Chalet Shenanigans - Chapter 10

"The Help" is not just a movie.

I have been back in South Carolina for a week.

The Good Things:
I got to see all three of my children, their spouses/significant others, and two grandchildren for a whopping total of 18 hours.
I was able to play bridge with 20 of my nearest and dearest for 5 hours.
I went out for dinner/drinks with my friends for 4 out of 7 nights.
I bought mothballs to bring back to the chalet to combat the stone martens.  I found them in the very first store I went in.  Imagine that.  No one questioned me.  No one told me that mothballs were a controlled substance.  They just rung up my mothballs.  That’s how we roll in America.
I was able to watch my favorite TV shows in real-time, not in “taped time”.
I basked in the hot sunshine on my porch and saw nary a drop of snow for seven days.

The Bad Things:

18 hours of Kid Face-Time is not long enough.
3 rounds of bridge is not enough.
I will have a hangover that lasts until March because my friends are like Energizer Bunnies with booze bottles.
I think I am going to have a problem at Customs because I am bringing 2 end tables, one mounted antelope skull with 2-foot long horns, 6 Swedish glass bottles, 1 extremely large wine carafe, 6 cartons of Newports and 2 ceramic laughing goat heads in my luggage.  Oh, and an oil painting
I gained my normal “American Five” (pounds) which I will have to lose when I get home, but this doesn’t panic me like it did in the beginning.

This blog entry is going to be kind of screwy, in that it will try to explain to my ex-pat friends why I am soooo not normal and to my American friends why I am getting a little weird.  Does that make any sense?  Unfortunately, it does in my mind, but nobody lives here in my mind except me and my crazy self.

The other day, I was having coffee in Lausanne with some friends and trying to explain the concept to them of organizing a bridge game for 20 women in my home in South Carolina with a caterer, a bartender and bridge prizes.  The logistics of such an undertaking were just beyond them.
1)       WHERE WOULD THEY PARK?  Well, um, they park in the driveway.  Or, if there’s not enough room, on the side of the house.  Or on the grass.  This comment was met by a wall of silence as they each tried to picture in their mind a driveway that would accommodate 10 or 12 cars.  Or, God forbid, parking on grass.
2)      WHAT DO THE LANDLORDS SAY?  There are no landlords.
3)      WHAT DO THE NEIGHBORS SAY ABOUT THE NOISE?  My noise is not the neighbors’ business.
4)      WHAT DO YOU DO IF THE POLICE COME?  First of all, no self-respecting police officer is going to come up on my property for a measly ol’ bridge party.  We are a bunch of old ladies.  Second of all, the police officer’s mother is sitting at Table 4 bidding Three No Trump.  What?  Is he going to arrest his own mother?  No, I don’t think so.
5)      DON’T YOU WORRY ABOUT DRINKING AND DRIVING?  Well, actually, yes we do.  That is why some of the women enlist their children to come pick them up.  Consequently, around midnight, my house is the place to be if you want to hook up with some friends that you knew from High School, because you can come on in, eat up the fabulous left-over food, laugh at your crazy mothers and arrange to meet up later at somebody’s house.

As I said to my European friends, picture the movie The Help.  Fast forward the hairstyles and the clothes a few decades and you have got Modern Day South Carolina.   Yes, we still have Black women who raise our babies and wash our clothes.  But, we pay them very well.  And, we know their names and consider them our friends.  But, they don’t play bridge with us.  Not because we wouldn’t want them to play bridge with us, but because they have much better things to do than sit around with a bunch of old, white ladies comparing chicken salad recipes and playing a game where no money exchanges hands.  But really, the movie “The Help” is not that far-fetched.  It’s still kind-of like that, where I’m from.

Does that make me a horrible person?  I don’t think so.  Which brings me to trying to explain to my South Carolina girlfriends what my life is like in Switzerland.  Tit-for-Tat, right?

On Mondays, before French class, I meet my girlfriends in Lausanne for coffee.  I’m going to try to explain this little get-together to my South Carolina girlfriends:

1)      WHERE DO Y’ALL PARK, BEIN’ AS IT’S A BIG CITY AN’ ALL?  Well, most of us don’t park.  We take public transport.  Me, personally, I walk to the #9 bus stop down below my house and take it up the hill to where the coffee shop is located.  EVEN THOUGH IT IS BELOW ZERO AND I’M WEARING APPROXIMATELY 25 POUNDS OF CLOTHING.
2)      WHAT DO Y’ALL TALK ABOUT?  OK, I might possibly one of the oldest living ex-pats.  Most women “of a certain age” don’t agree to do the ex-pat thing because it’s really hard and stressful and they are completely settled in their lives at home.  Me, I’m just a weirdo.  Therefore, most of my ex-pat friends are in their 30’s and early 40’s.  We talk about the merits of Full-On Swiss-Schools versus Bi-lingual Schools versus English-Only International Schools.   We talk about where to find our favorite food ingredients.  We talk about which new restaurants we tried.  We talk about where we went skiing over the weekend.  We try to “Out-Switzerland” each other, i.e. who had to pay the most outrageous price for something trivial during the week.  (The week that Mr. Big paid 99 Swiss franc for a dimmer switch still holds the all-time record.)
3)      ARE THEY NICE?   Yes, they’re nice!  Their problems are not the same as y’all’s problems but they are (sometimes) even more serious because, without each other, we have no support group, right?  So, even a problem as seemingly easy as finding an English-speaking gynecologist can become a major thing.
4)      WHAT IF YOU DON’T LIKE WINE OR COFFEE?  The hot chocolate is wonderful.  You can live a full, complete life in Europe without wine or coffee.  Order Jus d’orange.  Or “un verre d’eau”(ahn-fair-doh) which is a fancy way of saying a glass of tap water.

Even after three years away, it is gut-wrenching when I have to leave America.  I hate to leave, but I can’t wait to get back.  I swear, if I didn’t have the Mothball War to look forward to, I would be wanting to stay right here in this warm sunshine!

Here is a perfect example of why I love where I’m from.  I just went out to the mailbox, here in SC, to post a Thank You Note to Charming Daughter’s boyfriend, who bought us a lovely house-warming gift for the chalet.  As I’m reaching into the mailbox which is located down by the road, the UPS driver coming up the opposite way screeches across 2 lanes of traffic, stops his big ol’ brown truck next to the curb just to hug me because he hasn’t seen me in a year.  Y’all, only in America are people on a first-name, huggin’, cheek-kissin’ basis with their UPS driver.  (Hi, Joel!  I hope your boss reads this and you get a raise.  What can Brown do for you?  Well, they can make you feel at home!)

OK, fast forward a week later.  It’s Sunday night, I’m in the chalet, I just spent all day at an auction (my favorite thing in the world) in Martigny, Switzerland, I bought a GIANT set of antlers for the wall in the dining room, and I have coffee and French class to look forward to tomorrow.

Count your blessings, people.  Appreciate those things that make you happy.  Me?  I don’t have enough fingers and toes.  I’m two-continents-full-of-happy.

Chalet Shenanigans - Chapter 9

 Cows Are One Thing, But Stone Martens are Something Else Entirely

The chalet continues to present me with one little surprise after another.  Not long after the cow episode, I was awoken in the night by a terrible racket somewhere up in the rafters.  I stumbled out of bed in my tights, sweat pants, two pairs of socks, camisole and sweat shirt, which is what I wear to bed here in the Alps because it is freakin’ freezing, and went exploring to see what fresh, new Hell had invaded the homestead.

OK, walk along with me here.  It’s dark.  It’s like, 2 a.m.  The noises are outside, thank God, because me and all of my nighttime attire, to which I had added a cozy pair of slippers and a down jacket, are inside.  Really, it sounds like something is gallivanting around and around the house, up above the level of my 5 foot 4 inch head.  It actually sounds like WHATEVER THE HECK THIS THING OR THINGS IS/ARE are using the decorative woodwork as a racetrack.

Quick like a bunny, I scamper back into the bedroom to wake Mr. Big.

Me:  Dude!  Wake up!  Chalet Ruisselet is under attack!

Mr. Big:  Hhhrrrmph.

Me:  Seriously, you need to get up.

Mr. Big:  Have these alleged attackers actually breached the ramparts?

Me:  Well, no.  But disaster is imminent!

He never even opened his eyes.  Knight in Shining Armor, indeed.  More like Knight in Snuggly Bedding.

I then proceeded to stalk the nocturnal intruders from window to window, but my only actual sighting was a bushy tail when it flashed around the kitchen window.

Ah, I thought to myself.  They are just squirrels.  Big, noisy, Alpine squirrels.  So, I went back to bed.

At first light, I was outside in the snow looking for tracks.  Of which there were many.  An alarming number.  And, they were kind of big.  Bigger than say, squirrels.  I pointed them out to Mr. Big but he was not impressed.  Trailing Spouse, he said, you live in the mountains where there is, by nature, a wide variety of flora and fauna.  Apparently you saw some fauna.  Get over it.

I made eye contact three nights later.  Directly outside the glass bedroom doors, playing around like they were at Chuck E. Cheese, were two weasel-like creatures with long, bushy tails.  I screamed like a girl and jumped up on the bed.

Y’all.  You know your husband is completely immune to your charms when you are jumping on his head and carrying on about vermin and he does not even roll over.  I guess we know who will end up defending whom if a serial killer ever breaks in.

Eventually, after my hissy fit, I climbed off the bed and ran into the dining room to consult The God of All Wisdom, i.e. Google.  I typed in “weasel-like Alpine native mammal”.  The very first link had an image of MY thing.  I screamed again.  Aaaaak!  That’s it!  What is that thing!

Mind you, it’s 3 a.m., I’m sitting at my dining room table and I’m talking to myself.  Y’all, I have a Stone Marten infestation.  And, get this, they are living down under the house where I made them a nice, cozy habitat of imploded fireplace stones!  Remember?!  Yeah, I did this to my own self.  Apparently, unbeknownst to me, I inadvertently constructed the Taj Mahal for Stone Martens.

Just now, at 9:17 p.m., I can hear them.  They come out at dusk and play around for about 5 hours and eat random birds, mice, small French children, whatever.  They skip around my rafters and run along my balconies and romp through my yard and then they crawl back up under my house and go to bed.  Yes.  That is what they do.  Google it.

I took some pictures yesterday of their tracks on my deck and of what I like to call The Stone Marten SuperHighway, which is the area of my yard right outside the Stone Marten Taj Mahal.  However.  Their days are numbered.  The God of All Wisdom has told me that mothballs work a treat for an infestation of “Le Martre”.  Now I just have to memorize the word for mothballs in French so I can go to the store,  buy some and annihilate these suckers.  Mr. Big owes me, uh, big.

Update:  After checking every home improvement/hardware/general store in two countries for my “boules de naphtaline”, I was finally told by some kind soul in the pesticide aisle, that my “boules” are only available in, wait for it, the Pharmacie.  Well, of course they are.  Why didn’t I think of that?  If full-strength bleach is a controlled substance, it makes sense that mothballs are considered a weapon of mass destruction and are not safe to be just left sitting around on any old shelf where the general public can easily get their hands on them.

I wonder if I will need a prescription to buy my little balls-o’-death?  We will soon find out because I was going to the Pharmacie today anyway for something for my HEADACHE which continues to worsen because I am on my THIRD DAY without running water.

Yes, the pipes at the chalet are frozen.  We are having a freak cold spell.  The temperature hasn’t risen above zero in two weeks.  I have been carrying big buckets of snow inside the house to melt so I can flush the toilets.  Just this morning, I inadvertently filled the coffeemaker with the bottle of water that has gas in it, (which actually tastes kind of good—I may be onto something here).

Anyway, I called Mr. Big in Jedda two days ago to tell him of my dilemma and to solicit solution ideas.

ME:  Hi, Mr. Big.  Whatcha doin’?

BIG:  I’m having dinner with the Sheik at his palace watching his harem dance and feed me grapes by hand.

ME:  That’s nice, honey.  My pipes are frozen.

BIG:  I do not think there is a safe answer to that remark.

Long story short, he recommended that I follow the water pipe from the furnace room into the crawl space, find the frozen section under the house and blow-dry it.  Apparently the dancing girls had befuddled Mr. Big’s brain because he forgot completely that the CRAWL SPACE is also known as THE STONE MARTEN TAJ MAHAL.

Like there was a chance in Hell that I was going up under the house armed with nothing but a blow dryer.  I will flush toilets with snow water until the spring thaw before I will go into that crawl space.

A call to the plumber in the valley resulted in a smug, French chuckle and a “we’ll put you on the list” sort of attitude because, apparently, everyone in a vast swath across Europe is in the same dilemma.  There are no showers happening in Europe right now, people.  Can you imagine what everyone will smell like by Sunday?  Oh, wait. . .

Chalet Shenanigans - Chapter 8

Fun With Crepi



The holidays are over and it’s back to the grindstone.  We only had Small Son here for the week between Christmas and New Year’s and it was weird.  Good, but weird.  First of all, it was cheap.  He had been here for about three days, when I finally said, “Gentlemen, we need to stop at that ATM (Bancomat) across the street because I am out of money”.



I was chuckling to myself while pulling my euros out of the machine because, when all  9 or 10 (depending upon the girlfriend/boyfriend situation at any given time) of us are together, I go to the ATM at least twice a day.  Here it had been three days until I finally ran out of euros.  Little Dude!  You need to start spending some money or else your father is going to get used to this “thrifty vacation” crap!  You need to start pointing at random shop windows and saying, “Hey, Pops, I NEED that”.  He was letting down the team!



One can’t let Mr. Big get too complacent or it could get to be a habit.  And then where would Charming Daughter, Mrs. Domestic Son and Grand One be next time they came to visit?  In the bread line, begging for centimes, or at the “Grand Magazin” at the January sales?  No, I tell you, this needed to be nipped in the bud.



ME:  Small Son, what is that you are wearing on your hands?

SS:  Dad’s gloves.

ME:  Why?

SS:  I can’t find my snowboarder gloves.

ME:  Really?  (With an evil twinkle in my eye.)  Well, why didn’t you say something, son?  I think we need to walk down to the shops right this very second and buy you some INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE gloves.

SS:  Um, OK, maybe later.  These are good for now.



AAAARGH!  Kid!  What am I going to do with you?  You come for an entire week and your father only shells out 381 euros all week which includes the tube of toothpaste you forgot to bring.  Do you see the dangerous precedent you are setting?  Then, when the girls come to visit and we spend 381 euros in ONE STORE in FIVE MINUTES, he will have a stroke and all the good work I’ve been doing for the last 25 years will have been for naught.

This child, bless his heart, was, literally, quite happy with a croissant, a lift ticket, a few beers and 67 bottled waters per day.  Which explains why a 6-foot 2-inch guy weighs less than me.  More water goes down his gullet every day than in the city-wide sewer management system of Tuscon.  I’ve raised three of these water-guzzling kids and it still boggles my mind.  Where does all this water go?  It’s a generational mystery.  They don’t really pee to an excess, nor do they sweat a lot, so I just don’t get it.  Intra-cellular-water-hoarders.  Weird.  When I was little, the only water we drank was out of the hose on the side of the house when we were really thirsty from running around playing Tag or Dodgeball and/or we wanted to squirt someone.  Sometimes, if our mother had the temerity to run out of Coke, we had to drink tap water, but that was like, a punishment.



Maaaa!  Where’s the Coke?

We’re out.  Drink water.

NOOO!  Mom, seriously, where’s the Coke?  Stop trying to be funny, Mom, because you’re no good at it.  Now, where’s the Coke?



Anyway, it was nice to spend time alone with just Small Son.  I really hadn’t done that since the “gap year” after his sister went away to college and he was still in high school.  We did enjoy, during that year, going out to dinner, just he and I, (remember, Mr. Big travels Monday-Friday), and doing crossword puzzles in the restaurant with no one else bothering us.  He is my retro-geeky-whiz-kid and I just love him to death.  (Right now, I’m sure he is reading this and texting his brother and sister—“Favorite Child, blog alert, Favorite Child!”)

Small Son’s got me off on a tangent, here.  Back to the mountain house.  When we last talked about the chalet renovations, I was planter-deep in the stupid geraniums.  The only other thing I managed to do before we were inundated with snow was “crepi” the pink walls outside on the ground-level  floor.



What is Crepi, you ask?  Well, let me tell you.  CREPI is the stuff that all Americans wish they had when they want that “Tuscan” finish.  Yeah.  That stuff.  This is how Europe does it, America.  And they are keeping it a deep, dark secret and quietly enjoying watching you pay MAJOR dollars to a “faux finisher” to get the same “look”.

I swear, I am going into business exporting Crepi.  This stuff is magic.  It comes in big tubs in the hardware store, but it’s all white.  If you want to tint it, you buy  a tube of “colorant” and mix it to whatever shade you want.  I wanted the exact shade of grey that looks like cement that’s been there 200 years.  We’ll call it “Old French Barn Weathered Grey”.

You apply your Crepi with your special Crepi roller.  Keep in mind that Crepi is the consistency of grits that have been left on the heat 20 minutes too long.  This stuff does not pour.  You have to trowel it out of the bucket into your roller pan.  Then you roll your Crepi brush all up in this gook and, by the time you take your brush out of the roller pan, it weighs as much as a wet Airedale terrier.



So, with a soggy dog clutched in your fist, you schmear it on your house.  And, voila, after three days of this, you have magically turned your pink basement-level floor into  something that vaguely resembles a 200-year old French barn.  If you squint.  And have a couple bottles of wine.  Whatever.  It looks BETTER, and that’s all I’ve got to say about that, except that I was rockin’ some serious biceps there for about a week.

Wait.  There is one more small thing.  A miniscule thing, really.  The configuration of this house is such that, at the very end of the last and final wall to be crepied, the wall itself slowly becomes buried into the hillside.  So, at the last little bit, I was, literally, lying, completely prone, on my back, on rocks, with the deck above me only inches from my face ,breathing in God only knows what kind of bizarre French mold and mildew,  wielding a wet dog on the end of my outstretched arm.  That Michael-Angelo-Sistine-Chapel pose lasted about 9 seconds before I scootched back out to reassess the situation.

I immediately noticed that the pink color had stopped about one meter earlier.  (How I let myself continue that torture for one extra meter more than I had to is beyond me.  I think I was just in a crepi-induced trance).  Hmm, I said to myself, Mr. or Mrs. Previous Owner stopped waaay before I did, therefore, I am completely justified in just going inside and getting a shower right this very second.  However, if, some day, I am having a barbeque out here and one of my guests looks at this wall from a very specific spot at just the right angle, they are going to see that I stopped crepiing and took the lazy way out.  I was torn.  Truly.

Ya know, there are always more than one way to skin a cat.  I had a very small, renovation-related epiphany while standing there staring at my wall.  If applying the crepi to that claustrophobic little triangular area is too difficult, can I not cover it up with some other method?  What if I just fill in that area with more rocks?  And where will I find 2 or 3 cubic meters of random rock?  From the fireplace that I’m ripping out upstairs, of course!



This is how I found myself lugging 65 (not an exaggeration) Hefty bags of rock out of the living room, out onto the deck, across the lawn, down the hill and chunking it up under the house.  Mr. Big was like, “What in the HELL are you doing, woman?”  Well, snookums, I am TRYING to make everything look pretty for our future barbeque guests.  Y’all, I was actually STRATEGICALLY trying to place these rocks in some random order so that they looked NATURAL and not like what they actually were, which was chunks of concrete from inside an imploded fireplace.  I think the magic Crepi ate away at whatever little bits of sanity I was still operating with.  Seriously.

Anyway, all of it is now under 5 feet of snow and no one will see it until May, so it really doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that I DID clear out the old, ugly fireplace and we now have a new, ugly 18-inch deep pit in the middle of the living room, which is a story for another day.

Chalet Shenanigan - Chapter 7

It is blizzarding tonight in the mountains and Mr. Big is outside playing with his new snow blower so I am going to sit inside, drink some wine and write to y’all.  I would light a fire, but the fireplace is one of those things on the demolition list and it is laying in about 12 pieces on the floor next to the Christmas tree, so I’m just picturing a fire.  Which is not really working for me, but one does what one can in times of difficulty.
I am getting ahead of myself.  I can’t talk about snow until I tell you about my geranium adventure.  Mountain gardening is quite different than gardening in, say, South Carolina.  In South Carolina, where it gets so hot and humid in the summer that my children used to come inside from playing and walk directly into the fridge to cool off, (we have a walk-in fridge in the SC house because I used to cater a lot when I was a real working person and not just a Trailing Spouse), you have to worry about your plants burning up and you have to water them every, single day or they will die overnight.

Here, you have to worry about your plants freezing.  In October.  It snowed here in Chatel three days after we moved in.  It was October 3rd.  The previous owner had left me all of her geraniums which were growing in planters along the balconies.  This is a very typical chalet thing.  You line your balcony railings with geraniums in the summer.  She also left me about 20 potted plants and bushes on the two patios.  In the garage, there were about 10 empty burlap bags.  These were the only clues I had about alpine gardening.

Well, when the first snow flake hit the first tender geranium leaf, I freaked.  I quickly got on Google to see what one is supposed to do with geraniums over the winter.  Because I was definitely not throwing these suckers away.  I counted my geraniums and there were 80.  80!!!  The cheapest you can buy geraniums around here in the spring is 15 bucks for a little guy.  My overwrought brain was multiplying a mile a minute and once I reached a thousand dollars, I was in serious panic mode.  Save the Geraniums!  Save the Geraniums!  Where’s That Stupid Burlap?!
I was hoping, when I Googled “overwintering geraniums” that the answer would be something simple like, “bring them inside, you idiot”.  No.  Well, okay, you can bring them inside if YOUR HUSBAND WILL BUY YOU A GREENHOUSE, which mine will not.  I asked.  He laughed.  He is such a tightwad.

For us non-greenhouse-owning peons, we have to manage our geraniums the old fashioned way.  First, you have to take them out of their planters, shake all the excess dirt off of the roots and hang them upside down inside a burlap bag.  Then, once a month, you soak the roots in water and hang them back up.  You keep doing this until spring.  I would rather give birth without an epidural than commit to this archaic and painful process for the next six months, but visions of a thousand-dollar-bill kept flashing in front of my eyes.

Y’all, it took for-e-ver.  Day after day, shake, bag, hang, shake, bag, hang.   I did do the scheduled root-watering routine in November.  I was good.  I was following the rules.  But now it is December and there are two feet of snow on the ground and it is freezing.  Would you want to trudge out the garage, take down a million burlap sacks, spread them out on the snow, water them and hang them all back up?  Neither do I.  It’s a dilemma, I tell you.
These durned geraniums are going to be the death of me.  About two weeks ago, when I first started getting in the Christmas spirit, I was eyeing all of the lovely, empty planters in which the geraniums had recently resided.  Hmmm, I said to myself.  I could make some really alpine-y Christmas decorations out of those planters for the balconies.  So, I spent two days cutting down evergreen branches from my yard, filling the planters and attaching big red bows on the front.  Awesome!  Look how pretty!  I’m like a Swiss Martha Stewart!  I even made Mr. Big install four spotlights in the yard to shine up upon all that loveliness.

