The Lion, the Witch and the Guest Bedroom with Full Bath.

The door on the left?
It used to be a closet. 
But now when you open it, instead of finding assorted winter coats and snowboots, you end up in a magical land where it is winter all year round because of the terrible Snow Queen.

Well......it would be nice if that were true, because last time I checked, having an imaginary country located  in one's home did NOT involve a month of unholy messes and daily numerous trips to the DIY shop....not to mention actual  painting, tiling, and general hard work.

As you may have gathered from the above, our project is NOT done yet.  Still at least a week to go. 

The stairs have been temporarily put in, making it a lot easier to get in and out.
And  fitting a staircase of any kind into a closet was no mean feat. We had to get special, rather steep ones.

 The room is finally painted and the stratified  flooring ("Celtic Oak") is in.

The light fixtures we chose at Ikea are also up.
There are two, though you can't see the second one in this pic.
Very groovy.

 The bathroom has been taking shape nicely. 
The in-wall suspended toilet turned out really great.

Apparently, they are not very common at all in the USA, as I found out when I was trying to describe the project to my mom.
Here in France it's A Thing.

 We also have the heated towel rack ...which is also totally a must-have in your bastic French bathroom.








Below is the shower.  The glass bricks are to let in light and keep it from feeling too claustrophobic.

I also like the exposed beam.

 This was my brainstorm for the vanity: custom-tiled to match the wall mosaic!! I am SO happy with how it is turning out.

I also ordered a really cool faucet to go with it.....

 This is where it is as of today.... I think the final touches will be done tomorrow and then we will have a brand-new,  fully-functional bathroom!!

Totally Worth Waiting For (AKA Pimp My Garage)

After long silence, it has all built up to this moment:
 STILL MORE HOME RENOVATIONS!!!!
And what is better than that?
 Nothing- duh!

We need more room in our home in order to welcome guests more comfy-cozily (pretty sure that's not a word, but it is so much cuter than just "comfortably"). This in mind, we ("we" in this case mainly  consisting of  Paul the Roumanian Magician)  have attacked a new moumental project:
 making a nice guest room with full bath in the upper story of our cavernous garage.

What used to  be a closet next the the half bath on the landing now leads to a small, empty (for now) stairwell.  The ladder there takes you to a soon-to-be-finished mini guest suit ( NB: not that it is intended only for smaller than average guests.  The "mini" refers to the fact that it is just an average-sized bedroom with a bathroom thrown in.  Non-palatial in nature.)
It is only 3/4 finished at this point, but I figured that a few "before and  partially finished" photos are in order:

 The new area only takes up half of the total upper floor of the garage.  The other half is still desperately needed for storing all of our plenteous junk.
The little cement block you see at the right edge of the picture above  is part of the closet that was later cut to provide a space for the new stairs to come up.

The above photo was taken at almost exactly the same spot as the one at the top. As you can see, the bathroom takes a chunk out of the space. But I think it's worth it. 
 In the left photo, the ladder is in the hole where the stairs will be installed. And I hope that happens soon, as the ladder is a pain.

This is the exterior wall where the window went in.  It is by far the biggest window in the whole house. These old Savoyard homes were built to keep the heat in and that meant tiny baby windows.




Now we have a nice view of our backyard!

Pimp My Livingroom

This post is not about television programs, travel or bubonic plague. It is about my all-time favorite topic: renovating our sweet and rather exasperating old house.
Yes- in May, The New and Improved Romanian Handyman showed up. Actually, we don't call him that. That would be silly.   We refer to him as "DJ Pauly G".  Not to his face- even though the girls mean it in the nicest possible way.  It is just their way of expressing the amount of his awesomeness. The truth is, the man works miracles!  Just look!

 This is the "before " shot. This living room is quite small and has one tiny window.  One!  Only a cave-dwelling troll would have thought to "improve" the place with dark varnished wood ceilings. Sadly, the previous owners were cave-dwelling trolls with a decorating budget.....

Not that our own  "improvements" over the years turned out much better.  The textured wall treatment was my bright idea.  I started hating it the minute I finished putting it all over the walls. Definitely time for a change.....

This is where Paul took down the wall between the living room and the entry hall.  The idea was to make that wasted space part of the living room and give it some much-needed volume....

It was so great to get that horrible wood off the ceiling.  But under it was tons of lathe and plaster.....

As you can see to the right in the photo,  there is
the old opening leading to the main staircase of the house  leading up to the bedrooms. This would be blocked up and the space behind transformed into a closet.....



 Dust ruled our lives for many; many days.  Every surface in the house was covered....

