The felling

I just got a call from Walt. He has landed at CDG airport and now has to wait 2½ hours before his train leaves for the Tours TGV station. I'll go pick him up there just before noon. We should be back at home for our chapon au vin lunch by about one p.m. Walt thinks his suitcase might not have made the connection at Washington Dulles airport, but he made it. Just barely, he said.

I was surprised the tree felling actually happened yesterday, because the weather in the morning was horrible. We had strong, gusty winds, wind-driven rain, and just general meteorological misery. Then the clouds blew away at about 12:30 and the sun came out. Shortly thereafter, the landscaping crew showed up. There were several gusty showers over the course of the afternoon, but they just worked through them. I did this post as a slideshow because I can show all 10 pictures I want to show and it will take you only a couple of minutes to view them.

The first images show the sapin bleu (blue spruce?) tree in our back yard as it looked in the summer of 2003, when we came to live here, and again yesterday morning. You can see the tree was moribund. Only looking at old pictures made us realize what a sorry state it was in. We've always thought that it was too close to the house, and too close to the huge green deodar cedar right behind it in my photos.

The guy in the red helmet was amazing. He quickly cut off some lower branches with his little chainsaw and in a minute or two he was, I don't know, maybe 30 or 40 feet off the ground cutting the upper branches. Once there was nothing left standing but the tall, straight trunk, he tied a rope around the top of the it and the other three crew members stood a trunk-length away holding it taut. The red-helmet guy sawed through the trunk at its base and the other men pulled it down so that it landed just where they wanted it to land. It felt almost like an earthquake when it hit the ground.

Then the cleanup began. All the branches were hauled out through the back gate and run through a chipper towed behind a truck. The trunk was cut into thick disks that were thrown into a second truck. By 6 p.m., everything was cleaned up. All the while, I stayed in the house, standing at the windows and taking photos.

A cat and a tree

I have to get busy this morning. There's a six-pound free-range capon in the kitchen that I've thawed over the past 48 hours in the fridge. It's waiting to be cut up and made into a chapon au vin, based on the recipe for coq au vin. I assume you know what a capon (un chapon) is, and the au vin part refers to red wine. The bird gets cooked in red wine with broth, onions, carrots, and herbs. It's what I'm making for our afternoon meal tomorrow, after Walt gets home from New York. We'll have leftovers all weekend.

Meanwhile, a couple of good things happened yesterday. First, I took my camera out on the afternoon walk in the vineyard. The light was good, the temperature was moderate, and, most importantly, it wasn't raining. When Tasha the sheepdog and I headed out through the back yard, there was Bertie the black cat prowling around near the garden shed.

The cat jumped up on a small pile of firewood and watched us leave the yard. Before we left, I took another photo of him, above, for posterity. Bertie has been living here for 10 years now, and he'll be 14 years old in April. Unlike us, he is a Saint-Aignan native. He's basically an outdoor cat, but he spends more and more time in the house with us nowadays. He and Tasha get along famously.

I took a lot of pictures on the walk, including the one above to which I've added labels. That's because around 6 p.m. the phone rang and it was the man who owns and operates the landscaping business we hire to trim the long, tall, wide hedge around our property and tend to the trees on it. He wanted to know if he could come the next day — today — in the afternoon to cut down the big spruce tree near the house that seems to be sickly. You can see it in the photo above, along with other trees in the yard. It really is too close to the house, and it's being crowded out by the cedar and the linden.

A few minutes earlier, when the dog and I came back into the house after the walk, Bertie was waiting for us on the landing at the top of the stairs. He let me take the photo you see here. I think he was hoping for some cat treats.

Gratin de choux de Bruxelles

People in France grow and eat a lot of the cabbage variety called choux de Bruxelles — Brussels  "cabbages" or sprouts. I love them, along with all sorts of cabbages, including kale, collard greens, cauliflower, broccoli, and sauerkraut. I grow some of these varieties in our vegetable garden.

Late yesterday afternoon, I started feeling hungry and wanted to eat something green. Something warm and comforting. I remembered that there was a bag of Brussels sprouts in the freezer. Usually I buy them fresh, but you can always fall back on frozen vegetables when you haven't planned your meals in advance. This made a good supper.

