The before's, during's and after's: 1 The outside

The house as we first got it

This house is a curious construction of stone, columbage and concrete.

Perhaps this is because originally, the house was just a house and was converted into a shop. Of course, we're not keeping it as a shop, but have been granted a Certificat d'Urbanisme and the shop itself will be our lounge.

The outside has its issues however and we were presented with a building whose ground floor is anything but domestic. Its red, black and gold façade with huge dual aspect windows is a little too 'in your face' for us, however, plans are afoot to change all that. All we need is the money ...

The majority of the vines removed

There is obviously another side to this house, but this is the one I'm concentrating on here as this is the side that's had the work done.

Well one day, we decided to get creative and remove the vines we could from the side of the building. It took an age and uncovered some pretty nasty holes in the exterior rendering.

There was nothing we could do at the time, but we knew the stuff had to come down and that was that. The vines may well have looked really pretty at one time, but they play havoc with the walls.

When we came over, one of the jobs we labelled 'really important' was having the outside of the house re-rendered. 

So the first thing the boys did, was take down all the rendering and the straw-like gubbins behind, which exposed the columbage makeup of the upstairs.

Unlike buying a property in England, you don't get all the ins and outs of the building's makeup, so whilst we were aware that the stonework to the left of the picture wasn't real, we really didn't have a clue what was behind it.

One of the issues with having bought the house without a surveyor's report.

It wasn't long before the replacement cladding went up, which as I said before, was something akin to those packs of dried noodles you can buy.

The good thing about them is that whilst they may well look like they're nothing but holes, they don't allow water to penetrate - a bit like thatching really - and they're really good insulation.

Heavy snow in the winter is not uncommon here, so that's a bonus.

Yesterday we got creative again and this time, we removed the vines from the rest of that side wall above the shop.

Our house no longer looks 'hairy' and although the rendering on the rest of the house isn't the same colour as the stuff that's just been applied, it really was at one time. 

We believe that once the new stuff weather's in, it will look the same as the rest and that's good. The only issue now is that the vines have worked their magic on the whole of the outside and really, we should get the rest re-rendered too, but that's going to have to be another project.