Provence je t'aime. Gordon Bitney
offer on a house sheltered on a southern hillside on the outskirts of Nyons. Marie-Hélène telephoned the realtor and then e-mails went back and forth without any documents being signed.
“Don’t we need to make a formal offer?” I asked the agent.
“No, it’s not necessary,” she said.
The next e-mail we received said that the vendor would leave the sinks, the toilets and the kitchen cupboards.
“But those things are fixtures and go with the house, don’t they?” I asked, astonished.
No, apparently not, at least not in France. We were told that when someone rents an apartment the tenant must install his or her own fixtures. A vacating tenant takes all fixtures.
“What about the doors and the light switches?” I wanted to know.
Well, those things do go with the house, but not the light fixtures, I was informed.
After some further negotiations, the price was agreed upon, but there had been no discussion about a deposit.
“We’ll get to that,” was the response.
Then two days later the tone changed. The e-mail read, “If you are serious about the house please send us a deposit of ten per cent of the price immediately.” We were to learn later that a rival offer had come in from another real estate agency. When we sent our money in the form of a bank draft drawn in euros, we knew we had crossed the line and were committed to owning a house in Provence.
Closing the purchase of property in France proved to be another new experience. Arriving at the office of the notaire to sign the papers, we met the realtor, Madame Joule, already there, waiting with the vendor. He was a retired civil servant, in fact the former tax collector for the village. We had been told that his career hadn’t made him very popular around Nyons. He was seated in the waiting room like an old curmudgeon and rose reluctantly to be introduced.
The notaire’s secretary appeared and showed us all into an office furnished with a few chairs and an oversized ornate Louis XIV desk. The notaire rose from his antique chair in a grand welcoming manner, shaking our hands. Then his secretary carried in a heavy, leather-bound tome, which she set on the desk in front of him already opened to the relevant page.
He put on his glasses and read the entire transaction aloud to us.
Did we have any questions?
I asked if we would receive a deed to the property. Of course not, was his reply. It was, after all, all recorded in the title book he had in front of him.
Was there a plan of the property I could see?
No, there wasn’t, the vendor said. It seemed that when the village expropriated a corner of the lot to put the road through no one had bothered to do a new plan. I saw the notaire take the cap off his fountain pen and make a notation in the margin of the tome.
At this juncture the vendor was showing signs of considerable agitation. “Why do you need a plan? After all, the property has a wall along one side and the rest is fenced. Isn’t that clear enough?”
I acquiesced to this assertion as there was nothing else to be done short of stopping the transaction. “Any other questions, Monsieur?” the notaire asked. We moved along to the signing of the documents.
We were all handed ball-point pens and the secretary moved the documents past us in succession, showing us where to sign. Madame Joule stayed at the side of the vendor and talked quietly to him to see that all went well. Once the papers were signed, the secretary gathered them up and left the room.
I had been expecting to see a statement of adjustments showing the use of the funds we had given to the notaire. Nothing had appeared.
“Do you have a statement for the funds?” I finally asked.
“Monsieur, that will be in the report that will be mailed to you in a few months.”
We were handed the keys.
The notaire stood up, indicating that the transaction was complete. The vendor remained seated and asked when he would receive his money. That would be in a few weeks, he was told. We all shook hands and filed out of the office.
Marie-Hélène and I had the keys and immediate possession of the house. It was now ours. So, giddy with expectation, we drove over, unlocked the front door and walked in. We looked around at the dusty rooms, peered out the dirty window panes and began to realize the amount of work we had ahead of us. The empty rooms echoed as we walked about. The realtor’s ‘À Vendre’ sign was still nailed to one of the shutters. We found some dust-covered tools the vendor had left behind and pried the sign loose.
That we were starting from scratch hadn’t fully occurred to us. We needed everything: beds, chairs, fridge, stove, dishwasher, cutlery and much more. As agreed, the toilets, sinks and the kitchen cabinets were still there. Fortunately, friends had lent us their house to stay in for the time being.
As every room in the house was wallpapered, we decided the bathrooms were the place to start. We bought scrapers and litre-sized spray bottles that we filled with water and used to soak the walls. The glue softened and we began to scrape and peel the paper. However, it only came away in small pieces. This proved intolerably slow considering the amount of wallpaper to be removed. Then I noticed a four-gallon garden sprayer that had been left behind in the garage. I filled it with hot water and sprayed a strip of wallpaper from floor to ceiling. The entire strip peeled away in a single piece. We began to make progress and moved on to other rooms.
Friends came and went, each contributing labour as well as moral support. They had looked at the condition of the house and knew we needed it. Their enthusiasm helped us continue. All the same, we knew that we had gotten ourselves into far more work than we had thought. Without their assistance we could easily have been overwhelmed and dispirited. We dug in and stayed at it.
Looking around the garden that first spring, I stopped to examine a pile of wood that was infested with a colony of large black ants. The house didn’t have a fireplace, so the wood had to go. There was too much to burn in the yard and I had no means of hauling it away. Our neighbour, an observant man, I came to learn, leaned over the fence just then and introduced himself as Monsieur Jean Drouin. We chatted amiably for a few minutes and then he asked, “What will you do with that wood?”
“I don’t know what to do with it. It’s infested with ants.”
“Pas de problème,” he said. “It’s olive wood and burns very well.”
I clued in. “Would you like the wood?” I asked.
In less than an hour we had moved it all over the fence and he had carried it to his garage. The wood and the colony of ants were gone and, with another problem solved, I breathed easier.
That spring I had returned to Vancouver and my law practice, leaving Marie-Hélène to finish stripping the wallpaper and painting. She had also been trying to put up curtain rods, in order to hang drapes. The walls were not wood-frame construction, however, but stone and concrete. The electrician had been using an industrial-sized hammer-drill for boring through the walls, which he lent her. The job involved holding a ten-pound drill that was two feet long at the top of a six-foot ladder. The vibration from the drill made a deafening noise and set everything shaking, including the ladder. When she put the drill down for a moment to rest, Marie-Hélène heard someone knocking. Covered in dust, she opened the front door. It was the neighbour’s wife, Suzette.
“Marie-Hélène, are you using an electric drill?”
Marie-Hélène nodded, “Oui.”
Suzette looked absolutely horrified. “Mais non! C’est un travail pour un homme! I’ll send my husband down immediately to help you. Please wait.”
A few minutes later Jean appeared. “Can I help in some way?”
They spent the day drilling holes in the stone walls, screwing curtain rods up and hanging drapes. That day a close friendship was established. Our neighbours had