You don't want to cook the sprouts too long, because they start to get a strong flavor rather than a fresh flavor. But you do want the sprouts to be tender. It's a delicate balancing act for a delicate vegetable. I made these into a gratin by cooking some flour and milk into a sauce béchamel. Or sauce à la Béchamel, named after Louis de Béchamel (or Béchameil), a famous gourmet during the time of Louis XIV (17th century).

La béchamel is a white sauce (une sauce blanche) made with milk or cream instead of water or stock. In America, we would make what we call "gravy" the same way, but using broth or meat drippings. For this gratin de choux de Bruxelles, add some grated cheese to the béchamel. Pour some sauce over the cooked sprouts in a baking dish and sprinkle on a little more grated cheese. A grating or pinch of nutmeg in the sauce (don't overdo it) is always good when you are making it with melted cheese.

Jacques Pépin gives this simple recipe for making sauce Béchamel. I think he learned it from his mother.

You can easily make a smaller quantity by using half the butter, flour, and milk.

Adjust the salt and pepper to taste.

6 Tbsp. butter
6 Tbsp. flour
2 U.S. cups milk (475 ml)
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp. pepper

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and mix well with a whisk.
Cook for a few seconds and then pour in the cold milk all at once.
Turn the heat up to high and keep stirring until the sauce thickens
and comes to a strong boil (about 2 minutes).
Remove from heat and stir in salt and pepper.

Saint-Aignan, weather, and memories

It was so windy yesterday that it felt dangerous to walk into or even close to the wooded areas around the vineyard. Over the past five years, a lot of trees have fallen around here. There's no reason to tempt fate. I'm not sure what kinds of wind speeds have been recorded around the Saint-Aignan area, but they haven't been quite as violent as in the U.K. I'd estimate gusts of at least 60 mph, and maybe 75 mph. Down in Corsica, a wind gust of 219 kph was recorded yesterday. That's 130 mph.

I don't have a lot to write about or a lot of photos to post, since I've been mostly housebound for the past few days. My walks with the dog are pretty short, given the dangers presented by howling winds, falling tree, intermittent rainfall, and hordes of hunters (only on Saturdays and Sundays).

I also have had the misfortune of contracting a virus. No, my health is fine — it was a computer virus. It was either a virus or a bad video card driver. I found an undated driver (for the video card I bought in December and then installed in my new computer last week). I also found instructions for the complicated removal from my computer of an infection called the Segurazo virus. I'm not sure which fix was the good one, but whichever it was I'm glad my computer has stopped locking up while idling.

The pictures here are some panoramic shots I took of the château and other buildings in Saint-Aignan on June 21, 2003. We had arrived with our suitcases and our dog Collette exactly two weeks earlier, on June 7, to start cleaning the house we had owned since April. It was a lot of work and the weather was very hot. It was the summer of the great heat wave, la grande canicule, in all of northern France. Our container-load of furniture and other possessions wouldn't arrive until July 10 or so. We camped.

The cleaning up must have been complete. The yard was especially a mess. Wet and warm weather since mid-April that year meant that the grass had grown knee high all around the house. Walt spent many days, first with a weed-eater ("strimmer") and then with a lawn mower, both of which we had to buy immediately upon arrival, while I carried junk out of the house and garage and piled it up in preparation for repeated trips to the dump over on the other side of the Cher River. I scrubbed floors and focused especially on getting the kitchen ready to use.

Anyway, that was nearly 17 years ago. Our house has changed more in that time than has the "skyline" and riverfront of the town of Saint-Aignan (pop. about 3,000). We live about 2 miles from the château and church. The town hasn't grown much either — in fact it has lost population over the past 10 or 12 years, though the area overall has grown. That's not true of our hamlet, however. There are still just nine of us living here in the nine houses that make up the neighborhood. Five of the nine houses are not being lived in by anybody right now. One house is home to four people, a young couple with two small children.

Mon dimanche

Walt is scheduled to come back to Saint-Aignan on Friday. We talked on the phone yesterday morning. The apartment where Walt is staying in Albany NY doesn't have its own wifi connection, so for him communications and blogging are limited. I'm glad he isn't flying today, because we've now had 12 hours of extremely windy weather. The gusty winds aren't supposed to die down much before Thursday, but the worst is over... I think. The roof tiles were clattering during the night, as I could feel the air moving up in the loft.

