french farmhouse open to the elements!

Oh noooooo! Please don't rain as we have no roof anymore. Leave the work force alone for a few weeks and look what happens. Our house is vanishing quickly. All the roofs have come off and the house feels so light and spacious instead of gloomy and dark. Not very practical though. It is all very well taking all the bad bits down, but there doesn't seem to be very much left.

Quick time on to July 2007. The house purchase is made and the carnage has begun. First step is to clear the site. The old roof is being ripped off, and all the vegetation and rubbish thrown out. The task is daunting. This is not a job for the faint-hearted.

Will there be any house left by the time we have finished?

A French farmhouse near Larresingle

We take Matt and Al over to France to show them what naughty children we have been. They are suitably unimpressed by the ruin we have bought. We try to distract them with a visit to Larresingle. This is a fortified medieval village on a tiny scale. Known (ambitiously) as The Carcassone of The Gers. It is cute, but only takes about 10 minutes to walk round.

It all seems fairly closed up on a cold day in March, but in the summer there is a creperie and some little shops. The village also lies on the well trodden pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella. Which I have just discovered also runs past our farmhouse. I hope we get some interesting pilgrims trailing by!

Larresingle also has a small (everything here is small), outdoor exhibition of medieval warfare. It looks like something that small children and engineers might like. It's not open today, so back to our newly acquired french farmhouse to torment our boys.

Lovely barns to be rescued at Barrusclet

We have some lovely old barns at Barrusclet. They are unfortunately falling down! Take a look at the main ridge of the tall barn......this needs sorting out soon otherwise the whole lot is going to cave in. Once the roof has gone down, breaking all the tiles as it hits the ground, the walls will start to deteriorate. They seem to be mostly held together by mud. Having said that, the mud here does seem to be of an exceptional quality. It's a long time ago, but Aristotle or Plato imagined a world of forms, where the perfect image of everything on earth was held. Anyway, this mud must come close to the perfect form of mud. Walk around in this and you soon end up on mud platforms. Naomi Campbell would be 10ft tall in no time if she lived round here.
Saving these barns from further damage is a bit of a priority. Sadly some of our budget will be instantly munched up by something that doesn't move the main house on at all. Mmmm, we didn't think of that did we?

Anyway, check out those lovely corner stones. Straight as you like. Who needs a structural engineer?

French country picnic at Barrusclet in the Gers

All that hard work renovating a house has to be balanced with some R and R. We had a wonderful picnic in the back field as the sun was going down. Lot's of our lovely friends were with us on holiday enjoying the gorgeous weather in the south-west of France. Ahhhhhhhhh, the simple pleasures of life bring out the bunting maker in me. Great way to end a day of loafing round the pool, I mean working really hard on the house. Life is fabulous in France!

The wood and the crappy crepie

We are lucky enough to be able to buy 12 hectares of land with our farmhouse. Like, we really need 3 fields and a wood. Well actually, we really love the wood, but the farmer won't sell just the wood, we have to buy the fields too. Our estate agent advises us that it is no bad thing to have plenty of land round us. We are like lambs to the slaughter. But hey, it is the trees and the lush greeness of this property that has attracted us. So, yes, let us have more land, and spend even more money!
I have uploaded this picture below, and I can't get rid of it.....so it stays. The house looks very pretty in the distance. the walls are covered in crepie, or crappy as we have been calling it. It is a type of render. We hope to return to the original stone underneath. This means blasting and chipping all the old crepie off and repointing around the stones underneath. It will be a big job!