Lets get back to the decorating
A blog post in which we actually renovate a room for guests to come and stay in
When I wrote my original ‘we bought a french house’ blog approximately seven or eight years ago it was initially to be about renovating - a practical guide to doing up rural french houses. Or indeed any houses. Though with this one, we had the specific issues of dealing with a house that had been derelict in the french countryside for around 15 years as no one was mad enough to take it on as a project until Patrick the estate agent found us. Wide eyed, romantic and english…. les idiotes as it were.
But as I began telling my renovation tales I ended up, probably due to my ‘real life’ career as a journalist - making it more about the stories behind the renovation. Which when it comes down to it is why we are all so fascinated by home improvement shows. The TV shows that even create heroes and villains from people as they look for houses, do up houses or fail to do up houses (everyone’s sick pleasure - oh no they’ve run out of money….) It is never really about what shade of Farrow and Ball they’ve chosen for the hallway or how they restored the original floor tiles (well unless your my husband in which case it IS about these things)
I’ve had a lot of new subscribers to this newsletter in the last few weeks so feel I ought to explain again how this all works. I’m revisiting posts from a blog I wrote about renovating my ancient old, tumbling down, french Maison Du Maitre in a tiny village near the larger village of Maubourguet. It is also only about ten minutes from a village called Marciac which holds a very big jazz festival in July/August each year - Johnny Depp played there this year and previously Sting, Jamie Cullum and Nile Rogers have appeared. It is deeply incongruous to see even our London friends in our local village never mind Hollywood royalty but I like the idea of Johnny visiting the Marciac tabac where my kids over the years have spent more on Pokemon cards than the locals have spent on Gauloise I imagine.
Anyway, each newsletter I go back in time to see how my renovation was coming along and hope to offer a slightly more realistic perspective of what that really meant both at the time and subsequently. More often than not the posts are about the frustrations on us as a family of having a french holiday home (yep I know you feel really sorry for us.. but bear with me) and how often it is a concurrent money pit and emotional drain.
But this week’s post IS - a simple one about doing up our spare room - with nice shocking before and after pics. Which sounds like a nice easy post and to be honest I had forgotten we ever DIDN’T have this room so populated has it been. I didn’t remember that when our first guests came we moved into a much smaller room and gave them our master bedroom.
The bedroom I talk about is known among my friends (well by my friend Julian) as the ‘sleep clinic’ as it is so dark and cosy that it is impossible even for insomniacs not to get 10 hours when sleeping in it. And even now that we have two other en suite spare rooms (as well as the multi room area that is Seb’s bedroom and attached rooms) that are proper, fully decorated places to stay - I think my favourite and the one I give people first is this one.
Hope you enjoy and next week I will get back to more emotional tales of angst and how stressful it is having a house in France (the truth is these days its all lovely but there was a big blip in the middle - but you’ll have to keep reading to find out about that.)
Original blog post August 2013
We may have had our fair share of guests by now but we’ve relied on their pioneer spirit to see them through. That and a supply of flip flops for crossing unfinished floors. The house was slowly taking shape and with each holiday that passed we became more confident that one day we would have one of those holiday homes you could imagine on a website of ‘baby friendly boltholes’. We had a few finished rooms and had started to collect some bits of furniture.
Until now we had vacated our master bedroom and bunked into a little room next to the boys room when people came to stay. You have to walk through it to get to the boys room which curtails any chance of privacy and means that Arthur wakes us up with his 5am rises which he has done since birth and even now age 10 doesn’t show any signs of changing. I am hoping that one day he will be one of those teenagers that you have to drag out of bed with buckets of water. I found the granny quilt on ebay (you actually search for just that – granny quilt) and we have no problem moving in while guests come to stay.
But as another Christmas loomed large, and this time my parents were feeling brave enough to make the trip (the prospect of heating and not peeing in a bucket had increased their levels of interest in another holiday) we wanted to get a proper guest room ready. The room pictured at the top was the one we had earmarked. It was downstairs and next to the one finished bathroom (see below).
So together they would make a really nice guest suite. But as usual there was a lot of work to be done before getting Alistair Sawday round to give us a five star rating.
By this stage we were old hands at doing up our rooms. And this room did not phase us. Oh no. Despite originally having a loo in the corner with a rats nest underneath it (we tend NOT to share this info with guests before they’ve slept in it) The most horrible peeling ceiling. A funny coat rack thingy (technical term) which I actually kept and put in another room later on and broken windows.
We got to work with a vat of decorators caulk to fill gaps in the wooden ceilings. A gallon of white undercoat and gloss for ceilings and woodwork. Another gallon of white emulsion for the walls and a lot of patience to apply all of the above. Ourselves. And finally hours of pouring over Farrow and Ball paintcharts to choose the colour for the walls, about six changes of mind over which particular shade of beige or grey to go for (Elephants Breath vs Mouses Back – #firstworldproblems) We settled on Old White or posh beige as my husband likes to call it.
And we painted. And painted. And I got the children to help and they painted. And then Peter filled the holes in the ceiling and I painted that too. And this was probably some sort of school holiday/half term or other and my friends were Facebooking about their sunshine breaks to Morocco/Dubai/Majorca (I even had pangs of jealousy as people fessed up to being at Centreparcs – not for long admittedly)
And it was finished. Although it didnt yet have a floor – just some mucky cold concrete but I bought a rug at Marks and Spencer and that would do for now. We bought a Leirvik bed from Ikea and carted it back from Toulouse. Along with yet more Hemnes drawers (I will be calling my next born Hemnes FYI)
And finally we added a great glass chandelier we’d found at a Vide Grenier. And I made some curtains out of my favourite hessian fabric bought on ebay – with black out lining for extra warmth. Voila. And the rather splendid 1970s pic of the fallen madonna with the big boobies was found in a Vide Grenier for ten euros. A bedroom fit for parents and anyone else who descends from now on. Want to come and stay yet?