Visit to Paris 2

The next day we got to work on the details of the apartment.  The most important business was meeting our architect, Monsieur P.  In fact his role in the project is more a combination of the roles of architect and contractor in the building jobs I have experienced in the US.  He drew up the plans like one would expect from an architect, but he is also our main contact person for the job, the person we sat down with to pick out the tiles and the flooring and the handles on the cabinets, things that on previous jobs we had done with the contractor. 

We had never met Monsieur P.  When we asked Sandy to describe him, her reply was that he, “looked like us.”  When we met him at the apartment I guess I could see what she meant.  Monsieur P. could easily be a professor.  He is about my age, taller than me, blue eyes, graying hair cut a little long.  He was wearing a corduroy sports coat over a vest that looked like it must have been designed for architects, covered with pockets for pens and tape measures.

We stood in the bedroom going over a few things that needed to be decided while we were there.  One big question was about placement of the toilet.  Like most French apartments, ours was constructed with a salle d’eau, a bathroom that is just that, a room with a sink and a bath/shower, but no toilet.  Then there is a little room with a toilet, in our case it’s the first door when you walk into the apartment.  The two rooms back into each other, so we had the possibility of taking down the wall between them and creating an American-style  bathroom.  It would be that much bigger, and to me anyway, the idea of having to walk out in the hallway to go to the bathroom after I take a shower seems a little strange.  On the other hand, if two couple were ever staying in the apartment, I guess it would be convenient to have a toilet available while someone else was showering, and of course this configuration is more authentically French.

Well, whatever you replied to that poll, it doesn’t matter, because Monsieur P. was very firm about it.  If we want to rent the apartment to more than one couple at a time, we simply have to have a separate toilet.  I guess he is right as a practical matter, but really it’s one of those cultural things.  Toilets in the bathroom just seem strange to French people.  I am holding out, by the way, for one of the few American comforts that I actually care about:  a fixed shower head, attached to the wall, as opposed to one of those hand-held things that wind up spraying water from one end of the bathroom to the other, and never actually stay in the little holders that are supposed to hold it while you do something else, like actually wash yourself.  We’ll see if I get my way on that one.

We had emailed Monsieur P. that we would like to take him to lunch, so around 1:00 or so we headed out with him, Sandy and Philippe to find someplace to eat.  right around the corner we found a cafe called Cafe Le Pierrot and randomly walked in.  It was one of those amazing experiences you only have in France.  The place was full, and CAM and I were the only Americans in there.

It is still decorated in the original  Art Deco style, tiffany lamps, brass and glass.  And as though it were nothing at all, everyone sat down to an enormous lunch.  The special of the day was pork ribs in sauce “barbecue,” Philippe had that, M. P.  had an enormous, mostly raw steak hache.  CAM had skate wing in caper sauce, the most I have seen her eat for lunch in about five years.  I had a wonderful omelette paysan, layered with sliced potatoes, gruyere cheese and ham.  The men all had beers first, Sandy had wine, all this in the middle of a work day.  It took about two hours, but we still had a lot to do.  So when lunch was over, we said goodbye to Sandy and Moulan (who had come to the restaurant, of course).  Monsieur P. had a meeting for an hour or so, so we went with Philippe to look at convertible couches at Maison Convertible.  

Paris Visit I

 

Blogging confirms the first law of writing, which is that if you sit down and write a little bit every day, or even most days, before you know it you have a whole lot written without a great effort.  Most of it is terrible, of course, but even if a quarter of it is any good you are way ahead of the game.  Speaking of writing every day, I have also found lately that it is much easier to get motivated to blog when I am unhappy; now that things are going smoothly it’s easier to let it slide.  I suspect this phenomenon explains a lot of the negative tone you see on the internet.

That, and it’s hard to resist handing out little pearls of wisdom once you feel like you have a platform.

Anyway, we got to Paris… when was it?  A week ago last Sunday.  Exhausted like you always are.  We were staying at the rental apartment owned by our friends Sandy and Philippe, a beautiful little one-bedroom/studio that has to be the best deal in the city.  They had picked up the keys from our Monsieur P., our architect, so we headed over to Rue d’Ouessant to meet them.  They showed up with Moulan in tow, as always.  Once we got into the apartment we realized that pictures had not done justice to how completely demolished it was.  Where the tiles had been ripped off the floor there was just concrete rubble in between the floor joists.  Wires were sticking out of the walls everywhere, and grooves had been cut in all the walls where the new wires are going to go.  There were workers everywhere, mostly Polish, though they spoke French, ripping down wallpaper and smashing old ugly shelves with crowbars.

We hung around for a while, and took some pictures.  Here are some familiar ones of the kitchen and bathroom, or what’s left of them.

Oh, and the view is still there, as is all the beautiful light that streams in.

Afterwords we had lunch at a little Cafe on the Place Contrescarpe, near Sandy and Philippe’s apartment where we were staying.  Contrescarpe has to be one of the most scenic little squares in Paris, perfect Bohemian 5eme.   it was late by then and we knew we had dinner reservations, so we were trying to eat light.  I had onion soup, which was good not great, and CAM had an omelette fromage, which was perfect, soft just to the point of a little runny at the center.  As these cafes always are, the place was full of French people eating real meals, drinking wine.

