The half-bath downstairs

This is approximately what our downstairs half-bath looked like until last week. I say "approximately" because I took this particular photo in 2007 — 12 years ago. It's a long narrow room resembling a hallway, with a toilet, a small sink, and a radiator in it. We painted it blue all those years ago and hung pictures on the walls.

It's funny, this morning when I went to take a photo of what the little "loo" looks like right now, I pushed the light switch and nothing happened. Almost in protest, the light bulb in the ceiling fixture has burned out. I guess. Or there's some other problem. I hope it's just a coincidence that it has burned out during the plumbing work. I thought we had put a new LED bulb in there, but maybe it's an old incandescent.

I got this photo using my camera's flash. Since significant plumbing work needed to be done to hook the new upstairs fixture into the drainage system, we decided to have a new toilet installed in here too. It'll be a wall-mounted commode (une toilette suspendue or un WC suspendu) — I think "commode" might be a Southern U.S. term for toilet. We figure it will be easier to clean the floor in the WC if the toilet is wall-hung. The old toilet is 16 years old, and right now it's sittingoutside in our front driveway, below the terrace.

In this photo you can see the frame or bracket on which the porcelain toilet will be mounted. The frame will be boxed in using wall board, and there will be a shelf on top of that. Our first plan would have involved running the drain pipe from upstairs down the back wall in one of the corners of this room and having the whole back wall boxed in to hide the pipes, but then the window would have been in a kind of tunnel.

Finally, at the last minute, we decided it would be better to run the big drain pipe down the wall in the main bathroom, which is just on the other side of a partition from the half-bath. (There is no toilet in the main bathroom. That's a French way of arranging the facilities.)

You can see the drain pipe and the way it comes into the room and hooks into the same drain pipe that connects, or will connect, to the new downstairs fixture and to the sewer mains down below.

Up close in the vineyard

It's 22ºC on the front terrace this morning. The "historical average" low for the morning of June 26 here in Saint-Aignan is 12 degrees — and the historical average high is 23 degrees. So it's nearly as warm at dawn as we would usually expect it to be late in the afternoon.

This is the western wall of the grape-workers' shed out back, bathed in afternoon sun. Workers who came from their homes on foot could store tools here and even spend the night if need be.

I don't think the shed is used any more and I've never seen the shed door open in 16 years of living here. Nobody walks to work in the vineyard any more. Everybody drives.

I'm trying to spare you more toilet pictures. One of the building contractors came over and sanded the walls of the new little room and put a coat of primer on the sheetrock. Now we are getting an idea what the loft is going to look like once the work is finished.

These are some "macro" or close-up shots I took out in the vineyard last week. It was obviously a very sunny day, but I don't think it was a hot as it is now. On, I just looked and Accuweather says the high temperature that day was 24. That was nice.

The grapes were already starting to flower more than a week ago, as you can see in this shot. You can enlarge the images to see more detail by clicking on them or touching and then "unpinching" them.

It'll be my turn to walk the dog out in the vineyard late this afternoon. I think the walk will be brief. Neither I nor the dog could stand to go very far in this heat. Predictions are for a high between 32 and 37 degrees, depending on which weather service you believe.

Reasonable heat and progress

Yesterday's high temperature on our outdoor thermometer was only 30.4ºC — see the temperature conversion table on the right for the ºF equivalent. This morning, the temperature outside is about 21ºC. I got up at 4 a.m. and started opening windows and shutters to let the cool air in. So far, sleeping is comfortable and the house isn't too hot (23.4ºC).

Meanwhile, progress continues on the new "facilities" upstairs in the loft. Detail work remains to be done up there — a shelf on the ledge over the sink and toilet, baseboards all around the inside and outside of the room, a toilet seat, the pocket door, a couple of coats of paint — but the focus is now shifting to the work needed in the downstairs bathroom and throne room. Pipes between the downstairs half-bath and the upstairs half-bath still need to be connected together.

