Three months into château life and I have learned something nobody puts in the renovation brochure.
You don’t “hire contractors” here.
You court them.
You pursue them.
You hope to be chosen, like a young maiden with high hopes and a modest dowry.
We purchased a château in rural France, and with it came an ancient chapel, a coach house, a gatehouse, a private forest, a river, and a boulangère that predates the United States. What it did not come with is a functioning heater, an installed woodstove, a new pool, updated electrics in the outbuildings, three new septic systems, a cleaned chimney, a felled forest, or a repaired entry gate.
It’s nice to have these things, and a whole other adventure to maintain them.
The List, In All Its Glory
Let me be specific, because the specificity is important.
We need new septic systems for the château, coach house, and gatehouse. We need the old pool filled (bad location, safety hazard, small kids, so: non-negotiable). We need a replacement pool installed (because we promised “by summer,” and I’d like to keep my promises and model integrity). And the gatehouse needs its electrics and plumbing redone before summer if we want to rent it.
Meanwhile, the forest is full of dead, diseased, aggressively leaning trees that need felling before gravity took initiative We need a woodstove installed, a chimney tubed and cleaned, and a heater that doesn’t rage-quit multiple times a day. The gate was broken (deliveries were a disaster), and the façade was so dirty it looked like it hadn’t been washed since the reign of someone with a powdered wig.
Each of these things requires a professional.
Each professional requires finding.
Each finding requires communication.
And communication, it turns out, is the project that lives underneath all the other projects, sneakily eating them from below.
We are three months in and it seems I have spent more time hunting contractors than I have spent on anything else. It has become, without exaggeration, a part-time job. Some weeks, a full-time job. A job for which I am unqualified, underprepared, and completely unable to quit.
The Website Situation
The first sign that things would be different here was the websites.
I say this with genuine affection and a mild twitch in my left eye. French contractor websites exist on a spectrum that runs from “built in 2003 and never revisited” to “does not exist at all.” At first I thought this was a regional thing, a rural thing, a maybe-they-just-haven’t-gotten-around-to-it thing. Then I realized it is none of those things. It is a philosophy.
The French do not particularly want you to find them on the internet. They would like you to call. If you cannot call, you may email, though they make no promises about when or whether they will respond. The website - if it exists - is less a marketing tool and more of a courtesy gesture, like a business card you hand someone you don’t particularly expect to hear from.
I grew up in California where I was trained since birth to believe that a bad website means a bad business. I am unlearning this, and it’s taking time.
But once you accept the website situation, you graduate to the bigger issue.
The phone.
And the phone is where this story becomes…personal.
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