Home again, home again, jiggety jig

May 2012-April 2013

G here. The next few months went ahead with the pace of a Fellini movie. Very colourful, very disjointed, and not much happened. Well, quite a lot did happen if I'm being completely honest, but it happened almost of its own volition.

To get the septic tank approved, the government agency SPANC had to get involved - and without SPANC's sign-off nothing would ever get processed by the Mairie, least of all our Building Permit. So Dave our plumber arranged to meet with the SPANC rep on site, and together they spent a careful few hours digging a hole and soaking it with water, then filling it completely with water to see how quickly it drained. As luck would have it the water refused to drain anywhere. So the decision was made - here's a difficult site that needs a synthetic 'Eparco' solution. No chance of an agricultural system of drainage tubes across the land, but two huge green underground tanks, the one to separate the waste and the other to allow the grey water to percolate through a zeolite bed, thereby purifying it before it would be allowed to dribble onto the stormdrain below our home.

Dave our Plumber was keen to put in a tank with coconut husks, which seem to do the same job as the zeolite except you have to replace the husks every ten years. Not a long time in septic tank terms. Even 50 years seems like too short a time to have to start opening hatches on septic tanks. But the Eparco system which uses zeolite was slightly cheaper and the zeolite is said to last 15 years with normal use. Hey, we're only going to be there on holidays so my hope is that the zeolite will last long enough for our grandchildren to be the first people to have to empty it.

The months ticked by as we waited for unknown intermediate government agencies to process the paperwork for the system, now driven by Eparco who were going to do the job. Oh, said the one government agency, on consulting records that pre-dated the Wars (the Napoleonic Wars), it seems that this property doesn't belong to you in the first place. Followed by rounds of letters to our lawyer and more deep silence before one day, miraculously, Eparco wrote to say that SPANC had given the go-ahead with only a few minor modifications to the drainage on the land. Yee har!

All the while, we were also processing quotes from our trusty and patient builder friends who worked their way through our painfully detailed analyses and questions, until we felt we could compare apples with apples. And in the event there wasn't a great difference in price between the two of them. In the region of less than 10%.

So the cut came down to who might be able to provide the best all-round help, given that we live so far away. With our experience of Elllie's abilities to cut through French paperwork, and the praise that Tom's former Clients gave us over the phone when we were researching, we finally made the call on Tom's side of the fence. Which was one of the toughest day's of the project, the darkest and the lightest at the same time, as we told one good builder that he hadn't been successful and another good builder that he had.

Tom's schedule was busy - he runs several jobs at differing stages, choosing progressing on the indoors and outdoors works in stages so he's always got something to do no matter what the weather. And he told us that he can't start for another few months and would like to get going in the Spring of 2013, when the worst of the winter is over and he could strip off our roof without risking water damage to our dense walls.

In the meantime, Christmas came and went and we sent postcards to our neighbours adjacent to us, our good wishes for 2013. And within a few weeks had back the most charming replies, with best wishes to us and our family. A great feeling of 'belonging' was starting to take root.

Of course the taxman didn't send us a Christmas card, or any card for that matter even though we knew that at least the 'tax foncier' - the land tax - was due. No matter how many enquiries I made by E-mail, no-one replied with any sensible answer as to what our small but growing tax liability was. Perhaps this is typical of government departments the world over, a sort of code of ethics held by all government agencies. But one day Ellie and Tom mentioned that the Mairie was concerned because Ms Factrice at the postal service had had to return an important-looking letter because we errrm didn't have a post box at the barn. 

The idea of a post box did start to make sense if we were to expect official-looking letters. By sheer good luck Ellie had a spare one from another project that she could put at the barn, and if anything turned up in it she said she'd send it on to us in Australia. A small glimmer of light through the dark bureaucratic clouds that the French Tax Office were casting our way!

So now we had our Builder, our Septic Tank contractor, and all we needed was some good weather so Tom could start. Then Dave, our Plumber, contacted us to say that he had fallen seriously ill and couldn't take our project on after all.