Tuesday morning Pierre and I drove home from a(n extremely strenuous) pilates class with two contraband pains aux raisin wrapped in a crinkled boulangerie bag. The rest of the morning, we reckoned, we’d occupy ourselves in early festive bliss, nibbling brioches and sipping cafés-au-lait while writing Christmas cards. Maybe we’d even put on some cheery, seasonal tunes.
Pulling up to Bellevue, we dropped the “It’s a Wonderful Life” film script. We couldn’t even enter our own driveway. A van was illegally parked on the busy road, smack in front of our gate.
We soon discovered that more than one vehicle stopped our show. Both the small courtyard behind our entry gate and our off-road parking area were miniature circuses. They were chock-a-block with further cars and vans belonging to the local workforce.
Anitou and Jessica, our cleaners, directed traffic. Someone unearthed Olivier, the brawny electrician and owner of the most intrusive van.
Meanwhile 70-year-old Jean and his nameless sidekick, les menuisiers, stooped at Bellevue’s front door, tacking a weather strip around its frame. Their work flung Bellevue’s massive wooden door agape – letting into the chilly morning air all the precious warmth we’d managed to eek out of the home’s grudging heating system.
The warm air flooded out, too, from Pierre and my festive morning plan of sugar and spice and everything Christmas-y and nice.
“Now that we’re the only ones giving work away,” Pierre said as we crept into the drive, “we have everyone here. I mean, we have a traffic jam in front of our house.”
It was true. Some of this circus-like phenomenon at Bellevue relates to the ever-deteriorating real economy (as I described in Monsieur 90%, my blog dated 13 November). And some of it, we are finding out, relates to the ever-fractious relations in the home maintenance trades.
Whatever the cause, the sudden availability of workers is a ripe opportunity to sort out some of Bellevue’s endless ills and – so we’ve discovered in the process – to become re-educated about life in the south of France.
Septuagenarian Jean and his baggy chinos stood up as we stepped out of the car. Blue eyes twinkling, he was delighted to show off his weather stripping invention, arms flapping in typical enthusiasm.
Before the economic meltdown, we’d been unable to entice Jean back to Bellevue for a good year and a half. Our odds-and-ends jobs weren’t nearly lucrative enough. These days, having complained to Pierre and me several times that he no longer has enough work, Jean has become something of a fixture around Bellevue. We’re actually delighted to see “the Little Man,” as he is affectionately called in the area for his charming but errant ways. (Jean keeps a scooter in his garage, for example, just in case the cops repeat their same injustice of relieving him of his driving license after a teeny glass of lunchtime wine.)
In fact, for the last few weeks Jean has swung by Bellevue every other day. He and his gangly, bearded colleague have repaired and re-repaired four doors (always flinging them wide to allow maximum heat escape). They’ve mended broken locks, cracking varnish and gaping doorframes. They’ve put up laundry room shelves. They’ve built storage for outdoor lounge cushions. They’ve even fixed a bed.
We’re doing our part for the French economy.
During these visits, Pierre and I have been rewarded with French economic news (namely, which worksites have given up the ghost). We’ve gained a new appreciation of French banking relations (from a client who lost his EUR 8,000 credit line). And we’ve become privy to some gossip (as the 70-year-old Little Man is only too pleased to boast of his new, young squeeze).
Late Tuesday morning, after weather stripping the last of the Bellevue’s leaking doors, Jean offered to build shelves in the simple wine cellar. This time Pierre put a plug on his creativity and paid Jean and his associate a nice Christmas bonus.
Les menuisiers grinned. They took turns shaking both Pierre’s and my right hands and headed – I’m guessing with fair certainty – straight for a slap-up meal. It was, of course, lunchtime, and recession or not, no one messes with that hour and three-quarters in the south of France.
We’ll be looking for Jean on his scooter in the new year.
The precious heat that Jean and his mate let out of Bellevue’s front door Tuesday morning is exactly, in a circuitous fashion, what brought Olivier, the illegally parked electrician, back to us.