One of the worst things about the hated textured wall plaster was that it was so hellish to remove.  We had to use a wallpaper steamer and putty knives to chip it off little by little. It was truly Satan's Wallpaper


The green being uncovered here is the original wall color from back at the turn of the century.... So, that is an historically accurate revolting shade of green.  Call the Smithsonian!

.












As for the clean-up task-  luckily we had help from R2D2's cousin.  (see below right-hand  corner)  He's never, ever been in a movie and his name is Kevin.  Sucks to be him.

 Anyway, the above may look similar to what we started with...but it is actually COMPLETELY different.  The room is now about a meter longer, the ceiling is NOT a disgusting troll-ceiling and the floor is a lovely oak parquet instead of splintery pine....

Back in Ouagadougou, one thing JP and I spent hours discussing was our house back in France. The main topic was how to enlarge the living space. He was all for knocking out some interior walls. I was more a proponent of adding rooms in the loft of the huge garage.

It was all fun to daydream about, at any rate...

But as the time for the move back to France drew nearer and our family grew older, we began to realise that at least a few of our idle daydreams would have to become a reality if all six of us were to fit comfortably in our moderately-sized, old-fashioned home in the Alps.

The first big project would be to take off the existing sad little hovel serving as a back entry hall:

...and replace it with a good-sized room that could serve as a giant cloakroom and staging area. Something like this:

It would have closets to store all the coats and shoes. Plus, the space would make getting ready to go out in the winter SO much less painful. Having four big kids in the kitchen, struggling in and out of their ski gear is very claustrophobia-inducing, as well as messy.

But getting from the first photo to the second one is not proving to be easy. Right away when I arrived back in France in July of 2008, I began trying to contact people about getting work done on the house. Wheels began to turn, but with glacial slowness.

It's now October 2009- 15 months from the day I started trying to get this project going and it's only this week that the real action finally started up.

On Tuesday, a team of men arrived, tore down the old shack (which is SO not missed) and began digging the foundation.

Looks like fun, eh?

They also worked at the front, preparing to pour new stairs to access the main door of the house:

So, there's plenty of action around here lately and not just outside the house. There have been people constantly in and out of the house. On Wednesday, when my second group of English students left, I was sure to follow them out the door and say loudly "Good English lesson! See you next week for another English lesson!". I was afraid that the guys working outside were starting to suspect that I have a home meth lab and am dealing from my living room.

Or maybe not. Do they even have meth labs in the French Alps?

I digress...

That day there were over twenty people in and out of the house (students, friends, family). I don't know why, but I'd thought that my life would contract when I moved to France. It's far from the case (and I think that's awfully nice). However, the fact that my home seems to be a central traffic point is becoming an issue, as our entrances and exits become increasingly blocked by the work. This morning, for example, the back door was sealed with plastic sheets from the outside and the path from the front door was completely blocked by the backhoe. Mallory was afraid of missing her bus and crawled out a window on the north side of the house.

When I got home this morning (I had to take JP to Geneva), the guys were pouring cement in the pouring rain. I had to squeeze between some drippy shrubs and scramble up a muddy incline to get to a door. But when the cement is all poured, they've promised to build us a little bridge across the wet cement. And that's very good, as I really don't want to be crawling in and out the window all weekend...

What is the absolute BEST thing to do after spending about a month being sick?
Taking on two new home renovation projects is, of course, NOT the right answer.
But I did it anyway.

Last weekend, JP was still in Africa, but I knew that our good pal Cristian the Romanian Handyman was available for the week. So, I picked him up at the Swiss border on Sunday morning and brought him home. After a big lunch, we went to work.

The first project we tackled was the smaller of the two. Our downstairs entrance hall has been looking distinctly shabby, as you can see below:
The wallpaper that my father in law and I put up when JP and I first bought the house was looking pretty bad. And, frankly, I was no longer happy with the whole striped wallpaper and pale peach trim look. It was just not working for me.
So, we pulled it all down. The green paint you see below is the original wall color from back at the turn of the century, when the house was built.
The "1994" was painted there by my FIL. Roger taught me everything I know about hanging wallpaper.

When we got the old paper off, we put on a base coat. Then Mallory and I painted the woodwork. I went with Provençal Green paint that I chose after much anguished deliberation in the paint section of my favorite DIY store.

Although JP and I chose the wallpaper together, we never got around to talking trim. And JP tends to have definite ideas about these things.

I loved the green, but was somewhat afraid that JP would return from Ouaga and the first words out of his mouth upon entering our home would be "Well, THAT'S sure ugly" or something equally uplifting.

But the green turned out great, with a softly old-fashioned feel to it and it looked wonderful with the retro wallpaper.

We took down the raditor and repainted it.

And Cristian put in new light switches. They're a bit too modern looking, but much safer than the old ones.

All this took about a day and a half. By Tuesday morning, we were ready to start on the twins' bedroom.