I went grocery shopping yesterday for the first time in a while. Above is the lunch I made for myself, just to keep my strength up. The steak is the cut of beef called rumsteak (a.k.a. pièce à fondue), which is tender. As a side dish, I made peas and carrots with butter, onions, and bell peppers. I also bought myself a couple of baguettes (loaves of French bread). What I do is cut them up and put them in plastic bags in the freezer so that I don't have to go out in the car every day just to buy bread.

I hated to leave Tasha at home alone yesterday, because she has been showing signs of stress since Walt suddenly departed. I found her hiding under the bed in the guest room on Thursday evening, the day Walt left. She's better now, I think, because she realizes that I'll go out with her for the regular two walks a day, and I'll give her her food at the regular hours. She's used to Walt serving her her lunch. When I got back from shopping, Tasha and Bertie were sitting together and looking out through the sliding glass door in the living room, just waiting to see what was going to happen next.

Toward four p.m., I looked outside to see if it was raining. It was getting to be time for the afternoon sortie. Even though the regular hunting season for hares and game birds is over for the season, there was some kind of organized hunt, une battue ("beating the bushes" to flush out game), going on out in the vineyard. They might have been hunting foxes. There would be no walk out there while that was going on.

When we got back from taking a short walk and settled in for the evening, I started feeling a little bit hungry. I'd bought some croissants when I went shopping in the morning, and I had some ham and cheese in the refrigerator, so I decided to make myself a croissant au jambon. That's a funny name, because it's really more of a croissant au fromage. It's a standard French café treat. If you look carefully, you can just see the ham that goes inside the split-open croissant, along with grated cheese (Comté), before it gets baked in the oven for a few minutes.

Wasted space?

In this house outside Saint-Aignan, which we bought 17 years ago, the main living space is one floor above ground level. The only "living" space downstairs is an entry hall. It's an odd arrangement, because we don't actually use the entry hall as living space. Well, we used to, before we had the attic converted into living space. For several years, I had my desk and computer down there, and for a while we had a single bed there too. It was made up as a day bed or sofa, and two or three times when we had visitors it served as an extra guest bed.

The downstairs entry hall was remarkable mainly for its wallpaper, which looked like what you see in the picture above. That wallpaper covered the walls and ceiling down there and all the way up the stairwell walls, not to mention the landing walls and ceiling — a huge space. The ceiling in the entry hall is 2.1 meters high — I just measured it. That's not quite 7 ft. Between the busy floor tile and the even busier paper on the walls and ceiling, it was pretty oppressive.

The ceilings on the main level of the house are 2.6 meters high — that's 8½ ft. So the ceiling above the staircase is up at about 15 feet. It didn't take us long to decide that we were capable of stripping the paper off the walls and ceiling of the entry hall. We did the job in August 2005, and we painted the room a neutral color. That helped a lot. There's Walt painting the ceiling.

However, we decided it was too dangerous for us to try to perch ourselves on ladders over the staircase to do the job of removing the paper on the stairwell walls and ceiling, as you see in the photo above. It was 2010 before we took that paper down, with help of the crew that was converting the attic space for us. They stripped the paper off the high ceiling and walls above the stairs. We did the rest ourselves.

Here's a close-up of that busy wallpaper. The entry hall itself measures about 4 x 4 meters — about 13 x 13 feet, or nearly 170 ft² — including a fairly big area of wasted space under the staircase. We've never figured out what to put under there, but it was all wallpapered too. You could easily argue that the whole entry hall is wasted space. If the upstairs included a doctor's office, the downstairs space would make a good waiting room.

The result was good. In a house like this one, one problem with taking down wallpaper or even just painting the walls is the big cast-iron radiators in all the rooms. You pretty much have to take them down off the walls to work on the space behind them, and they weigh a ton. Besides, before you take them down you have to hook up a hose to the boiler and completely empty the system, letting the water run into the ditch along the road outside. Otherwise, you flood the whole house. There are about a dozen radiators on the system, and many meters of pipes.

After we sanded and painted the entry hall walls and ceiling, I got my desk and computer set up down there again, right by the front door. We bought and put a new light fixture up on the ceiling. I didn't mind sitting down in the entry hall in summer, because it's the coolest part of the house. In wintertime, though, it was downright cold down there, despite that big radiator. That's what finally motivated us to have the attic converted into living space in 2010. Heat rises, and it's warmer up in the loft than at ground level.

