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steak and pommes frites while also recovering from once again spending so much money! Next on the agenda were two bricolage trips — not my favourite places, even in France — and the buying started again. Stepladder, paintbrushes, tools, paint, all chosen quite at random (bearing in mind that we had just painted in Australia and bought five samples of white to choose the right tone). Very fortunately, the white turned out to be perfect. Everything was harder because, of course, all the labels were in French. As always, I used a lot of miming to indicate what we needed, including that the walls had to be cleaned before painting. Equipped with the French equivalent of sugar soap, once again my sense of the dramatic seemed to do the trick.
    Two bricolages later and it was the supermarché for essential supplies and an air mattress for the next few nights. The first purchases of bread, ham and cheese — prosaic words that set the tastebuds fluttering when recited in French: pain , jambon and fromage . We finally staggered into our house for our first night at five o’clock. By then it was about thirty-six degrees. Instead of simply relaxing with a beer after the long, exhausting and eventful day, we had to start cleaning — the house has been empty for a long time. Stuart tackled the bathroom and toilet, which I was extremely grateful for. It would be a long, long time before I got used to the French style of toilette . Meanwhile, in the searing heat at the end of a shattering day, I madly vacuumed, sucking up strands of cobwebs.
    It was the time of day when the French had wound down and were wending their way down the lanes to their maisons and apéritifs . Yet the first sign of the morning’s horror was already evident as there seemed to be rather a lot of traffic for the early evening and impending sacred dinner hour.
    After a hasty breakfast in our new home that seemed more like a camping expedition, I launched into all the work. First, I ripped down the ugly wooden fence on the front porch that served no purpose at all, and swept up all the piles of dead winter leaves. The abundance of dead leaves and weeds growing in the cracks in the stone steps leading to the front door all added to the air of neglect. An immediate improvement. Now, we weren’t novices at renovating. We had ten years of renovating and a few other houses under our belt, and were actually very pleased with our organisation and preparation. We had all the tools and bricolage purchases on hand to get underway on the very first day. That seemed quite impressive in itself to achieve at home, let alone in a foreign country.
    We decide to start with the bedroom, so we could have a restful space to collapse in every night and shut the door literally on the dust and mess and reality of renovating. Keeping in mind that we simply didn’t have the luxury of much time at all, in fact a mere three weeks, we decide to take a short cut. After all, we had painted over wallpaper in our terrace house in Newtown and it was a huge success. No-one could even tell there was wallpaper under the paint. This was not the case with French wallpaper, however. As soon as we painted it, the paper started to bubble under the paint in huge, unsightly blobs. We were, however, fully committed at this stage and somehow hoped that as it dried it would improve. This did not happen. Neither did we have any wallpaper stripper, so we had to continue and more than doubled our work as, after the paint was on, we had to strip it all off by hand. Meanwhile, the trucks thundered past incessantly …
    We kept working furiously in the heat, mindful that our friends Brigitte and Erick were soon to arrive. Yet again, thanks to the internet, we had made arrangements with them to buy us a bed and deliver it to us once we arrived. We just couldn’t stop; we were so determined to get the bedroom painted and move on as rapidly as possible to the rest of the house.