French Property Renovation

These photos give an idea of what is involved in picking the walls to remove the old lime based render, moss and vegetation.

It took 3 weeks to burn and remove the tree stump from the chimney. The bottom of the chimney breast was badly fractured so it needed to be re-enforced with cement. Much later this was covered again in a more aesthetically pleasing manner. The chimney breast had also separated from the external wall and required new support.

The chimney looks very different today as you will see later in our story.

This was the corner of the kitchen - very nice: anyone for dinner al fresco? I think those who were held at Queen Victoria's pleasure in Dartmoor had better conditions.

It took two of us a solid week of work of picking the interior walls and making emergency repairs to bring this rude space back into shape. It was necessary to pick the walls so that could reapply new render later on.

After long hours of hard physical work, the stones began to come alive in several parts of the house. The bare structure started to appear in front of our eyes and it was a great encouragement and morale booster to continue with even greater gusto.

Unfortunately there is no picture of this archway beforehand but it was completely **** (you know the word I am searching for).

There was no roof and of course there were no ceilings either. The wood remaining was infected with termites and needed to be professionally treated to save it - some of it had to be replaced with reclaimed oak sleepers, courtesy of the French Railways. The floor was also sprayed and the colony of termites moved home in a great exodus - probably to the neighbour's house - I am not joking if his house has not been treated. They will be his new dinner guests.

Advice lesson number 3 - Always use a professional company to treat a house against termites who will be confident enough to give a 10 year guarantee. Don't underestimate this enemy, termites are common in this area and will destroy all the wood in a property in no time at all. The expert told us the termites are quite content to live in the stone walls until the next lunch of untreated wood arrives.

As you can see in the photo, the top of the walls were covered to try and stop the rain continually entering between the stones and soaking down into the core of the walls. This helped in keeping the walls dry enough to pick efficiently. As winter was upon us, we did not want the weather to further damage to the walls knowing that our new roof would not be in place before the spring.