Old houses, quick trips, and new computers

Boy, you all really get worked up in your comments about old French houses that have been given a new look (see yesterday's post and comments). I say: at least they didn't demolish those old houses over in Montrichard to build something new and shiny. And a thought: could it be that those houses' exterior walls, like the walls and interiors of many of France's big old churches, were painted in bright colors when they were built hundreds of years ago? Did anybody look at some the photos of the old half-timbered houses in the city of Troyes? Have you been to Rouen?

On another subject, maybe you are aware of the fact that Walt is in Albany NY, his home town. At least I hope he has now arrived there. He had a family emergency he needed to help with. One of his brothers flew to Albany from Texas, where he lives, and another from South Carolina, where he lives. And Walt flew in from France, with a long layover at O'Hare airport outside Chicago. It's hard to tell from internet weather sites, but I think it might be snowing in Albany right now. If all has gone well, his plane from Chicago should have landed at Albany a few minutes ago. I'm waiting for an e-mail or phone call from him. No news yet...

Meanwhile, I've been going crazy for a week trying to get my new computer set up and running. I made great progress yesterday. The first problem I had to resolve was how to clone the SSD that was my boot drive on the old computer onto a hard disk so that I could put that SSD into the new computer. It would need to have the contents of the new computer's boot disk transferred to it. Trying to do that, I learned that the company I bought the new computer from had prepped its boot disk using an outdated format called MBR instead of the newer, more flexible, faster format called UEFI.

This was my computer space one week ago today, with both the old and the new  computers running.

Running on the MBR-formatted disk, the new computer's operating system wouldn't recognize my external USB hard disks, where I have tons of files (including photos, films, and music) stored. I ended up having to reformat the boot disk and re-install Windows 10. Then I couldn't get a couple of other hard disks, which are external SATA devices and not USB drives, recognized by Windows on the new computer. It was very frustrating, because I really want everything to work at least as well, if not a lot better, than everything worked with the old computer.

Here's a photo I took just a couple of minutes ago. Maybe it doesn't look much different, but it feels different.

The new computer has a faster CPU, which I want to be able to take advantage of. But I need the hard disks to work too. I have spent hours and hours reading different web sites to figure out how to get it all working smoothly. And I had a breakthrough yesterday. Suddenly, by updating the driver for the new computer's SATA hard disk controller — it was almost automatic, but I hadn't thought of doing it — all the hard disks starting whirring happily. And I was happy too. Now I have to figure out what I'm going to do with the old computer, which is still in good working order. I guess I'll donate it to Emmaüs, which is the French equivalent of our American Good Will charity organization.

Montrichard houses

These old houses are across the street from the real estate office where we started our house search in 2002.

I took this photo in Montrichard on December 13 that year.

You wouldn't recognize these houses today. Below is a photo I took on February 27, 2008.

They were being renovated at the time. What do you think?

Random house images and features

The house we bought in 2002 has a name. It's Les Bouleaux ("The Birches"). That might be the name of the plot of land it sits on, or it might be name that the people who had the house built came up with. Other houses in the neighborhood are named Bella Vista, La Grange, and La Ruine. I wonder if giving houses names like these was some kind of affectation, or if it came about before the houses on our road had numbers.

This is what we saw the first time we drove up to the house. That's the real estate agent's Audi parked in front of the gate. He was driving us around from house to house. I think it was the third one we saw that afternoon, and we saw one more after that. You can see the name of the house on the façade just to the left of the kitchen window. I'm sure I've posted this photo before.

Here's the real estate agent standing in the bedroom window and looking out over the back yard. As I think I said, he had told us that he thought we'd like this house, even though it didn't have the three or four bedrooms that we thought we needed so that we could have computer rooms and guest bedrooms too. For several years, I had my desk and computer in the downstairs entry hall, which you can see below.

This staircase is what you see when you enter the house through the front door. It's kind of grand for such a small house. However, it is very solid, very wide, and not too steep. The glass block windows let in a lot of light. We took down the wallpaper (and "ceilingpaper") in 2005, I think,  before I started blogging. I know I have photos of what it looked like back then, but I can't find them right this minute. I don't see them on my blog anywhere.

