We finally got the keys of the house last week and today is Day 1 of the renovation work! There’s definitely a lot to do… but what keeps us motivated it to know how beautiful the house will be after all its potential is finally revealed.
The structure of the house is overall good, but since it has been closed for a long time, it’s pretty humid and the living room parquet floor is warped. The first step here will therefore be to ventilate the house, hoping that the wooden floor will eventually shrink and take back its original shape…
Absolutely everything has to be renovated in this old french stone house, except the windows which have already been replaced:
- painting,
- floors,
- electricity,
- plumbing,
- create a heating system,
- changing the layout of the first floor to create an open kitchen and living space,
- solve a problem of water infiltration coming from the external chimneys and that cause humidity on the top floor walls,
- and of course the whole arrangement of the garden
- renovate the outbuilding (currently used as a shed) that we want to convert into a guest house.
Before buying the house, we also discovered that we were going to have to create a sewage network because the existing one is very old and not adapted to the new regulation; which means digging trenches at least a meter deep, from the house to the city’s evacuation network located at the sidewalk: so, 12 meters to dig …
We also have to build a wall to separate our property from the neighbour’s, because there’s currently only a little fence to separate, which we don’t fancy that much.
We have estimated that 4 months will be needed to carry out the renovation work of the interior of the house, work which will be carried out largely by ourselves but also with contractors.
We’ll take care of the garden and the outbuilding afterwards.
But photos being better than a long speech, here is the current state of the house, that will give you an overview of the extent of the work that awaits us …: