It's Easter weekend already and my family visitors have been and gone till next week at least when they will be with us again for a night on their way through. We spent a pleasant day which included the obligatory tour of 34 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (with which they were very impressed), lunch at Flunch ( I so want that to be the product of a misoverheard conversation in English- can we meet f'lunch?) and a stroll around the principal central sites of Lille and the old town. French translators please note it is not the Old Lille but the old town or just Old Lille. This was followed by a foray into the biggest Auchan (hypermarket) in France. I swear I could not make out the end walls and the checkout desks went on forever. It could have been a shopper's paradise or hell but I needed to get to the wholesaler in time to collect some mussels and deliver them to Max's father's shop before 1800 so my task was merely to make sure Ian and Tracy bought the provisions they needed and not to get too involved in the purchasing.
How is 34 J-J R? Well, thanks for asking! As you can see from the picture the rather substantial and - for us - unnecessary range of cupboards in the kitchen has been reduced in stature and now natural light from the back of the house floods into the hallway. We have finished removing the indoor stonework and also removed the pretend door in what was the dining room. Now we have very rough and ready walls - or not as where they have been removed, horror of horrors, which will require some kind of plastering or boarding. The red sofas arrived yesterday. Their arrival though was not as satisfying as we might have hoped as we had something of a set back with the estimate for the central heating. We had been waiting about 3 months in total to find out the damage in the expectation of a reasonable outcome and we do need quite a lot of kit given we are on 3 floors yet we only need 12 radiators. Let's say we were gobsmacked to discover the total was more than 34K Euros or about £25K. Removing "unnecessary" cast-iron old-fashioned rads for the ground floor and taking into account various grants and tax credits it would still set us back in the region of £18K.
We had hoped the new system would be in before we were, but as this patently wasn't going to happen and now definitely won't (at least à ce prix), we will delay till late summer giving us a chance to have further estimates and to see what is available in the way of grants and cheap loans etc.
Methinks the expensive perfume of British money must have been hanging in the air a little too headily when that particular estimate was concocted! Ahhh zeese reesh Londonaiiiires zey 'ave a few Euros, non? Zey are used to pay-ying, ow you say, sroo ze nose, n'est-ce pas? Apologies to the vast majority of decent and lovely French people out there!
Otherwise we are moving in by stealth - I am sure Mr Cameron would approve of that description - by taking a few boxes etc every time we go to Lille. I guess we will need to hire a van for a day to take over one large sofa bed and the double-doored fridge-freezer we bought. The good news is that hiring said vehicle is not going to cost any further jambes nor bras.
The quotation is thus:
"You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?" George Bernard Shaw.
Ain't that something??
Allez!! Joyeuses Pâques à tous!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment