The Work Commences

Despite the lack of a caravan, see the last posting, I went to Arné for a week and the central purpose was to meet with the architect. So at the start of the week I spent my days clearing away rubble, etc to make the site as safe as possible for us to explore it fully and thereby be able to draw up the necessary plans. The scale of the problem is aptly demonstrated by the attached picture which shows what has happened in the centre of the house where the roof has fallen in and the weathering has reduced part of one of the internal walls to a muddy heap covered with the tiles that have fallen through.

Part of the concern that the architect expressed is that all the walls made out of earth have so little stone/pebbles in their structure and as many of them have been and are still exposed to the elements he cannot be sure as to their long term durability. There's a particular issue with the external wall at the western end of the house which is badly affected with a large area where the wall is disappearing. The architect asked that I have it assesed by a local mason to see whether it could be rescued or would it need to be pulled down and replaced by a new block-work wall, which would of course be covered with limestone plaster (chaux) to make it look the same as the rest of the house.

It's also apparent that we shall have to take down the open-sided barn on the eastern side of the property. It would require a huge amount of work to make it safe and it's not really an option (see the attached picture to get an idea of the problems). We don't need the barn and don't want to convert it to a gite; and removing it would also make restoring the main roof that much easier as we could reuse the tiles to replace those broken or missing. So the architect is going to enquire about getting a demolition order and this may be on a Déclaration de Travaux which is much simpler. In fact he thinks that we might be able to do most of the work on a set of Déclarations if the Maire is agreeable, but this is unlikely as there is so much that needs to be done. Still it's apparently worth a try.

The architect's visit also included a meeting with the man responsible for checking the viability of septic tanks - the rules have been very much tightened up recently. In fact his view is that there's absolutely no problem with this and we actually filled out the forms there and then so that they will go through with the main planning application without a problem.

So, good progress at that stage and much encouragement.