Yeah.  That didn’t work out so well.  During snow storms, the winds whip through this charming valley with surprising fury and the entire planter boxes, the jaunty bows and the carefully placed hanging pine boughs were strewn from the house to the Swiss border.  The first morning that I woke up to this mayhem, I thought, “huh, fluke occurrence”.  I chased down my errant decor and painstakingly reconstructed all my prettiness.  BY THE THIRD TIME, (yes, I give new meaning to the term “exercise in futility”), after rounding up my bows, which now look like they’ve been through a Cuisinart, hurling the stupid greenery any-which-way back into the planter boxes and drinking large quantities of wine, I got out the rope.  The planters are now TIED to the balcony with rope and they are not going anywhere.  It looks like shit but they are in place.  (You thought I was going to hang myself with the rope, didn’t you?)

The neighbors must think I’m right out of an asylum.  Oh, wait.  No, they must think WE are right out of the asylum.  It is pitch dark outside, it is pouring down snow, it is about 5 below (C) and my husband is blowing snow off the driveway.  The snow is piling up behind him faster than he can blow it off BUT THAT IS IRRELEVANT.  He is Man With Large Machine v. Nature and he is losing but he is having so much fun, I can’t tell you.  I did ask him how he could even see because it was so dark and he looked at me with no small amount of manly contempt and said, “Woman, it has a headlight.”  Well, of course it does.  Silly me.  I’ll just go back inside, dear, and bake some cookies or something.

Chalet Shenanigans - Chapter 6

We Have a Little Cow Problem

Is there anybody here who didn’t read Under the Tuscan Sun or see the movie?  The funniest parts of the book were where the author had to adapt to the ways of a small, Italian village.  I have been doing some adapting myself to life in Chatel.  Remember I told y’all that the name of the valley is the Vallee d’Abondance?  Well, it turns out that we have our very own cows in our valley called, obviously, Abondance Cows who make, of course, Abondance Cheese.  Go ahead, google it.  It’s legit.  So, if you ever go in a Dean and DeLuca, ask the deli guy if he can get Abondance cheese and then we can have like a Karma connection across 5,000 miles and eat our Abondance cheese together.

Anyway, one of the farmers in Chatel has one of his “high” alpine fields just across the ice rink from our house.  Every day, all day, I get to work on my renovations while being serenaded with cowbells.  It’s very cool.  But.  The farmer also has another field somewhere up above and behind my house.  There must be some farming system of which I am unaware that makes “my” farmer move “my” cows back and forth between the two fields every other day.  So, picture about 30 giant mama cows and about 5 kid-sized cows trundling along our neighborhood roads being followed by the farmer’s wife, the farmer’s young daughter, the farmer’s young son and the farmer’s dog, swinging long sticks and yelling.  (Except the dog—the dog is neither carrying a stick nor yelling.  He is just running around and barking.  Duh.)

And they do this every other day.  I have no idea WHY, but it is what it is.  Cow exercise, maybe?  I don’t know.  After about a week of watching these random cow migrations all over the side of the mountain, I hear the bells one evening.  The bells are really close.  REALLY close.  They almost sound like they are in my yard!  Well, they were in my yard.  They were Cow Escapees.  Cows on the Lam.  The sun was setting and, apparently, Mrs. Farmer was home making supper and the Farmerettes were doing their homework, so it fell upon my farmer, himself, to come round up his errant charges.

