40 years of trash included.

Much has happened since that dank December day.

We bought it. January 12 came and went, and we didn’t pull out.

We had quite a few meetings with the financial advisor and the bank.

There was stress over whether and when the bank would hand over the money, and the lawyers would hand over the keys.

That day, April 17, came.

We went back to the notaire, and met an elegant lady and her husband, the daughter of the grandfather of the cousin of the sister of the man who owns the house. Or something.

She was delighted to be shot of the place, and, upon signing about 150 pages of dense legal documentation, handed over a sack full of keys.

There are lots of keys because there are lots of flats. There are lots of flats because over the years, the members of the Favret family, which built the house in 1928 and held it until they sold it to us in 2015, had history.

Here’s great great grandfather Favret, with the staff on the balcony:

That photo was given to us in a big portfolio book, in which is every plan and invoice from the last time the property was renovated, in 1982. Cost of the electrical work in 1982: 14,000 French Francs.

There are five dwellings, each of which smells worse than the other. At one stage, there were a lot of old people living in the house. Then they left — moved out or moved on, amen. The place looks as if they fled persecution in the middle of the night. Dishes on the sink. Dressing gowns on hooks, beds made, family photos on the sideboard.

Lives leftover

There is a lot of stuff that was once dear to the Favrets which we will box up and send to them, whether they want it or not.

In one wardrobe:

A wedding photo in a linen cupboard drawer.

Everywhere, the dusty sepia remains of lives once lived: piles of hoarded rubbish, games hopefully stacked on bookshelves under ancient numbers of magazines, mixtapes, ashtrays, broken clocks, dolls. One room, windows boarded and foiled up against the cold had three wardrobes full of old clothes, shoes, broken souvenirs, electrical appliances of uncertain purpose, a sewing machine, rolled up posters — some fetching unhung picture wallpaper with a forestry scene which I’m keen to hang in the basement when the house is done (an idea adopted enthusiastically by Claire. Not).

When we opened the windows the place seemed to breath.

A very old man spent some very long winters in this room. With the windows boarded up.

We tossed a lot of stuff out the window, literally.

Mattresses, old electrics, furniture, rugs, linen (why do old people have so much linen?). That was just the start. In the basement, at least ten cubic meters of old furniture, appliances, boilers, tiles, wooden planks, cabinets full of cloth and unidentifiable metal piping parts, a child-sized plastic castle. And, this being an old French house:

Two cases of champagne.

We’ll keep those. Other stuff, select items from the bottomless mine of kitsch, we’re keeping for a flea market sale.

Here’s what a big pile of rubbish looks like:

This stuff just from the basement.

Now the place is clear (almost). It’s time for the demolition to start.