Builders in today! M. Freitas and a worker arrived early morning and set to demolishing the wall between the two rooms. Next step will be to rebuild the wall with the new glazed opening from the entrance door, and the existing double doors reversed and moved towards the windows a bit. Another partition wall and a door and we’ll be all set up.
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| Life is a little awkward |
We taped up a large curtain of plastic between the living room and bedroom to try and stop as much dust as possible coming into the living room. We are now living in just part of the living room.
Now afternoon and the studs are in, the storeroom door is in, the new entry doorway is cut and the double door hole is ready. Half of the wall is down. Despite the plastic curtain heaps the floor in the living room is coated in dust, as always when there is any work on within 50m of us. I’ve now put plastic sheeting over all the furniture as well. We are rapt with how the bedroom is looking. It will still be a decent sized room, even with the small entry passage and storeroom taken out of it. We’ve asked the builder to put a small window between passage and bedroom so light and view will come straight through from the bedroom window. The passage feels quite generous, yet we had thought it might not.
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| New wall to separate bedroom (part of wall to come out still), new passage, and storeroom beyond |
M. Freitas invited us to have a look around the top apartment which he has just about finished refurbishing. It has a very large living room/kitchen, two new bedrooms made out of loft spaces and a large bedroom on the topmost level. It has windows onto Place des Neuf Jets and is rather gorgeous. We are getting to know the owner of that apartment quite well as we see him most days.
After yet another scratch meal of bread and cheese we snuck into the two disused storerooms on the half level above us. We are still playing around with the idea, if it is possible to buy them for a nominal cost, to put a stairway in from our new entry passage and make a new bedroom and outdoor terrace upstairs. We took up the measuring tape and measured the whole area, with John spending the rest of the evening on the computer drawing it all up. Our first step is to see if M. Vargas, the owner of the building, owns these two storerooms or if they belong to M. Antonetti. It they are owned by M. Vargas, we know that M. Antonetti may be interested in perhaps adding them to his top apartment because we have spied him scouting inside them as well. We don’t want to express any interest in them to Antonetti yet!
If M. Vargas owned them then we will take our plans to the Mairie to ask if it is possible to build a terrace facing towards the little alleyway between Place des Neuf Jets and Place de l’Eglise. It is not allowed to build a terrace looking onto either of those places – there are very strict controls about altering the appearance of the old buildings.
If we get over this hurdle, we will ask M. Freitas for a rough estimate of what it would cost to do the work in the two rooms upstairs.
