Les Caulins
We bought the house in December 2015 with all the furniture and many animals who had made the house their home. We bought an old van, £2000.00 well spent & John spent 3 months moving all our furniture from Heacham to Saint Sernin. Seven trips in total while recovering from a double carpal tunnel operation. Each trip took 5 days, and the drive from our house in the UK was about 18 hours each way. After loading the van, John would drive 5 hours to the tunnel. Then, once in France, a further 6 hours to an overnight stop. A different location every trip, and the final leg was a further 6 hours to our French house. Two days to unload the furniture. New beds, the new bathroom furniture, a thousand cookbooks, 4000 vinyl records, John used to be a DJ, crockery, cooking equipment & clothes. The whole 9 yards. We both drove down for our last trip and moved in April 2016.
No driveway just a grass track
For 15 years it was owned by a French couple, William and Nelly, who lived in Orleans. It was used as a holiday home and they spent 4 weeks a year and the odd weekend here in the Summer. There was neither heating nor a working fire so it was left empty for the remainder of the year. Joel next door used to open the doors and ventilate the house throughout the year to stop it smelling musty.
At the end of April, we removed a huge tree to reveal the well. Damp was affecting the back walls of the two barns, so we removed 20 tonnes of rubble from behind the main house, where the original main house had collapsed. The soil level was restored to its original level, allowing the walls to dry. 10 tonnes of debris and soil were removed from behind the small house, as damp was infiltrating what was going to become our house. The walls began to dry and slowly the black mould started to disappear.
Dangerous large tree. Click on the image for the full picture.
We installed a wood-burning stove in our house and an electrical radiator in the bathroom and the bedroom. The whole property’s electricity was wired to a maximum of 7 amps on a tiny fuseboard in the barn. Therefore, if we had a radiator on and tried to boil the kettle, the electricity tripped, leaving us in the dark. Every hour, off we went in our PJ’s to the barn, in total darkness, torches in hand to flick the trip switch back on. Everything was electric, the oven, the hob, the water heater, the newly installed radiator and the kettle.
The next job was to install Emma’s commercial gas cooker and buy a kettle that we could use on the gas hob. Oh, and buy some gas.
It was cold
Next, we started to repair the shutters and windows. The shutters were in a terrible state. They had been neglected for so long, they were rotten and completely dried out. So much so that when opened, all the wooden tongue and groove strips dropped, one after the other, meaning closing them again was impossible. The windows were in no better state. Much of the glass was missing. The panes of glass were only 2mm thick, meaning your hand could very easily punch through the glass. Some of the panes were concreted in instead of window putty. It took weeks, and thank goodness, the weather was nice and sunny. Hourly, Emma would shout out, “Living the dream”, and the first evening glass of wine could not come quickly enough.
Shutters covered in ivy
Emma’s parents, Andy & June, arrived in May to help. We had a huge storm and realised that the roof had many leaks. Emma’s Father and John spent a couple of very scary days on the roof patching up the holes and replacing the broken tiles.
Terrifying
A new driveway was laid; previously, it was a grass track. The new fosse septic went in at the end of May which meant we could then start inside the house. It also meant that we could flush the toilet and have a shower on the same day. In June, we increased the amps to 48 so we could start to dry the house out and get rid of the damp. Shutters and windows were repaired, doors fixed, Old stone sinks revealed, and walls torn down.
Our grass track. No lorries could use it. So no materials.
There was one small bathroom for the entire house at the top of the stairs. So we put up partitioning walls to create the 2 en-suites. Inside the partitioning walls we suspended the floor to the roof joists to take out much of the bounce in the floor. The weather began to get very warm and the last rain we had was on May 26th. We plastered and insulated all the ceilings between each beam in most of the house and formed the en-suite in the downstairs bedroom. Emma started sanding and repairing the stairs. We think it’s a mixture of oak and chestnut and the rail is new pine. It was now near the end of July and it had not rained since the storm in May.
We started digging the pool at the beginning of August and removed 16 tonnes of earth. The concrete base was poured, walls built and rendered. The liner went in and a concrete terrace was poured. Back inside the house and Emma started to paint and paint and paint. It was so hot that the paint dried immediately with each brush stroke. It was now the end of September and it finally rained. We had enjoyed 4 months of clear skies, it was great and we stopped work in October. In December we had a great family Christmas with Emma’s parents and her sister.
Work began again in January cleaning cleaning and cleaning. The new kitchen went in during February and all the showers and bathroom fittings. March came and Emma’s family were back to give us some much needed help. The walls were built around the pool and behind the house. The travertine terrace around the pool laid and grouted and the bathrooms grouted.
From the end of Feb through to April we had clear skies and warm weather and no rain. The ground was drying out which meant we could walk around the clay garden without getting 3 inches of mud on our boots. We reseeded the grass and started planting. 3 weeks into April the rain came. The ground was so dry that a river formed flowing down the side of the pool towards the well, around the well, between the 2 houses and down the drive. After 4 days of the continuous downpour most of the grass seed was gone and much of the drive. All washed down the hill. We wheel barrowed most of the driveway back up the hill and re-laid it and another storm took it back down the hill.
At the end of April 3 new drainage ditches were dug and a channel was cut to stop the water running around the well. The driveway re-cut and laid and we re-seeded the lawn again and planted more plants and crossed our fingers.
With the house we tried to save as much as we could. The sinks, the old pine floor, we exposed some walls, kept the doors that we could, windows, shutters, fire places tiles, beams and stairs. We repaired as much of the furniture as we could. The rest is in the barn. When we had to replace we tried to use natural materials and we kept the house as simple as possible.
We hope you enjoy it. Have a great holiday.
