Pressure is Building

Today I got back down to business with the renovation of my apartment here in Carcassonne. It is quite an undertaking really. You see, it's actually three apartments side by side on the entire first floor of a townhouse that was built sometime around 1750 by a wealthy textile merchant of the day. It's even marked out on the tourist office maps as a building of historical importance. You might think I'm lucky that the mayor hasn't requisitioned it for the mairee but actually he's got a much grander townhouse than this one.

Mind you, he, or one of his predecessors, might have our fountain. Apparently, this building was only converted into apartments in the 1970s/80s when a couple of very elderly sisters who then owned the building passed on from this life to the next. As with many large townhouses, this one used to have a courtyard and a garden accessed through a gate and arch from the street - I guess they would drive their carriage or ride their horse through to be met by their staff and servants.

Well, it seems, from the records I have seen, that there used to be a garden and a fountain. Sadly, the fountain has gone and I bet it now adorns somebody else's garden, looking hopelessy out of place and making it all look ridiculously over-fountained! Sadly, the garden has gone too, replaced by a concrete car park for our neighbours tatty old citroens and peugeots - I bet they had the concrete mixer down here the day after the poor sisters' funerals!

It would have been great to have got hold of this place before it was split up into it's current three floors of apartments. Thankfully, many, many of the original features remain but a lot of what was here has been covered up as I have been discovering. Behind false walls and ceilings I have found evidence of old staircases and even old windows that are now trapped in the middle of fake plasterboard walls! Today I found 6 feet of space idly lying wasted above a ludicrously low false ceiling in a bedroom. I am definitely having that back.

So much has been done already over the past 18 months but there is still so much to do.

I have some quite serious, self (and wife) imposed deadlines for the completion of the various stages of the renovation. I also have some quite serious budget constraints which makes the whole enterprise a pretty delicate balancing act between speed of work, quality of workmanship and materials and the wrath of Mrs Renovator when she turns up to find that either it is not finished or not good enough or, god help me, it is not finished and it's not good enough.

Which means I better stop talking about it and just crack on with it!