In the living room, there's this fireplace. That was an attractive feature, even though it was (and still is) in a corner of the living room, which is kind of odd. And as we were to discover the first time we tried to build a fire in it, the chimney didn't have any updraft at all so smoke filled the room. As it turned out, the chimney had been sealed with a piece of slate. In 2006, we had the slate taken off, the chimney lined with a staineless steel tube, and a wood-burning stove put in. We still use the stove and it keeps the house pretty warm

The wooden shutters on the terrace off the living room were (and are still) decorated with the heart-shaped cutouts. All the shutters on the house used to be wooden panels like this (many of them were piled up in the garage and garden shed) but had been taken down and replaced with folding metal shutters — the kind that creak and clang when you open or close them and which are notorious for how easy it is to pinch your fingers as as you manipulate them.

Le jardin et ses arbres

For several days I've been posting about the house we bought in the Saint-Aignan area (Loire Valley, France) in 2002. One of its most attractive features was its yard ("garden" in UK English, I believe). The house sits on half an acre (2,300 m²) of land and is enclosed on three sides by a tall laurel hedge. The land on the north side of ours is wooded. Remember, we had been living for eight years in a house in San Francisco that had a yard that measured about 25 x 30 ft. (8 x 7 meters). We were moving from an urban to a rural environment, and we wanted room for a big vegetable garden. Here's a slide show I made using some photos I took the first time I saw the house and the yard (December 10, 2002).

There's no real front yard here, but there's a large side yard on the north side of the house and a very large back yard on the west side of the house. It was all landscaped, as you can see, but we had to have two trees, a linden and a spruce, cut down as soon as we moved in, because they weren't healthy. Two plum trees blew over in a storm in 2010. Since then we've also lost two apple trees and a pear tree. And we plan to have another big spruce tree cut down this year — it's not healthy and it's too close to the house. We're contemplating whether or not to have some new trees planted, and what kinds. Cherry? We still have two apple trees. Walnut? Time will tell.

Le grenier

Le grenier means "the attic" because traditionally, in old farmhouses, harvested grain, hay, and straw were stored up there, providing some insulation over the living space below. Our grenier most likely never had grain stored in it. After we had it converted into living space, we starting calling it "the loft" — that comes from the expression "hayloft" I guess, and  le loft is used as a term used in France for an attic that has been converted into living space (aménagé).

Part of the aménagement of the attic was putting in a staircase. When we first saw the house in 2002, access to the grenier was via a trap door equipped with a folding, drop-down ladder. It was pretty rickety, so we almost never went up there until the conversion was completed in 2010. Here are a couple of photos of the pre-fabricated staircase we bought and had installed.

By the way, we had an electrician in yesterday afternoon. He couldn't find any reason for the circuit breaker problems we had 24 hours ago. He said only: Il n'y a rien de plus bête que l'électricité... He just told us to let him know if the problem re-occurs and he'll find a fix.

The attic in this house is very spacious. Converting it gave us about 60 m² (650 ft²) of extra living space. Luckily, those horizontal roof beams are high enough above the floor that I don't bump my head on them — I don't have to duck as I walk the length of the room. We use the space as a bedroom, family room, and computer room. We finally had a half-bath (toilet and sink) put in up there last summer.

One funny thing about an attic like this is that there is no moisture or airflow barrier under the roof tiles, which are made of concrete and hang on wooden slats. Air just blew through, especially when the wind was blowing from the west. In February 2010, just weeks before the conversion began, we had hurricane-force winds and a dozen or more tiles were lofted, as it were, off the roof and landed in the front driveway on the east side of the house.

The attic conversion didn't include putting in such a barrier. When we have strong winds, you can still feel air movement in the loft, despite the 20 centimeters (8 inches) of insulation that now lies under the tiles, and the plaster board walls that were put in. As you can see, there was a television antenna up in the attic, but it no longer could receive the signal after the insulation was put in so we got rid of it. We get television via a satellite dish.

There were two little windows up in the attic, one facing east and the other facing north. They were in pretty good shape, so we kept them. We also had two Velux "roof windows" put in, facing west, for afternoon light. We (ourselves) painted the plaster board walls white — white because the paint is less expensive and also provides the impression of more space. Here are some pictures I took in 2010, when the work was complete.