I knew it was going to be a pretty big job. The room hadn't been touched in decades. When we bought the house back in 94, we kept the same wallpaper. We didn't even repaint the hideous gray woodwork.

And the room only got worse while we were away in Africa. The walls had terrible cracks and one was even crumbing away under the window sill.

This was going to be bad. And we only had five days. CtRH had to leave by Sunday morning and I knew that without his energy and know-how, I could never finish it on my own.

So, we went to work on Tuesday morning, really motivated to get things done. Unfortunately, within five minutes we hit a major roadblock. And little did we know this would be the first of MANY!

To be continued...

I briefly considered posting a cute Valentine's Day -themed picture here. Perhaps one featuring an adorable cat saying something humorous.

But I'm too tired. MUCH too tired. This home renovation stuff is exhausting, especially when it's done in an old house, full of surprises. Bad surprises.

The down stairs hallway went fine and only took about a day and a half. But then we started in on the twins' room, and the fun began.

By "fun", I mean the opposite of fun, as in "sheer hell".

Cristian the Romanian handyman was brilliant, as always. And the kids helped so much. Valentine was especially great, taking charge of much of the painting.

I'll post more details, plus pictures, tomorrow.

But at least now, it's done.
That's right! We finished at about 6pm this evening.
I'd celebrate if I weren't so darn tired...

I mustered the energy to go to the grocery store last night, after I got done at the school. As I wandered the aisles, I reflected on the love-hate relationship with going to the grocery store in France.
No, make that hate-hate relationship. That means I really, really hate it, right?

When we first got to France, I did sort of love it, though. It was so clean and cool there. And so much choice. But it turned out to be too much choice (see this blog post) and so many other things about it drive me crazy these days.
First of all, the gocery carts are all out in the parking lot, chained together and the only way to get one is to slide a one euro piece into a slot. It's SO annoying, especially if, for example, you go for a big shopping expedition because all you have left at home to eat is a half a shrivelled eggplant and a box of corn starch and you find that the one euro coin that you ALWAYS leave in the car just for this purpose is gone, possibly taken by one of your kids to buy gum.

So, you rummage in your wallet and find that you actually have one euro worth of 1, 2 and 5 cent coins. Hoping to trade this huge handful of change in for a one euro coin, you go into the store and find your way to the "customer service" desk, where they do the huge service of telling you that they don't have access to any money, sorry. You'll have to ask one of the cashiers. Yeah. One of those harrassed looking people over there facing lines of customers 15 deep. Right.

If you can't get a cart, of course they do offer free of charge a shopping basket you can use. It is just about big enough to hold a four pack of yogurt and a baguette. It's just the ticket if you are shopping for a single person, hopefully an anorexic one, but is useless when shopping for six normal human beings.

And if that wasn't enough to hate, I heard no less than two songs by The Police and one by The Cure being played over the loudspeakers at the Super U. It was a bad moment for me. Nothing hurts like hearing something that you think is cool being played at the local supermarket."This is what passes as Shopping with Old People music now??!!" When did The Cure fall so low? Supermarket managers in rural France got the bulletin on this and not me?" I silently lamented.

And how about this: There you are, finally in the checkout lane after a long grueling shopping session and you are thirsty. If you are in France, you are flat out of luck. You'll just have to dehydrate, get kidney stones and die alone in terrible pain. You can't find water- not like in the USA where many shops have a nice drinking fountain right near the restrooms.
In France there are fountains, but they are the kind that are large, ornamental, outdoors and marked "non-potable".
And don't think of dragging your sadly desperate self into the restroom for a quick drink out of the sink there. That's marked "non-potable" as well.

Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if they sold cold drinks in the supermarket, but they don't. You know how US stores like to use that space near the cash register for impulse buys like candy and drinks? There's usually a grizzly bear sized cooler filled with small bottles of spring water, water with vitamins, water with extra oxygen and all sorts of other drinks, including my personal favorite: Diet Dr. Pepper, which is probably made up of 700 different kinds of cancer causing substances, but I just don't care.

Well, in France, forget that. No water, no anything.

So, there you are- all parched and annoyed and now it's time to unload your shopping cart. If you were in , say, Ouagadougou, the cashier would check out your items and they would pass down the conveyor belt and into the capable hands of two or three really nice young men who would quickly box everything up for you, carry it all to your car and load it for you. And you could give them a small tip and they would be really pleased because (can you believe this?) lots of people don't tip at all. Cheapskates. Then you drive home quickly and have a nice glass of water. (there's no water available in Ouaga supermarkets either)

In general, under the above system, everybody goes home happy.