Just like all grand projects, ours began with a small problem. (Wasn’t World War I prompted by a single assassination? Ditto the Rwandan genocide?) And so one particularly chilly Saturday morning in November – what’s more, don’t all small problems crop up at the least convenient times? – Pierre and I discovered we had no hot water.
Heat-related problems at Bellevue were hardly a surprise. The heating system had been acting up since we’d switched it on in early November. Put simply, there seemed to be no heat in the bedrooms or the small, round pigeonnier at the top of the house. We purchased a space heater to make my pigeonnier workspace fit for human existence. Soon afterward we phoned le chauffagiste.
Mr Martin, our extraordinarily punctual and efficient heat and air-con man, had made several November visits to Bellevue. All was well, he’d explained one chilly, Friday afternoon, half-moon eyeglasses perched low and professor-like on his nose. It was only a pressure problem, he was sure, although the manometer was broken so I guess he wasn’t that sure. Mr Martin added water to the heating circuit. All we needed was to wait for the system to respond.
The next morning was that chilly, hot-waterless Saturday. Mr Martin’s promised heat hadn’t kicked in appreciably. In addition to having no hot water, we soon had a deluge of dirty water in Bellevue’s main entrance. Then we had a puddle in the boiler room.
Mr Martin conveniently MIA, we found Mr Marc. He was recommended to us by Bernard, our estate agent. More importantly, Mr Marc was available. A chubby plumber who was new to Bellevue, Mr Marc fixed her leaks. Then, despite gray shadows beneath his eyes, he sniffed around and made some rather startling observations:
· Despite the fact that we’d completed a bones-up overhaul of Bellevue just three years ago, her 85-year-old pipes had never been properly flushed out. Mr Marc could do that.
· The heat to the bedrooms had been disconnected from the control system. No wonder, he explained, it had been no use fiddling with thermostats. He could fix that, too.
· None of the manometers or purgers worked correctly. Mr Marc replaced them, bumped up the water pressure in the heating system to the recommended level, and promptly created a new leak in the pigeonnier. His work order lengthened.
· There was, in fact, no proper return ventilation built into the master bedroom. We were sucking air out of the dusty attic. (Barring invasive surgery, I think we will continue to do so.)
· The circuit that brings heat into Bellevue’s two most far-flung rooms – the library and the blue guest room – was constructed out of flexible pipe and 90-degree bends. I’m no plumber, but even I can picture that higher water pressure is required just to keep that system moving. Ditto the subordinate loop that delivers heat and a/c to the whole of the ground floor. Sturdy new cabling, that’s what we needed. Mr. Marc could fix that, too.
· As we were on a roll, Pierre showed Mr Marc a secondary temperature gauge in the master bedroom that didn’t seem to function properly. Mr Marc promptly unearthed a whole new piece of Bellevue’s heating system. Not only had the main circuit in the bedroom been disconnected – up until Mr Marc’s recent assistance – but this new subordinate unit was completely disconnected from the main one. More work for the lucky plombier-chauffagiste.
By taking Bellevue under his wing, Mr Marc had, in fact, wholly obliterated the word “recession” from his vocabulary.
“I don’t know who to believe anymore,” Pierre said after Mr Marc departed from a recent visit. Both he and Mr Martin seemed such knowledgeable and credible characters.
I reminded Pierre of Vivian, the general contractor on our prior home project, six years ago in Denver. As with Bellevue, we lived far away during the big construction activity. But on the day we moved our trunks into that Denver home, Vivian surprised us. Not only had she left a posy of white flowers. She’d created an enormous, meticulously labeled, three-ring binder that housed all appliance instruction manuals; many of the house’s hard-wired details, such as the sprinkler’s watering zones; and a list of key contractors and their phone numbers.
I longed for a thick binder entitled “Bellevue.”
In the meantime a mistral blew in. Outdoor temperatures plummeted, and indoor ones followed suit. (Yes, this IS the south of France, but homes around here aren’t climatically bulletproof like they are in Edmonton.) Pierre ran out to purchase a second space heater, this one to make his own office inhabitable.
