beautifully, my plans rising up off the paper into exactly the volumes and spaces we need to make this house a delight, and a valuable asset (probably the biggest delight). I will have asked every question possible and sought all opinions helpful to deciding how best to spend every centime of any future leisure budget we might have enjoyed, had we not decided not to sell this place 17 years ago.

And, the secret is that I dream that this work will do more than earn me a contract for my memoirs, but the possibility of doing such work, even better work, for others. Of course, my degree being from the US, I cannot practice in my own name here, but I don't let that stop my brain from concocting fantasies in which other architects line up to sign my drawings.

And, right now, I am vibrating, and not from anxiety for once, but from excitement because I think that for the given the contraints, I have found the best solution I can. I can see it. The roof is in folded dark metal ( like zinc, but cheaper). The walls are clad in wood, treated in the Japanese technique of Yakisugi, or burned wood. The floors are concrete, the walls in white drywall with birch or poplar plywood cabinetry separating some spaces and making some objects, like the Japanese stairs. The windows are black-framed aluminum, 30% cheaper than wood, sometimes covered in slats of wood to obscure the view and play with opacity and transparency and create a lantern effect. I imagine the lighting having a photovoltaic control, bringing the lights on in the evening as the sun sets, and bringing up their intensity as the night darkens around guests seated on the terrace around a table covered in candles.

I almost forgot the wood shop and lawn tools storage. I guess we'll just have a woodstove and a few easy chairs in that space. It certainly will encourage me to get out and mow the lawn.

I'll keep you posted, whoever you are.
....