There was a thin layer of glass wool insulation on the attic floor, covered by a rough wooden sub-floor and some big sheets of cardboard. Before the conversion work started, we opened the north window and threw all that cardboard out. We gathered it up and burned it in the back yard. The contractors who did the attic conversion then put down a second sub-floor of rigid particle board and finally laid down knotty pine floorboards that we chose. The floor is a little squeaky, but wooden floors often are. You don't hear it downstairs.

Strange morning

I woke up at about 2:30 a.m. and everything seemed normal.

In other words, the digital clock on my bedside table was on and displaying the time.

I woke up again at 3:30 (it turned out) and the digital clock had gone dark. I got up and found a little battery powered clock that we keep in the WC. With that one, when you push a button in the front of it, it lights up, so I could see what time it was.

My fumbling around with that clock woke Walt up. "We don't have electricity," he said. I told him I knew that. He got up and went down to check the circuit breaker box in the utility room. He couldn't get it to work.

When we bought the house, the black box in this photo seemed to be some kind of master switch. Once or twice it tripped and we thought power was out to the whole neighborhood. It turned out it was just off in our house, and when we pushed a button on the black box it came back on. Who knew why? Not us, that's for sure.

This morning, when Walt pressed the button to raise the solar-powered roll-down shutter in the guest room on the main level of the house, he said he was sure he saw a light on at the neighbor's house across the street. Below is a photo of the new breaker boxes we had installed between 2003 and 2007.

I got up, got dressed, found the key to another neighbor's house, which is standing empty right now. I unlocked and opened the front door, and flipped a light switch. The light came on. So the problem was in our electrics, not the village's.

Without electricity, we have no internet (the modem-router goes out). We have no heat. Well, we can have a wood fire, but trying to get wood brought in and get the fire started in the dark is not easy. We do have cell phones, so we can call for help.

Walt kept messing with the circuit breakers. When he flipped the main breaker switch, the current would flash on for a split second, but the breaker kept tripping when he let go of it.

So he turned off all the individual breakers and then turned the main breaker on again. It held! So he started flipping the other breakers one at a time. When he turned on the third or fourth one, the main breaker switched off again. So he isolated the problem.

Why it's a problem we don't know. That breaker controls an outlet in the entry way that was installed in 2007. The only things plugged into it were a digital clock and a lamp timer. I went and unplugged those and he tried flipping that breaker again. When he switched on the breaker for that outlet, with nothing plugged into it, the main breaker tripped again.

Anyway, except for that outlet, our electricity is back on again. I was going to post about the state of the attic in the house when we bought it in 2002. With photos. I'll do that tomorrow. As for the circuit panel, when we moved into the house it worked with metal fuses. The electrician who replaced it with breakers asked us if we knew how old it was. We said it must have been put in when the house was built in the late 1960s. He said that old panel would already have been considered une antiquité in the 1960s.

February 2003 surprises

In 2002 and then in 2003, I had three occasions to visit the house we ended up buying in France. Walt and I had first seen it on Dec. 10, 2002, and then again on December 12, that time because we liked it and were seriously considering whether we might buy it. The price was very low compared to San Francisco Bay Area house prices. While we were seeing the house on December 12, I took a lot of photos. After the visit was over, the realtor we were working with told us he had asked the people in his office draw up the document that is called un compromis de vente — an offer letter — for us to sign.

I told him we weren't sure we were ready to sign any papers at that point. His reply to that was: you are going back to California in a few days. If you don't sign the paper now, when will you sign it? That was a good point. And then he said: when you are back in California, either send me a check for the down payment, or write me a letter to say you've changed your mind. What did we have to lose?

Back in California, we decided to send the money. It was a lot of cash in one sense, but not enough to radically alter the course of our lives if we changed our minds and forfeited the down payment. Once we had paid it, we thought it through and decided we'd better put our San Francisco house on the market to see what we could get for it, and whether that would be enough to finance the purchase of the Saint-Aignan house while leaving us sufficient funds to live on for a few years.

At that point, we needed to know what furniture we would want to have shipped to France if and when we actually relocated ourselves. So poor me, I needed to travel to France one more time — it's an 11-hour flight, but remember, I was unemployed while Walt was still working — to go inspect the house again and measure the rooms. We needed to figure out if our SF furniture would fit. Pieces that wouldn't fit would need to be sold or given away.

