Playing Ketchup

OK sorry sorry I know I've been slacking on the blogs. But it's a blog. They're like that. Periods of intense activity followed by dormant phases. A blogasm, and then a nap. Anyway, I'll try to catch up a bit here, because there has been some action to report.

Starting with this morning. Nicolas came back.

Put up the big rolling scaffold, and tomorrow we lose our front door for a while. he's gonna do the tall wall, the verandah wall. This is the important wall, since I plan on spending a fair amount of time on the verandah this summer, and Nicolas is gonna work his mason-mojo on it. I can't wait.

And now I have a list of things to update you on.

The Downstairs Bathroom

We went into Bordeaux the other day to hook up with an antiquitaire we'd met at the same antiques fair where I got my glorious desk. And this guy had quite a collection, massive things, entire stairwells from old buildings, rosette church windows, wells, ironwork, great heaped piles of architectural details... and some bathtubs too.

This is our new tub, destined for downstairs. Nice. Even came with a very cool set of taps, not shown. And while we were there, we struck a deal on a bunch of these as well:

These I love. Antique tiles, 9 square meters of it, and a good price, since there's apparently not much market for such a limited quantity. But for our future bathroom, it's just perfect.

The layout of the bathroom has been amended a bit as well:

As you can see, we've taken some advice from the assembled crowd. The direct sightline into the shower has been replaced with an eye-level window, and the door moved around the corner. The sink is placed so that the big beautiful antique mirror (which we already have) will illuminate the room with additional daylight. We're thinking of a glass pocketdoor on the shower, so as to steam, and there's a long benchseat built in, so as not to have to steam alone.

Kurt, we looked into the whole Japanese bidet-toilet thing. They're called "washlets", and they're really cool, but not really what we're looking for at the moment, for reasons of personal hygenic preference beyond the present scope of this blog entry.

And, as you can see, we have our new tiles in play here. In reality, we'd probably make a carpet inset of the stuff winding from the bedroom door to the door leading to the garage, with terracotta all around it.

In case you're wondering about that door to the garage: someday it might be an atelier. Imagine replacing the huge wooden barn doors with glass. But in the meantime, it's a way for wet dripping bodies to get from the pool to a toilet without sullying our precious wood floors. No peeing in the pool ok?

Upstairs

Here's what we're envisioning:

Well, sort of. What's not shown here is that the space over the newly created kitchen-dining-living space will be lofted to the roof (hence the big triangle of stone sticking into the sky), probably with some skylights as well. The tiles on the verandah are just dummies; we have no idea what they'll look like. And in reality, we'll have a roof, keeping the brutal rain off our tender heads.

The kitchen is a tricky puzzle. We have holes in every wall. Here's the general layout we've got so far:

We have yet to determine the logistics involved in cutting an irregular shape through a 2-foot-thick stone wall, but we're told it can be done :) All the white-block counters you see will be freestanding pieces; we're not into fitted kitchens. And in addition to the shelves which you can't really see covering the wall with the fridge on it, there will likely be some additional storage in the corner closest to the camera. Also note that the kitchen in this position serves the dining room and the verandah table equally easily. I love the view from the stove (and the fact that SketchUp lets me walk around a virtual house):

All the way across, including three window-wells, to the fireplace on the far wall. Sweet.

Sepses

So what's stopping us from realizing these grand plans? Only one thing, which is the single thing the new kitchen and the new bathroom have in common: wastewater. In order to accomodate the new plumbing, we need a new septic tank into which all our new effluvia can spill. The current kitchen is right by the back garden, owing to the slope of the terrain, but the new one offers no such easy pipe-path. We have it all figured out, in fact, exactly how the pipes will run and where, through which walls, and it's very very easy, except for the new septic tank. Regs say that the tank has to be three meters from the neighbor's property, five meters from any tree, and twenty-five meters from a well. And considering that the vast bulk of our land is uphill from the house, there's no convenient place to put it. The mayor even came round to have a look, and then wrote a letter to the state water commission on our behalf, asking for guidance. We're still waiting for their answer. As soon as we have a new tank dug, the new kitchen and bathroom are both a go.

And of course until we have the new bathroom, we can't eliminate the current one, which contains our only shower. Besides, we need to keep our kitchen where it is until we have a new one. So nearly every facet of the greater project hangs on the state sewage experts' verdict.

What about our current septic tank, I hear you say? Well, it's inside the house, underneath the stairwell toilet. Curious if it would serve us until we could get a new one, we decided to get it cleaned out. Anyway, we wanted to know what was down there, what sort of tank we had. So I called a guy over to deal with it. "We need an untouchable," I tried not to think.

He was not what I expected on first impression: Not an untouchable, in his thirties, clean, kempt, and polite. First impression. Because as my experience with him wore on, I must say that my estimation did diminish quite a bit. First came the issue of tools.

