Our shortlist was based on the list of requirements we had written when renting a house the previous year. At the time, this list was to be our criteria for future holiday houses to rent. There was no way we could have ever, in our wildest dreams, begun to imagine that, just a mere six months later, it would become our template for buying our own French home.
One of the things I most vividly remember about the house we rented in Rignac, also in the Lot, was that it was perpetually full of flies. The idyllic setting of a country home in France is not always as romantic as it may seem from afar. The house was next to a farm, with extremely neglected sheep that we used to give bread to over the fence. However, the state of the sheep meant that our two-week sojourn was somewhat tainted by the fact that the house was perpetually crawling with flies. Hence, we made a note to ourselves: Do not be seduced by the notion of renting a French country house before checking how close it is to a farm. This became one of our key criteria, along with peace and quiet. Neither of these carefully noted points proved to be the case in finding Pied de la Croix. Both noise and flies were in abundance. So much for our careful research. My notebook also has a list of ‘desirable features to check for’: a dishwasher and washing machine; the garden and surrounds, for peace and quiet; and, most importantly, not close to a train or road. So much for all these criteria. Not only does Pied de la Croix absolutely not have a dishwasher or washing machine, there is also no kitchen at all. And, as for the criterion of not being on a road, well, what can I say? Our house is virtually on the road!
Our Arrival in Cuzance
The traffic was a constant flow from the moment we arrived — not of locals returning home after work or tractors with hay during harvest time, though there would be plenty of those in the summer days ahead. No, the traffic was an onslaught of enormous trucks, one after the other, carrying gravel and who knows what else. They were enormous, constant and very, very close to the house! This was not the quiet, rural village we had envisaged. Stuart had of course bought it in the depths of winter, yet, still, we were both perplexed — not to mention, extremely perturbed — by the drastic and dramatic change. I vividly remembered it had been one of the points I’d been most anxious to confirm in our phone conversations: yes, it was a quiet rural backwater. Stuart had assured me that it was a peaceful village road that did not appear to lead anywhere at all. Out of all our criteria, this was the one I remember being most insistent about. One of the things I value most is solitude, especially after living in Sydney where, if a plane flew overhead, any conversation on the phone would be drowned out. So what on earth had happened to his meticulous research?
Even before our first evening, all did not bode well for what by now seemed to have been a very impetuous and romantic decision.
Pied de la Croix is just forty minutes away from Puymule, the petite hamlet where we had rented our holiday house during our first fortnight in France, when we had a ‘proper’ holiday. Then we launched into our renovation and off we went to Cuzance together for the first time. It was a Monday morning — and not the happiest of occasions, as we had anticipated. The grass was very overgrown and the day was cool and damp. The house simply looked very old and rundown; my overwhelming impression was how much work it required. It was by no means a picturesque country cottage. Instead, it had been half-rendered at some point so that the lovely old stone was half-covered in cement. The grounds were so overgrown that it was hard to even wander around — the brambles caught on our clothes and, to tell the truth, it was all rather dismal and overwhelming. Even Stuart wondered what he had done … and, it’s not like him at all to feel that way. He absolutely doesn’t believe in looking back or having regrets. However, the weather certainly coloured our emotions, and the enormity of what we had actually done hit home. We are by no means the first to buy a house in France as a holiday house — many other Australians do that. But, here’s the difference: most people usually pay and outsource all the hard work.
We returned the next day to meet our Australian friend Dave at our village restaurant; he had flown in that morning to Limoges and hired a car. We had lunch and marvelled at the fact that we were all together in Cuzance. This was after recovering from the amusement of Dave turning up in his less-than-attractive hired Kangoo. It was like a big box on wheels; only the windows identified it as a van. Then all three of us were off to inspect our house, a two-minute walk from the restaurant. I had managed to hastily confide in Dave that Stuart and I had had one of the worst arguments of our entire marriage the night before, after we had seen our little house together for the first time and been overcome by the reality of what we had done. However, the sun was now shining and it all looked much brighter. Coincidentally, it had been Dave who took our Sold sign photos at Austinmer the weekend after we sold our house and, now, here he was in France, able to take another photo on the steps of our petite maison.
Despite my initial misgivings after my first viewing, clouded by the damp and gloomy day, my innate urge to renovate immediately swung into action. While Stuart had talked me through the photos on his return and explained where he thought the kitchen could be located, it was clear to me that the room next to where the old stove and sink were would, in fact, be a better space to create a kitchen. I remember being sufficiently entranced that I even tentatively peeled a piece of the 1960s wallpaper off the room that I imagined would be the kitchen, just to see what lay beneath. And, so it would seem that there was an element of immediate bonding with the little farmhouse despite my very real feelings of Oh, what have we done!, I could certainly already see in my mind just how we could transform it. Similarly, Stuart had tried to prepare me, but it would be a long time — well, will it be ever? — before I could come to terms with the toilet being like a very small cupboard: no window and very, very petite indeed. The bathroom, while a decent size, didn’t have a window, either. I was hopeful we could cut through the stone. Maybe there had been an original one we could resurrect?
After first meeting Jean-Claude Chanel from the village and telling him about how difficult I found it to have a bathroom without a window, in his usual fashion, he investigated straight away. Somehow he was able to find out, from one of his numerous sources in the village, that at some point in the history of the little house there had had been a donkey stable attached to the outside of the bathroom wall. Unfortunately, the thickness of the stone meant that it would be hugely difficult to cut through, not to mention prohibitively expensive, so it looked like my bathroom would remain window-less.
I was entranced, too, by the width and rich dark colour of the walnut floorboards, as Stuart had told me I would be, while the heavy wooden shutters on all the windows were another typical French touch. I was also enchanted by the smooth curve of the stone step inside the front door, hollowed out by generations of French footsteps. So despite my misgivings, once we left to return to Puymule I was picturing just how we could transform it all and yet retain its charm. And I knew that our footsteps would now add to the patina of time and the story that lay wrapped inside the walls of Pied de la Croix.
With the sun shining on our second viewing, things were definitely looking brighter. There was, however, a huge shock to come later; one that nearly saw the end of the dream before it had even really begun. The traffic …
Arriving in France
Before I get to that moment of utter devastation, why was it that we didn’t go straight to Cuzance and our own petite maison? After the usual exhausting flight from Sydney, we arrived in Lyon to pick up our car that Stuart had organised to hire for the following six weeks. Mind you, this was after waiting an additional two hours at the airport,