The fickle finger of France...

The other world, the French world beckons. The property tax bill came from Castelfranc: 516 € or about $700. As with Vermont property tax, the system for determining the value of your house is hideously complex. The most interesting difference is that instead of basing the tax on the selling price of the house, the French base it on the potential rental value. The way they arrive at this is every bit as complicated as our sale-value system with points awarded for bathrooms, quality of construction, neighborhood, views, etc. But in principle, the French system avoids penalizing taxpayers for living through a real estate bubble.

A real estate bubble could be defined as a market where the sales prices have soared out of all relation to the rents. This obviously can happen where people are selling property at grossly inflated prices and turning around an buying into that same inflated market. Prices are out of any relation to personal incomes. Rents cannot wander so far afield from personal income. Thus property taxes based on rental value will likely prevent the typical Vermont situation where construction workers building high end vacation homes in Stowe can't afford to rent a house within a hour's drive. Or where farmers in gentrifying towns are ruined by soaring property tax bills.

The downside to the French system is that in the Lot at least, some towns are littered with abandoned houses, inherited perhaps by children who live in Paris and have no time or interest in selling or renovating them. The American property tax would tend to force such heirs to unload the house so it could be turned back into productive real estate.

I am grieving my French property tax since the deed even describes the house as "in very bad shape with neither heat nor comfort." Why on earth did we buy a house without heat or comfort? And why do we keep thinking in terms of renting the place in the summer to well-to-do British and northern Europeans?

After months of work, what do we have to show? I pulled out the stairway, ripped apart the what was left of a bathroom and kitchen, cut huge "saignees" or bloodlines!, gooves in the stone walls to conceal electrical and water lines. And I ripped up the sidewalk in front, poured a waterproof concrete barrier wall, laid drainpipes, covered over with gravel, and poured a new sidewalk. All to reduce moisture wicking up the front walls. Lots of rainwater collects down at our end of the town and drains into a storm sewer line that runs right under our garden and down into the Lot.

With EVERYTHING to be done, what possessed me to obsess about moisture in the masterbedroom wall? Why didn't I just consider buying a dehumidifier? Master Alain had me under his spell at the time, but still!

Here is the sidewalk ripped up, the black stub wall poured, the gravel placed, and the fabric overlaid.




Now I have leveled up and mortared in expansion joints, plastic extrusions which also serve as guides for levelling out the concrete.


Et voila, just about the same sidewalk as before I jackhammered up the old one. Am I crazy? (Note that after all this work, the bizarre brick infill area under the window still remains to be finished off.)

Thimble

At home in Vermont: This is the magic thimble. This searing hellhole haunted my troubled sleep as Mrs Snoutsworthy used friendly persuasion by day but penetrating will waves from her fiery store of stubbornness. By night. Cutting this circle through cement block and then clay liner in this chimney. All these years this chimney has been in mystical harmony with the land and airmasses around this house and has blown nearly 100% of the smoke out of the old Elm in the basement. Doing surgery on this chimney attracted me like having to reattach a severed arm in the bush. Who could know the inner logic of a functioning chimney?

When the operation was scheduled, I first created a dustproof plastic screen around the surgical theater to avoid freaking out the couch or the bookcases who might just fear their turn was next. But when I undressed the drywall and studs from around the chimney, the extra thimble appeared in just the right place like a wish granted by a genii. I slowly redressed the chimney in slate from Brazil with cement board and thinset mortar and metal studs and other clothing. To surround the thimble, I drilled a million small holes in one piece of slate, the same million holes it would have taken to penetrate the chimney with a new thimble.