The heat slippage reminded Pierre about the floor heating we’d installed at Bellevue during her major overhaul three years ago. Marvellous idea that it had been, we hadn’t the foggiest where the “on” button was. Or the “off” button for that matter. The marble floor in the living room had been ablaze for a couple weeks, creating Bellevue’s only truly warm room. There, and in the cramped toilet off the entryway, where floor heat somehow flows year-round. Elsewhere Bellevue’s marble and stone floors remained icier than her air.
Jean, who was tinkering with a lock when the query arose, suggested we ring Bellevue’s original electrician, Michel. Through Guy the gardener – as that’s how things work in this area – we found Michel.
Actually we found out about Michel. It seems that Bellevue’s formerly responsive chief electrician wasn’t so responsive anymore. But it was Olivier who installed Bellevue’s floor heating, the gardener said. And Olivier was happily available.
My enduring memory of this Top Gun-built electrician was the moment he hung Bellevue’s four-foot-diameter, wrought iron chandelier. Dangling this behemoth within the center of a three-story, cylindrical stairwell, over an unforgiving floor of marble, Olivier fixed himself to an upper floor railing and to a few colleagues while twisting the fixture into the ceiling. That was when I had to leave the scene.
The electrician was too happy to return to Bellevue. It turns out that the unresponsive Michel had become unresponsive on pay dates, too, and so Olivier set up his own shop. He swung by Bellevue that very afternoon to look at the floor heating. While he was here, we made more startling discoveries:
· Most of the circuit breakers for Bellevue’s floor heating were actually switched off. The system was, in other words, completely disconnected. Olivier bypassed Bellevue’s control panel, et voilà, heat!
· And happy days, entire rooms within Bellevue were fitted with floor heating without our knowledge (or at least without our recollection). It was hardly a bad thing that Olivier remembered wiring the bathroom floors in the master suite and Laurelle’s room. Had the control panel told these circuits to heat, the floors would’ve remained cool. The units had never been connected.
· The temperature controls associated with the floor heating, Olivier explained, are embedded within the heating panel that no one can figure out (hopefully bar Mr Martin, who built it). Some floors sizzle; others simply take the chill off bare feet. But at least now they sort of work.
· So – as Olivier was here – Pierre mentioned that Bellevue’s garden lights again were failing to illuminate. (Good thing, as I was close to forgetting we even had garden lights.) Olivier isolated a short circuit, et voilà, light! But get this: The circuit that causes these regular shorts is the lighting around the pool. The electrical boxes aren’t . . . waterproof. (Duh?) As soon as there’s water in the area of those boxes – think rain, sprinklers and a whole, fricking pond of pool water – pop go the lights.
· Oh, and could Olivier have a look at the front entry lights?
At the end of his second visit to Bellevue in as many days, Olivier handed Pierre and me his business card. He was most available, it turns out, to fix anything that needs fixing around Bellevue.
That evening, the floor heating ablaze, we felt truly warm within Bellevue’s stone walls for the first time in a month. We even turned off some of the floor heat.
Today, all day, six – SIX! – of Mr Marc’s plumbing and heating crew have taken up residence in Bellevue. Meanwhile, various opinions about how to fix the big picture are emerging.
The frontrunner belongs to Bernard, the estate agent who – put one way – got us into this mess. Bernard advises that we call a meeting among all the contractors, both old and new, who are associated with Bellevue’s heating and plumbing systems.
I like my idea better. Let’s get someone to take notes. Someone who will track down circuit breakers and label them appropriately. Someone who will bother with the details of whether subordinate circuits exist, and if they do, where their switches might be. Someone who will outline the riddle of synapses that compose the control panel’s enigmatic brain. Someone who is both intelligent and meticulous. That someone could even ensure client phone calls are answered and employee paychecks are paid.
In short, we need to hire an expert to manage this building project.
We need to hire a woman.
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