New here? I’m Kamille. We left California, moved to rural France, and bought a small château in the countryside. This is Castle Diaries, where I write down all the renovation details, stories, and how often it actually goes wrong.
This post is about a pool that does not yet exist.
We started planning the pool in January, just weeks after buying the château, which tells you something about our priorities and possibly about us as people.
The first pool company came out, walked the property, listened carefully while we explained where we wanted it and how big, and then sent a proposal for a pool in a completely different place, in a different size. Not in any way adjacent to what we’d discussed. So we wrote back with a few small corrections and asked whether we might meet again.
Alas, we never heard from him. Not that week, not any week. Not ever.
Moving on!
So we asked around and found another pool company. We met, talked, brainstormed, and eventually their proposal arrived, and we signed the paperwork that bound all of us together on this project, like a marriage. And like most marriages, the real work began after the union.
We told the pool guy (we’ll call him François) exactly what our goal was, which was for our children to be swimming by the summer. We painted the whole picture, and also told him we were prepping the coach house as a summer rental and it would be wonderful to have the pool ready for guests. He said no problem! He would have it done by July.
Then a legitimate schedule arrived, with the work broken out week by week, every phase laid out in order, ending on a completion date of July 21st. We were over the moon to have an actual schedule like this, which felt like an anomaly among the typical French workflow we had experienced so far.
The first work week came and the team showed up on time, with bells on, and demolished the old unusable pool with tremendous efficiency and speed. It was gone within a few days, and we stood there watching, thinking, “Well, look at this. Look at us. We’ve finally got it all figured out.”
The funny thing is, back in May, the project had already been pushed once, because at that time there was too much rain. François told us that the ground was too wet, and that we needed sunshine.
So we waited for sunshine. And when it finally arrived, it never left.
Be careful what you wish for.
It’s hard to convey how hot it got here without the numbers, so I will give you the numbers. France recorded its hottest day in history on June 23rd, clocking in at 44.3°C (111.7°F) in Pissos, which is in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. Paris hit 40.9°C (105.6 °F). Over 1,000 people died from the heat in this country before June was even over. 845 schools closed. By the time the fifth heatwave of the summer rolled through in mid-August, France had never had a year with five.
We chose northern France in part because we assumed we’d be spared (everybody knows the south is the furnace). We picked the green half, the rainy half, the half with mist, but no region was spared from the heat this year. Ours was just slightly less murderous than the south.
The wildfires were the worst part and thankfully they didn’t reach us. 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres) burned in France this summer, more than anything in living memory, and Spain had the largest fire in its recorded history. We were lucky enough that the fires never got close enough for us to even smell the smoke, but I still checked the news every morning like it was a weather report, because that’s pretty much what it had become.
And the heat wasn’t even a wave, really. A wave implies it goes in, and then out again. This came in several weeks long, broke for two or three days, and came back before anything had cooled down. The nights stayed hot, which means you couldn’t open the house up in the evenings. If you opened the windows at 10pm, all you would get was more hot air.
We were told we would be well-protected from the heat inside the stone walls of the château and coach house. And while this held true in the spring, summer told a different story of these old stone homes.
They’re famously impenetrable in the heat. They stand there cool and smug while the new builds down the road cook, and there’s a real, age-old reason for it, which is that the walls are two feet thick and it takes a very long time for heat to get through them. The stones hold in the cold the way a cellar does. Everyone tells you this when you buy one, and for about four days, it’s true.
But it only works to a point. If it’s suddenly 100°F on Monday, you’re fine inside. Tuesday, still fine. By Friday, after five straight days over 100, the stone has been absorbing heat the entire week with nowhere to release it at night. So on Saturday, when the temperature “drops” to 90, the house is significantly hotter than it was on Monday at 100. The walls have become a battery. Everything you loved about the building is now working against you, slowly, at its own pace, and there is nothing you can do to hurry it back the other way.
What was once your savior becomes your enemy.
We had a few truly ugly portable AC units, which saved us, and we adjusted our whole lives to the mornings. Anything outdoors had to be done before 11am, and afternoons and evenings we got very inventive indoors.
So we made the most of it, but this wasn’t the case for everyone. Overall, France caved.
This is a country that has spent decades declining air conditioning on principle, citing the thick walls, the shutters, the seasons, a certain national toughness about discomfort, and general suspicion of AC units making you sick. AC was just for Americans who couldn’t cope (that’s me!). And then this summer the units sold out nationwide, the mid-range ones disappearing from Bricomarche and E.Leclerc and Leroy Merlin within about 48 hours of every heat spike, and installation waits went from three weeks to ten. Yes, the French bought air conditioners, in enormous numbers. Not smugly or ironically or even shamefully, but because it had actually become dangerous.
I didn’t feel vindicated about it. Instead, I felt awful. There’s no satisfaction in watching a country give up a thing it was sort of right about, because the conditions it was right about stopped existing.
Everything went dusty - that’s the texture I’ll remember. Dry and crunchy underfoot everywhere you walked, the grass gone to straw, the gardens absolutely roasted. Every department in mainland France ended up under some kind of water restriction. I found myself actively longing for mist, and dew, and wet leaves and that specific smell, and gutters running, and having to find somebody’s boots. I never thought I would actually miss the mud - the infamous mud I’m always complaining about in my posts.
But the mud didn’t come, because the rain didn’t come.
And still, somewhere underneath all of this, on a spreadsheet on my computer, was a pool completion date of July 21st.
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers, because it’s the details I don’t reveal to the whole internet: what the delay actually was in the end, the guests who checked out of the coach house halfway through their stay and asked for their money back, the promises I made to my 7-year-old and to my nieces that I then could not keep, and where the pool actually stands as of this week.
Castle Diaries is the transparent version of the renovation. Twice a month, plus two additional posts about life in France as an American.
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