He hadn't brought any.

And so, to first pry up the cement panels which guarded the gates of hell, he had to use mine. And then there it was: the hatch. Round, cement, barnacley and encrusty. Yick. He pried that up too. I braced myself for the stenchblast... but there was none. Not really. That's the magic of septic tanks, I guess, that they don't just store your shit, but actually process it, break it down into "clean" water. Yeah, right. What it looked like was wet dirt caking the top of the tank, and not much else. So then the vidangeur (let's call him Dirk) went to his truck, and assembled his huge sewage-sucking hose system. Like the trunk of some fetid swamp-dwelling mastodon, it snaked across the grass, over the balcony, into the bedroom, and through to the prize it sought: that hatch opening into the inky unknown.

Scchhhhhhlllluuuppppppp. It started to suck. And under Dirk's expert guidance, the top layer of scum disappeared into its thirsty nozzle. He looked up at me and smiled toothily, almost complicitly, and said, "she's not young." Referring to the tank, I guess. But it was that smile that bothered me, that really made me realize with inner force: this guy works with vast quantities of other people's shit all day long, hundreds of gallons at a time. Other people's shit, that's his bread and butter. I don't mean to be classist or anything, but it kept running through my mind: This guy is an untouchable. Then his voice broke through my reverie, and brought me back to the situation at hand.

"Can I use your garden hose? And a flashlight?"

"You don't have your own?"

So I went and got them for him, and watched while he managed the giant slurping straw with one hand, while hosing down the interior of the tank with the other. I should say at this point that without the cake of fermented muck atop the tank's netherworldly contents, the smell was beginning to really rise, sharp and fast, through the house. Every once in a while, Dirk would put down one or the other hose to inspect the tank's interior with the torch I had supplied. And slowly, through spatter, manual contact, and environmental proximity, both the hose-gun and the light got covered in spackled spatters of shit. Dirk didn't seem to notice, applying himself with ever-increased vigor to the task of probing every possible corner of the tank with his eager tentacle.

"This guy is really an untouchable."

I watched on in horror. At one point late in the game, he somehow temporarily lost control of his coordination, and managed to get a small length of the garden hose stuck across the mouth of the shit-suck hose. I watched as, like Laocoon, he wrestled the two intertwining serpents free of one another. The garden hose had suffered a mortal wound, however, and now spouted a thin stream of fecally-contaminated water out of a small rip in its side. Thinking quickly, Dirk shoved the entire length of the hose into the septic tank. Then again with the unnerving smile: he was proud of his ingenuity. "I've got an idea, I'll borrow your garden hose, then I'll completely dip it into the collected shit of the last five years' occupants of the house!" Genius.

Finally, and not too soon, it was time for him to go. He switched off the suction behind the insatiable hosebeast, dragged it across a room and out into our garden leaving a souvenir trail of slime across the floor, and then returned, I thought, to tidy things up. The hose was still waist deep in the cesspit, after all. But I was wrong.

"Now I'm done," he said. "You need to fill the tank halfway up, and then reseal it. I looked at him incredulously, and mistaking my shock for ignorance, he repeated himself. "Don't fill it up more than halfway," he concluded, "now I'll go get your invoice. You can pay me by check." And he did, and I did, and I was glad he didn't offer to shake my hand at the end of it because this guy was definitely an untouchable.

And, cursing everything that is clean and holy, I found some sandwich bags to use as gloves, and filled the tank half-way up, before refitting the sewer-lid in place and throwing the hose away. Then I took a very long, very hot shower.

Finally, clean as a new penny, I called the company who had sent Dirk over to play. I explained to the secreatary there that, not only had Dirk borrowed and then sullied my property, but that he had left me with a portal to the very farthest depths of hell wide-open in my house, and that the demons were getting out and terrorizing my family. And you know what she said? "Sir, I frankly find it bizarre that you find this bizarre. Every vidange company works just the same."

Hmmm.

Well, there is at least some good news out of all this. I now know, and very well, exactly what there is under the bathroom floor downstairs in my house and need therefore no longer be plagued by mystery. What's more, when we finally get a new tank somewhere, we can fully decommission this one and render it inert to the world evermore. In five years, the mayor tells us, the main drain will reach all the way to our house anyway. And I got my first experience mixing and using cement, with which I completely erased all trace of the hole under the floor. It's all sealed away now. Demons contained for the moment.

That was a long story. And I have so much more to blog about: our glorious bedroom fireplace, our hunt for the perfect stove, Kepler's successes with French in school, and our expanding regional exploration. I was going to detail our plans for the attic, and for other parts of the lower floor. But you know what? After writing all that about Dirk and the aftermath of his visit, I think I'm gonna go take another long hot shower. Some things don't wash off so easily.