Still no SIM card, therefore no internet. I can’t wait to
get it all sorted as it is a pain trying to work in two places – home for the preparation,
then in a café to upload or edit on the live systems.
Today was our first brush with real French artisans as we
have two booked in for the afternoon. In the morning we started by visiting the mairie to see what permits we needed –
the answer was a nice simple NONE. They only want permits if you work on the
outside or windows. Back for lunch after a visit to our friendly neighbourhood
artist Denis Ribas. As we part-expected, he didn’t remember us all that well to
start with (us meeting a caricature French artist is a memorable occasion, him
meeting some more travellers is pretty ordinary). He had rushed back from
Shanghai to look after a sick dog, but there was no hope for it and he was very
upset. However he insisted on giving us a second copy of his book for our
apartment. Our one and only coffee-table book!
Something special this afternoon – we started work on the
apartment. I began by skim-coating the first of the walls with plaster , while
Karen scrubbed down one of the windows. There really isn’t all that much to do.
Having only 50m² means quite a small area of wall, particularly as every wall has
windows, doors, cupboards, a kitchen or something reducing the area needing to
be done. The plumbing man turned
up on time to quote on what we intend doing, and was all very agreeable.
However to get the waste water out from the kitchen means he has to remove the
bath, which in turn means we have to at least make a start on the bathroom if
we want to be able to wash ourselves. That was going to be next year’s plan.
Later on the electrician came round to look at the
impossibly noisy circuit-breaker for the hot water. Again very pleasant and he
left having sorted the issue (we can now leave the hot water on overnight
without being kept awake), and also another couple of minor issues. One was
putting a plate over an electrical outlet, which potentially could have been very
nasty as it had exposed 220V wires. Overall we are pretty pleased with the
apartment as regards services and state of repair. There have been no
unpleasant surprises thankfully, and a few pleasant ones like the
impossibly-stained toilet coming up like new with acid.