Yesterday the building contractors boxed in the big drain pipe that runs from the new "loo" down through the floor and along a corner of the bathroom. The resulting column will be painted the same color as the walls. We'll be getting a new "wall-hung" toilet in the downstairs petit coin too. Both toilets will drain through the same pipe out to the sewer mains.

I happened upon a nice light fixture for the new W.C. on amazon.fr last week, and I ordered it. After I did, I got worried that at just 600 lumens of éclairage it was going to be too dim. Doesn't it look like something you'd see in the Starship Enterprise?

It came yesterday and the contractors installed it. Walt got up a few minutes ago — it was still pretty dark outside and in the loft — and switched on the new loo light. "It's almost blinding," he said. That means it's fine and bright enough for the space.

Here's that boxed-in pipe in the bathroom downstairs. Not much of it will be visible, because under the white cabinet we have a little brown wood cabinet that we moved out of the way for the duration of the construction project. We'll paint the column to match the walls. And yes, that's a bidet next to the sink. We've kept it because it's a nice French touch in the room.




I was just looking at the MétéoFrance web site, and they appear to have lowered temperature predictions for the rest of the week. They say we might have temps of 34, 35 or 36ºC, instead of 39 or 40 degrees. The other site we follow, MétéoCiel, actually has the highs Wednesday through Friday two or three degrees lower. That's significant, and better.

Memories of the 2003 canicule

The weather we're predicted to have this week reminds me of our arrival in Saint-Aignan in 2003. Sixteen years ago, we flew into Paris from the U.S. on June 2 and spent five days in Rouen in Normandy. On June 7, we drove down to Saint-Aignan in our rented car to start cleaning our new house and yard. The place was a mess, and the grass in the yard was more than knee-high because the previous owner had canceled her gardening service when we became the new owners in late April. Having tall grass to deal with was not something we had thought about. It was really too hot to be doing the work of dealing with thoroughly cleaning the house and at the same time getting the yard under control.

Predicted temperatures in Saint-Aignan for the next two weeks — in ºC above, in ºF below.
Notice that I've added a temperature conversion table in the sidebar on the right.

So that June the weather was already extremely and abnormally hot in northern France. We had had outdoor lunches in Rouen and in Étretat up on the English channel. That's almost unheard of in damp, drizzly Normandy. We were wearing shorts and T-shirts. It was hot in Saint-Aignan too, and was going to get even hotter. We didn't expect that. All through June and July, we suffered from the heat. Remember, we had spent many years living through chilly, gray San Francisco "summers" before moving to France. (Mark Twain famously wrote that the coldest winter he had ever experienced was a month of August in San Francisco!)

Morning low temperatures in ºC recorded in France on Aug. 12, 2003.

Our low temperature this morning is about 19ºC — we would normally expect 12ºC.

This week's weather will be comparable to the weather we had in the first half of August 2003. The hottest day was August 12, with a high in Tours, for example, of 39.8ºC (103.8ºF). The low in Tours that day was 22.6ºC (72.7ºF). The weather station in the town of Romorantin, 20 miles east of us, recorded temperatures above 104ºF for six straight days around that time. Houses had time to heat up to uncomfortable levels, and mornings were much warmer than usual. Walt remembers that he actually suffered from the skin condition called "prickly heat" or "sweat rash" at the time. We had a rental car with no air-conditioning, and of course no AC in the house. On August 8, we bought and took possession of a little Peugeot 206 (we still have it) that did have good AC, so many days saw us put the dog in the car and go for long drives out in the countryside just to escape the unrelenting heat.

Afternoon high temperatures in France on August 12, 2003, during the canicule.

We'll see what today brings. Accuweather predicts 33ºC (91.4ºF).

Canicule means "dog days" — normally, canicules occur in July or August, so this one will be early and temperature records will fall. You can see from the charts I posted above that temperatures are predicted to be extraordinarily high by the end of the week. In August 2003, as many as 20,000 French people, mostly elderly, died from heat exhaustion and dehydration during the great heat wave. I'm now elderly, no matter how much I want to deny that reality, so I have to be careful. Drink lots of water, they say. Limit physical activity. Stay in the shade. And so on. We have a car with AC but still no in-house AC.