Thursday, June 05, 2008

Here's the plan


Well we finally gave in. We put aside our worries about the termites eating the walls and signed the compromis for our new house. As I write this I only have 2 days left to pull out of the transaction, after that we are legally obliged to buy.


Then the headaches begin. And you can follow them all right here. The plan sounds a simple one. We are going to demolish the house in July - it‘s falling down anyway. Then in August everyone is going to put their feet up. In September we sink the foundations. The Notaire explained our new house is going to be like a boat - floating on pillars that keep it above the concrete wrecking clay soil (Note to self - there’s always a reason that things are cheap. Further note - will it sway in the mistral?)


Once the foundations are down, there’s a rush to build the exterior before the end of the year. Hopefully, by January when the bad weather moves in all the workmen will be snug inside doing the electrics etc…Giving us a couple of months to finish everything off before the projected move in date of April.

As I said that’s the plan. People who know the area and the propensities of the local builders well, give us absolutely no chance of achieving our schedule. Their best guess is that it will be ready in two years time.

The only problem is there’s no contingency in the budget for this. Naïve me - never.

1 comment:

Linda said...

Good luck. I found that those doing the building tend to take two or more weeks off on either side of August. Our house was built with earthquake standards. Did you know that France gets earthquakes?