In France, though, this is the point where the major stress is just beginning. You unload your cart as fast as you can and the groceries zoom past the cashier and are shoved down the conveyer belt. They pile up at the end, a veritable Mount Everest of groceries. This is when you are supposed to whisk out your handy, ecologically correct shopping bags Wait! Don't tell me you forget your re-usable canvas shopping bags? If so, too bad for you, because there are no free bags at the store.

Bags or no, the cashier keeps pushing stuff at you and you deal with it as fast as you can, but it's never fast enough. She calls out the total and you're not even half done packing everything, but you fumble around for your "carte fidelité" and your carte bleu so you can pay for it all.
You punch in your code and start bagging again as the line behind you grows and grows.In fact, it seems like the entire population of France is in that line, waiting for you to get your show on the road. Babies are wailing, people tap their feet impatiently and yes, that elderly priest is glaring at you.

So you throw all your stuff into bags, trying to keep from putting the bottles of orange juice on top of the tomatoes....You get the general idea by now, probably. Guess I woke up in a rant-y mood this morning.

What else is new around here?Well, it's been snowing like mad since last night, but I guess that's not really anything new. The kids are out right now, all four of them, rolling around in the piles of snow and falling flakes. I'm glad someone is enjoying it. I am just dreading having to dig the car out.
I'll probably manage to avoid going out today, but I'll have to tomorrow, as I have to go pick up Cristie the Romanian Handyman tomorrow at noon. He's coming back to help out with more work around the house. Lots of wallpapering, painting and small repairs remain to be done and Cristie's energy is needed to get us rolling again.
I'll be sure and take pictures of the work for all you HGTV fans out there

Everybody loves a good house renovation story. That's my conclusion, all the comments and blog hits I've been getting about the few photos I posted last time about my own little epic: HGTV Goes to France.

This weekend, I have to admit that not much really got done. Not as much as I'd hope, that's for sure. We had guests all day Saturday. And then that night we were invited to a party down in the village and didn't get away until after one in the morning. The late night and the tasty kir (a mix of white wine and creme de cassis: if a French person offers you some, just say 'yes') both explain why I was completely feeble and ineffective all day Sunday. I had excellent intentions and spent hours down in the dining room, but little actual progress was made.
One interesting thing did turn up, though. The plaster over one of the doors was quite brittle and thin. I chipped away at it and discovered the wood of the wall frame underneath.

I sanded the plaster bits off and had a good look. Two upright pieces of nice old wood embedded in the wall. I think that i'm going to leave them exposed and call them "architectural interest".

I also continued with another project in there: stripping the layers of paint off the built-in cupboard in the corner. The product I bought barely seems to make headway against the layers of thick gray paint that was slathered over the original paint, lurking just below a thin layer of pink.

But when I finally got underneath all the ugly paint, I found a great surprise- the original paint on the cupboard was a bright turquoise color. The bottom of it was painted reddish brown, as were the baseboards. I'd love to strip the whole thing and leave it in the original colors. I guess that's the archaeologist in me. But it would probably be easier (and possibly more esthetic- the two doors in the room are already completely stripped and varnished) to strip it down to the bare wood. I can't quite decide.

After all that, I couldn't figure out what to next, so I decided to wash the dishes. As you can see, I had lots of help.

I thought that today I could show you what I do when I'm not sitting here blogging.
Mainly, I scurry about, doing the endless chores that go with a big house and four kids. Then when I have a free (ha!) moment, I get busy stripping wallpaper, painting and generally getting all HGTV-ish.
I love HGTV. When I'm in the USA, I have it on 24/7: Designers' Challenge, Design on a Dime, Deserving Design, Designed to Sell, Divine Design, Designing Designs for Dyslexic Designers...
Ok, I made up that last one, but ONLY that one. The others are all real shows on this channel that is all about home decorating projects.
But these days, I don't need to watch that stuff on tv. Nope. I have my own, very neglected house to whip into shape.
Just getting it clean was the first challenge. but once that was done, the fun really began.
The first project was to re-decorate Eldest daughter's room. It boasted bright pink wallpaper and a border of ballerinas. She chose it whan she was three years old but she found that, at age fifteen, her tastes had changed somewhat.
So, she did some sketches and made her plans. I wasn't too sure, but it turned out great. It's still not all finished, but the paint and wallpaper are done.

I love the retro wallpaper she chose. It's something that would have been in the house when it was built over 100 years ago. And the plum coloured paint really punches it up and makes the room more fun.

Here's the view out her window. Nice!

Now that her room is done, I am working in the dining room. the old wallpaper is damaged, so it's coming down. Sadly, the walls are very old, fragile plaster and I'm having to do lots of repair work, which is slowing me down. This project, which I thought would take about two weeks total has been dragging on now for three weeks and I'm still only halfway finished...