Renovating A Property In France

So the walls inside and out had been prepared. It had taken nearly 6 weeks to do it.

Perhaps it was the wrong order of carrying out the work but to make ourselves feel better and because no builders were available to start on the roof or other work, we decided to render the external walls with lime based cement and repair the window openings.

Then we found out that we also needed to add height to the walls to provide enough headroom in the planned bedrooms upstairs. If this piece of professional advice (constraint) had been given earlier, we might have waited before rendering the external walls ... never mind!

The rendering was a painstaking business. A mix of chaux (lime based cement) and red sand was applied to the walls with the flick of the trail and pushed between and over the stones. After a good day, one wall was done and it became just dry enough to be brushed; exposing some of the stones.

The colour came out bright orange (more like tangerine) to begin with and we were in horror. So were our neighbours who thought we were Martians building a home from home. However, within a few weeks the render had started to change into a nice beige-rose colour. A bit different from a yellow sand colour but still sympathetic with the surrounding environment.

And then problems started - the temperature dropped and we continued to render. A big mistake as the render freezes, cracks and much of it falls off. Luckily, we had completed all but one external wall which had to be redone when the better weather conditions arrived.

It was at this point that the roofing company told us it would be necessary to raise the walls by 30cm and that we should pour concrete into hollow bricks and re-enforce the ring of them by inserting a steel bar. The ring or belt would then be covered up later with a stone looking render to add some further character. The belt was necessary in fact not just to add height but to keep all the connecting walls firmly together.

The job of laying the bricks and lifting concrete to fill them by hand and all in one go is not a job for the faint hearted. It was arm wrenching work for us and the builders who did it. Second only in physical duress to laying a new concrete floor.

read on to see how this French property renovation developed.