Happy Halloween!

I’ve been visiting the local brocante (sort of a cross between an op-shop and a antique shop) a lot over the past few weeks and have become best buddies with the owner.  Mainly because every time we go there, we end up buying something for the house – so far a wardrobe, a bookcase, stacks of stuff for the kitchen, and the most awesome vintage poster– so he is making a tidy trade from our newly acquired home-owner status.

His shop is madness.  Half of the stock is outside, which means every time it rains, everything gets waterlogged.  Inside it is beyond belief.  You have to gingerly pick your way between towers of old chairs, bedside tables stacked to the ceiling and piles of old picture frames, to get to anything you want to see.  Even then, half of the objects are so hidden behind the mountains of gear that it is pretty impossible to really see anything at all.  But with the chaos comes that exciting spark of hope that maybe, just maybe, the very thing you are looking for is there, buried amongst the other random junk.

The other day I mentioned that we were looking for a big table for the dining room.  Something sturdy and preferably a bit rustic.  2-3 metres long?

He told me that on top of what he had in his current shop – which is enormous – he had another warehouse out in the country where he keeps some of the bigger items.  He told us he had a few tables and invited us to come and check them out that evening after he shut up shop.

We met at the shop and followed him in our car.  He sped off like a lunatic and we really struggled to keep up as he tore down old country roads.  Finally we arrived at his shed – in the middle of a paddock of sheep.

It was huge!  So big, that an old caravan he had inside was dwarfed.  And there was so much shit.  So much.  And in more of a jumbled state than his town shop, which by comparison felt like Ikea.

Here are some pics to give you an idea.

Anyway, after about half an hour of wending our way through towers of furniture and picking through the bits and pieces, we unfortunately couldn’t find anything we liked or needed – and we felt bad about it because we had the feeling we were ‘special guests’ in his hall of bedlam.  He wasn’t put off at all however, and even gave us two umbrellas as parting gift because it had started to rain (one of them was completely broken, but it was a nice thought).

I did find something pretty cool in his shop the other day though – this book. 

...les bébés de vampire...

'Hurry up and eat your soup before it coagulates'

'a visit to granny'

We had the same book in English in our town library when I was growing up and it was one of my favourites.

A pretty good Halloween find!

Jean-Marcel

This is the man you need to call to fix your garden troubles.

Jean-Marcel.

He is a bonafide lumberjack and a long term friend of the family.  Singlehandedly he chops down trees and whizzes them into fire-place size chunks, with the aid of his trusty tronçonneuse (chainsaw).

He came to our place yesterday to help 'sort out' a few of our garden issues.  After the massive clean up last week, we were in need of his assistance to haul the mountains of green waste off to the dump.  And there were a few extra branches that we hadn't been able to get to ourselves that we thought we could turn over to him.

He was more than happy to oblige.  In fact, he got a little overzealous - as I suppose one does when you are let loose in a big garden with a chainsaw in hand.

We asked for a trim, and came out with a crewcut.

But it will all grow back again.  Right?

What a man!  What a moustache!

Hello + homeownership

Bonjour!

And welcome to my new blog!  Another one!

Well I’m no longer ‘Pregnant & Hungry in Kosovo’, and I figured a new chapter deserved a fresh new blog.

I left Kosovo 2 weeks ago to begin my life in earnest as a Fraussie – an Aussie in France.

It has been a very eventful couple of weeks.  The morning after we flew in from Kosovo, we signed the final paper work (the rest of which had been done through sketchy channels between Kosovo, Australia and France) for our new house.  Our first house!  We decided now that we are well into our thirties and with our own little Fraussie on the way, it was time to grow up and get our shit together.  No more boxes of belongings stored in parents/ grandparents/ relatives/ friends /friends of friends garages (and a huge thank you to all of you who have stored our gear over the years).  No more ‘pretend’ residential addresses on government forms because:

a)  the last two places we’ve lived in for a considerable amount of time (Kosovo and Vanuatu) didn’t have proper street names let alone street numbers (for Vanuatu our address would have been 'the first house after the big mango tree' and in Kosovo 'the apartments near the bank above the shop with the freaky mannequins')

or

b) because we were drifting around the place like a couple of bums with no fixed address.

As of two weeks ago, we have our own little house.  In a very cute and very tiny French village of just over 200 people.  With its very own castle, no less.

While we’ll still be sharing our life between Kosovo, France and Australia, I’ll be making my home in the land of snails and stinky cheese for the next few months, while I wait for the baby and get stuck into some serious nesting.

Which is well under way.

Although it is an old stone house - we can date it back to late 1800s at this stage - it is in very good nick.  But we’ve still had the obligatory troops of electricians, plumbers, gardeners, and even chimney sweeps traipsing through the house over the past 10 days.  This is the first time I've lived anywhere with a chimney and I was really really hoping the chimney sweeps would turn up all sooty-faced with tatty overalls and straw brooms.  But they didn’t.  And they didn’t so much 'sweep' the chimney as shove a massive vacuum cleaner type thing up it and press ‘go’.  Oh well.

But it has been Romain’s family that have really taken on the lion’s share of the work.  I’ve been pretty useless as I’ve been hauling my huge belly around the place and issuing nonsensical instructions in my version of the French language, like some deranged foreman.  And Romain has been back in Kosovo for a week, gearing up for the national elections there (he’s not contending them, just monitoring them).

So here are some pics of our new pad and the work under way!

Everyday there are new adventures and obstacles so I’m going to do my best to document them here, if you care to stop by every once in a while.

This is us trying to open the gate to the house for the first time.  A nice picture of my fat bum.  After a very looooooooong day spent in  meetings with banks, brokers, and solicitors and signing mountains of paperwork (all of which I professed to understand, oh dear) we finally arrived at the house after the sun had set.  Which made things pretty tricky trying to figure out the idiosyncrasies of locks and doors for the first time, especially because we were buggered.  So after about 15 minutes rattling around in the lock and trying the many enormous keys we had been given, we finally got inside.

And toasted our success.  As much the success of having survived the gamut of meetings that day without any major tantrums and finally figuring out the keys and locks, to actually being homeowners.  We even brought our solicitor along for a drink - that's him in the middle.  He is also (conveniently) one of Romain's oldest buddies.

But those champagne glasses were soon whipped out of everybody's hands and replaced with paintbrushes and soapy sponges as we set them to work.  This is Romain's dad, Dominique, working away in the kitchen.  He has managed to paint nearly the whole house in a week, while he has been on 'holidays'.

This is Romain's mum, Marylene, and her friend Elizabeth sorting out some overhanging branches in the garden.  She is also on 'holidays' at the moment.

Romain's cousin Jean-Baptiste having way too much fun cleaning cobwebs off the ceiling.

Romain's other cousin Jean-Philippe and Pepe getting serious about pruning back some bushes.

Chainsaw Pepe.

Me making a rare cameo appearance in the garden.

Our front garden in a shambles.

Me posing outside the front door.

Romain before he escaped back to the tranquility of Kosovo, sitting on the step to the kitchen door and looking happy because he'd just discovered something cool -

- this metal maiden and her matching mate holding back the shutters to our bedroom window.

Us looking very bleary eyed but happy, celebrating the first week of homeownership.