purelyfrance

Le Bricolage - French D.I.Y.

Every foreigner who has relocated to France has a story to tell about some do-it-yourself project that didn’t quite go to plan.  If we are being honest, many of us have a cupboard  full of how our inexperience (i.e. naivety) has caused us more harm than good.

One of our early such projects was to tile our roof top terrasse located up 6 flights of stairs. Anne’s brother Michael was visiting so it seemed an opportune time. Buying tiles and cement was no problem but sand and gravel required a little more research. We located a quarry, Gambinos, a family operated business located 3 kms outside of our village. Indeed Gambino junior tells us how his father and grandfather worked the quarry before him.

He explains, ‘for them they had to work by hand using a shovel, (la pelle) for me it is easy, I just push this lever he says with a broad grin sitting on his seat in a monstrous front end loader. He knows about Nouvelle Zelande (le Rugby) so that makes us instant friends. Anyway, he has sand to burn and loads up a truck (un camion) for us. With our ‘expert’ eye the load looks insufficient. He raises a more expert eyebrow and tells us it consists of  2 cubic metres. We defer to his superior knowledge.

Meanwhile, outside our house, back in the village we had instigated a cunning plan to ensure when the truck arrives there is actually somewhere to put 2 metres of sand. The village streets are of course narrow, and the small square in front of our home is usually full of parked cars. We had earlier observed a French practice of placing a chair in the street when you want to reserve a space for some reason.  My wife Anne, was gang-pressed into being our chair.

So Anne dutifully stood on the corner protecting the nominated space, telling many people ‘le camion arrive tout de suite’.  Of course the camion did not arrive tout de suite as back at the quarry we were being treated to the Gambino family history and of course we had to discuss le Rugby. After a time our ‘chair’ was becoming impatient, particularly as it started to rain.  But the ‘chair’ could not retreat inside to claim a raincoat in fear of losing the critical space.

The camion did duly arrive and the sand dumped onto the street. So far, so good. The next step, well 60 steps actually was to get the sand to the terrasse. Six hours, 300 buckets of wet sand and a countless number of steps later the sand was sitting on the terrasse. We wondered about the weight and stress on our ancient terrasse, and crossed our fingers.

The next day we proudly surveyed our pile of sand.  A friendly tradesman asked us whereabouts was our ‘Mamouth’ (pronounced mamoot) At that moment our ‘Mamouth’ was nowhere, seeing as we didn’t know it existed let alone what one did with it. Turns out mamouth is a waterproofing material lined with tar which you apply with a blow-torch to seal the terrasse, particularly the join along the walls. Oh~~~!!

And of course you install your mamouth before spreading the sand. So this meant shifting all the sand to one half of the terrasse to apply the indispensable mamouth, and then shifting all the sand back again to the other half of the terrasse. My back still shudders at the thought.

Eventually the job was done and we had a beautifully tiled roof top terrasse. It is amazing how on completion, and following a couple of beers, you can convince yourself that your ’innocence’ made the project so much more fun!!

A Bientot, Bruce.

Related Posts:

• B n B & Gites for fun and profit (2)

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under LIFE IN FRANCE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.