We then went back and rested for a while, and headed back out to see the beautiful little place that Sandy and Philippe just purchased in the same wonderful neighborhood.  More wine and cheese, and by the time we left we wondered if it was really worth going out to eat.  We were tired, we had basically been eating all day, we had to get back on the metro to get to the restaurant.  But what the Hell, so we set out to Le Marcab (If you follow these links, you will find that French restaurants have very fancy websites, too fancy if you ask me.  tons of flash animation.  Usually I just want to look at te menu.), on Rue Vaugirard, in the 15eme close to our new apartment.  Carol had found a review of the place at John Talbott’s excellent blog.

As it turned out, we had the best meal we were served all week.  Like most French restaurants, along with individual selections they offer a “menu” with a shorter list of items at a better price.  Entree (appetizer in French), main course and dessert.  Sometimes for lunch you can choose a main course and either an entree or a dessert.  Anyway we almost always order from the prix fixe menu.  The one that night had only a single set of offerings:  a cold course, creamy pumpkin soup topped with toasted pumpkin seeds, a hot appetizer, smoked salmon mi-cuit (half cooked, smoky on the outside and still cool in the center) surrounded by a wild mushroom puree, and then roast pork with an emulsion of foie gras and a pile of french fry sized sticks of baked polenta with cheese.   Dessert was a pear crumble with a layer of hot fundge and homemade cinnamon ice cream.

The French Banking System (cont’d)

We received the first request for payment from the contractor who is doing the work, so we have to get the mortgage bank to issue a payment.  Our instructions arrived from the indispensible L. at French Home Finance.
Dear et and cam,
As discussed, please find below instructions on having your renovation contractor’s invoice paid by the bank:
· You should write “bon pour paiement” on the invoice, date it, and then both sign the invoice in full
· E-mail a copy of the signed invoice to Mr. D at the bank, which will be handling your file (he is out of the office until next Monday) at the following address: xxx.  Technically, the bank will only need a copy of the invoice, however, do keep the signed original available, in case the bank comes back and asks you for it.
· As for whether payment to the contractor is done by cheque or by bank transfer, it seems both methods are possible.  Obviously, the bank would need the bank account details of the contractor in order to arrange the transfer (R.I.B.) – do discuss this with Mr. D when you e-mail him on Monday.
I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Best regards, L
OK, so I scan the invoice and send it off, and receive the following reply....
Cette notification d'+AOk-tat de remise est g+AOk-n+AOk-r+AOk-e automatiquement.
+AMk-chec de la remise aux destinataires suivants.
What this is a French email bounce notice.  I tried it again and it happened again, so I sent the whole business on to L.  Here is the reply....
I checked with the bank and they confirmed that this is Mr. D’s correct e-mail address. 
Their explanation for the rejection of your e-mail was that it is due to Mr. Ds’ mail box being too full, given that he was on holiday.  Please try sending your e-mail again, and if this is rejected too, I will let the bank know and they’ll try to fix the problem at that stage.
Please let me know…
Best regards,
L
I sent it off again, and so far haven’t received either a confirmation or another failure to deliver, so we’ll see.  As of now, the contractor hasn’t been paid….

Back in US, Just Barely

So much for blogging live from Paris.  We were just so busy, and by the end of the day I didn’t feel like dragging out my laptop.  Everything went great, more on that soon.
In the meantime the issue was getting home.  By the time our plane landed in Atlanta, there were two feet (maybe 60 centimeters) of snow on the ground in Cville, and there was no way we were getting in.  The first word from Delta was that they could get one of us out on Monday, the other on Tuesday, this coming on the cell phone while we waited in the customs line.  Rent a car, they said, but there wasn’t a single rental in Atlanta.  But we talked our way onto a flight into Greensboro, got in at 1100, rented a car, spent the night at my sister in law's, got out and on the road by 9:00.  What is normally a three and a half hour drive took five hours.  Once we got past Lynchburg the road was lined with abandoned cars and trucks, and by the time we got into Cville things were barely moving, 24 hours after the snow had stopped falling.  I have never seen so much snow here, it is past my knees.  We made it into our street, skidded down the hill and came to rest in a snowbank.

Very quick post from Paris

We have been too busy, or having too good a time, to post while we are here.  Everything is going great, though, we are now on our way to Madrid to do some actual work for a couple of days.  Quick story:  we needed to see our banker today, we called all morning but no one picked up the phone (this is Barclays, a huge downtown branch).  Was it a  bank holiday we didn't know about?  We really needed to see her, so we decided to stop by, and sure enough they were open for business.  Do you have an appointment, the receptionist asked?  No, we replied, we tried to call but no one answered the phone.  She shrugged:  Oh, she said, we must have been out.

On the other hand, our friend Sandy brought her dog.  No questions asked, Moulan just trotted in to the conference room, the bankers all stopped by and fussed over her.