While I was in the Saint-Aignan house, measuring the rooms, I left all the shutters closed. It took too long to open and then close them all. I didn't want to be late for a scheduled appointment with the notaire who was handling the legal aspects of the sale. My measuring done, I pulled the front door open and was surprised to see that it had started snowing. It had been sunny when I arrived less than an hour earlier (see the photo above). So you can see what the yard looked like as a light snow fell. Snow was exciting for us back then because we had been living in the San Francisco Bay area where snow is a very rare occurrence.

By the way, the weather is completely different from that this morning. It's about 55ºF and raining outside this morning. News reports is that fruit trees around the country have started setting flower buds because of the very mild weather we've had so far this winter.

La salle de bains

The bathroom was one of the most attractive features of the house we bought near Saint-Aignan in 2002. This is what it looked like the first time we saw the house, on December 10 that year. As is typical in older French bathrooms, there's a bathtub with a shower hose and head, but there's no enclosure around the tub. This one was actually built in such a way that there was no practical way to close it in. I don't know about you, but I'm not crazy about shower curtains anyway.

On the other side of the bathroom, which is very spacious, was this sink and mirror combination, as well as the fixture called a bidet. One dictionary defines the term bidet this way: Appareil sanitaire comprenant une cuvette en forme de siège sur lequel on s'asseoit à califourchon, et qui sert aux ablutions intimes. That is: "a bathroom fixture with a bowl in the shape of a seat upon which one sits astraddle to perform intimate ablutions." Does that seem clear?

The strangest thing about the bathroom, besides that wallpaper on the door, was this big empty corner. Judging from the lighter-colored rectangle on the floor, I imagine that there was a piece of furniture there at some point, and for a while. For the first two years of our residence here, we just lived with it that way. We took showers in the stall downstairs in the utility room, which was fine when the weather was warm outside. In winter, it wasn't fine because that room is not heated. We took many shivery showers.

Here's another picture of the wallpaper on the door. You can also see it on the walls of the short hallway that leads from the stairs and landing, past the bedroom and WC doors, to the bathroom door. The wallpaper was on the walls and ceiling down in the entry hall, the walls and ceiling of the atrium-like the stair well, and the walls and ceiling of the landing and hallway. It was a little much, but we didn't get all of it taken down until we had the attic converted into living space in 2010. The prospect of actually stripping it all off and painting those walls and ceilings was just too overwhelming. It meant working perched on tall ladders, and was dangerous.

In 2005, we finally had a shower stall put in, making good use of that empty corner. The plumber who was doing work in the house in those days recommended this pre-fabricated, modular shower stall. It was clean. The water was hot and the pressure was good. But the stall was never quite spacious enough. I was continually bumping my elbows on the glass. The seat in the shower was nice though. After 10 or 11 years, the plastic stall started to develop cracks, so we had it replaced with a more spacious tile-and-glass shower stall.

Built-ins in the "den"

The other room in the house that could serve as a bedroom, but was more likely designed to be an office or study, features a big set of built-in cabinets and shelves. We use it as a kind of library, and Walt has his desk and computer in there. The room opens onto the living room, so is not really close to the toilet or bathroom.

We used this room as a guest bedroom from 2003 until 2010. Some of you reading this post may well have slept in there. At first we had a double bed jammed into the room, and later we bought a single bed for it.

Now there's no bed in there at all but there is a cabinet where we keep some dishes and other cooking utensiles. Kitchen stuff seems to be stored in nearly every room in the house. I guess that means the kitchen is too small, or badly set up where storage space is concerned.

We haven't done anything to the built-ins that are in this room — no paint or anything. But we did finally take down another whole mess of wall paper in there. You can see it in these photos. In 2004 painted the walls a lighter color, but a few years ago Walt had the room re-done in brown. We already had the rug you see in the photos, and it works in there, along with the beige armchair. Since the room is used as a study or computer room, we also took the door down.

Our main redecorating work in the house began with this room in 2004. In 2005, we continued by taking down the wall paper in the downstairs entry hall and painting the walls and ceiling white. We also added a shower stall in the bathroom. And we sanded and painted the living room walls and ceiling — that was the biggest job and took us 6 weeks to complete. In 2008 we repainted the kitchen. And then in 2010 we had the loft space (the attic) converted into living space, and we took the rest of the wallpaper off the walls and ceiling on the landing and down the hallway. Somewhere in there, we also re-painted the WC (half-bath) in blue.