And I should add that unlike in the US, we actually have a banker who knows us by name and couldn't be any more gracious when she sees us.

More soon.  I have pictures, etc.  I just need a little time.

Good News! Our Apartment is Demolished.

Good news, present tense:  we sent Monsieur P, an email making plans for our visit next week, and he wrote back to let us know that the demolition was well underway.  What's more, he sent pictures, and they look great.  My expectation was pretty much that we would get to Paris and be greeted with a bunch of excuses about delays, and work that had just barely gotten started.  But it looks as though pretty much everything has been ripped up, the ugly wallpaper, the ugly tile in the kitchen, the ugly shower, the ugly tile floor in the living room, all gone.  It makes you think that it is going to be a very different place when they are all done.    


                                                                           Kitchen==>

We leave for Paris on Saturday.  It will be fun to blog from there.  I hope CAM gets into restaurant reporting.




<===== Bathroom

                                                                                                         
                                                                                                         

                                        






<=== Larger bedroom

Dropping like flies

Once the Promesse de Vente was finally signed, and the closing scheduled for October, there was still a lot to do, and none of it proceeded linearly. We still had to secure a loan, find someone to renovate the apartment and come up with a plan and a budget, and settle on a notaire, the fancy French bureaucrat who plays a role combining a notary, a lawyer, and a million of those mysterious and expensive little jobs that occur in the background of American real estate transactions, like escrow and title search. Then it was still Flathunter's job to tie all this together, to act as our agent in Paris, recommend people for the jobs, and coordinate all the arrangements. C's job was supposed to be done… she was the chasseur, the apartment hunter, and we presumed that the management tasks would revert to H., the British-American supervisor with whom we had signed the original contract.

We soon had a mini-crisis to cope with, pretty much all the players involved. In order to get our mortgage improved, we needed to submit a devis, basically a formal estimate from a contractor. We had two obvious contacts for contractors, the first, C, had been recommended by Flathunter. [This pretentious first-letter system I have been using to anonymize people must have worked better for nineteenth century novelists who had control over their character's initials. Most everyone involved in this story turns out to be a C. I should probably just make up names.] Anyway, this C was a very nice young woman who actually visited the Bellechasse apartment with is, as well as another one I haven't mentioned. I think we pretty much assumed we would use her. The other option was Monsieur P (first initial C), an architect associated with the company that we hope will wind up handling our rentals. We got estimates from both of them. The one from C was 30% lower than the one from Monsieur P. We submitted both to our mortgage broker, assuming we would be going with the cheaper system, but we got a surprise… the broker wrote back that the bank had rejected Mlle. C, because her company had a bad credit rating.

Now what? Turn to Flathunter, they can help us figure it out. But emails to H quickly started to go unanswered, leading to a familiar feeling of being disconnected from any guidance. What exactly were we supposed to do? Finally we sent a sterner email pleading for some kind of response. The response: she was sorry, she had been meaning to tell us, but she had left Flathunter to go to business school in Barcelona. We were upset and worried, but Carol managed to get her on the phone, had a long conversation, and was reassured. H said that she would certainly follow our case through to conclusion, she felt responsible for us and would make sure everything went OK. We never heard from her again.

So with H. gone we turned to Maitre L, our Notaire. We had to arrange to put 10% of the purchase price down in escrow with the Notaire, and to sign papers for power of attorney so we would not have to be there at the closing. At first, everything went fine, if you don't count the endless Fed Ex fees. But then, Maitre L.'s emails started to tail off as well. At first this wasn't unusual, of course, Notaires are never very reliable emailers. But as communication started to get rarer and rarer, we got that familiar feeling: Is anyone home? Then the same pattern occurred, we got anxious, sent a demanding email, and after several days received a reply from Maitre L's firm that Maitre L was no longer employed there. This was a blow. Maitre L had been specifically recommended to us, in fact by H, now of Barcelona. It had been emphasized over and over that we absolutely needed to have a English-speaking Notaire. Now we had no Notaire, and no one at Flathunter to recommend a new one. After several emails to Maitre L's firm, we finally got a brief email back, in French, from some new Notaire who said our case had been assigned to him. He seemed to know nothing at all about us. The power of attorney that we had worked on for weeks would have to be done all over again. As usual, no apologies, no mention of how sorry they were to make us start all over. In fact, the emails had a slightly annoyed tone, like we had neglected to provide him with the power of attorney. Even worse, he said that even with a power of attorney we would have to travel to the French Embassy in Washington to complete the signing. I once spent two days at the French Embassy trying to get a visa for my daughter, so this was a truly horrifying possibility.
 

More emails ensued, and as turned out to often be the case, our mortgage broker, L., finally stepped in, writing a stern email to Maitre F, the chief of the firm, telling him that we absolutely had to be assigned an English-speaking Notaire. Maitre F speaks a little English himself, so it was up to him and he agreed. It is now late September, the closing was scheduled in something like three weeks. We still had no devis, no loan. I'll take up there next time.