He drove his SUV right up in the driveway, let his dog out of the truck, got out his long stick and herded the cows back up the road and into their correct field.  Meanwhile, I’m out on my porch waving and “bonjour-ing” and taking pictures because I think this is really fabulous, right?  Wouldn’t you?
The very next day, the cows got out AGAIN!  Obviously, once they had had a taste of a manicured lawn they were unhappy with their wild pasture land and they were back for more deliciousness. 

Except, this time, they walked around the lake directly ON THE LAKE PATH just like tourists and settled in my neighbor’s yard to happily munch away.  Now, my neighbor is not a nice, American ex-pat like me.  She is French.  And she was not happy, no sirree, bub.  She came screaming out of her house just about the time my farmer rolled across all of our lawns in his SUV again. 

Man, did she let him have it.  I have no idea what she was saying because it was all in super-rapid French at about two octaves above normal, but he got his cows out of her yard tout de suite.  He and his little daughter had those big, fat mamas RUNNING around the lake.  At one point, he looked across the lawn at me.  I waved and took his picture.  I think I gave America a good name that day, at least compared to Cruella de Frenchie.

The next day the whole Farmer family came to get all of the cows.  Apparently, the cows were being banished to their barn for the winter for misbehaving and running amok in our neighborhood.  I was so mad!  It was all my neighbor’s fault!  No more cowbells ‘til spring.  Now I just get to listen to Mr. Big swearing at the walls all winter long.

Chalet Shenanigans - Chapter 5

1994 Called.  They Want Their Décor Back.

Well, they can have it.  We bought the chalet from the original owners, a lovely British couple who built the house in 1994 and lived there year-round.  Obviously, they picked out everything from the tile to the layout of the rooms to the carpet in 1994 and were completely content to let it stay that way. . . forever.

People, if it wasn’t breathing, it got stenciled.  There were flower-y and mountain-y paintings everywhere:  going up the banisters, on the bathtub surrounds, on the door jambs, you name it.  And this wasn’t some tacky, do-it-yourself attempt at home décor.  It had obviously been done by a professional and it probably cost a lot of money.  It was all free-hand and accurate down to the minutest detail.  For example, if you look at the alfresco painting above one of the sitting rooms, it depicts a mountain scene with cows, a wood-carver with a miniscule chain saw, some teeny goats, and, if you look very, very closely, two tiny parapenters floating down the sides of the slopes.  (That’s the only painting I’ve kept.  The other adornments have all succumbed to 40-grit sandpaper.  Au revoir, edelweiss.  Hasta la vista, wild strawberry vines.)

Acrylic paint a la 1994 is easily annihilated.  Piece of cake.  But the actual floor plan?  That’s a little more difficult to change.  Remember, in 1994, not many people had “great rooms” or “open floor plans”.  Well, OK, maybe Californians had them because they are ubercool, but regular people?  No.  They had separate EVERYTHING.  Separate living room.  Separate dining room.  Separate kitchen, etc.   And so does our chalet.

Now, when a person from 2011 walks into a house from 1994, they are going to feel cramped.  It’s natural.  How will I entertain?  Where will everybody go?  They’re all going to try to cram into the kitchen and the kitchen is only as big as a shoebox!  Where am I going to fit my sectional sofa and my cool, industrial coffee table that is approximately the size of Utah?  Huh?  Where?

So walls were coming down.  That was a given.  But which walls to choose from among so many?  Which walls can come down and not make the house fall onto our heads?  Normally, in a regular house constructed of 2 x 4’s and sheetrock, Mr. Big can find the load-bearing walls and plan accordingly.  Here, not so much.  This house was constructed “en madrier”, which means no framing, no sheetrock, no nothing.  Just logs.  Logs that have been specially planed at the sawmill to fit one on top of the other EXACTLY LIKE LINCOLN LOGS, only squared off, not round.  So, to build a wall, you stack.  And, at the junction where two walls meet, you interlace.  Tres, tres, tres complique.

We found a construction expert who spoke English.  His name was Music.  Yes.  You heard me.  Music.  I asked him to spell it because I didn’t believe him.  I thought it was possibly some weird French name that I had not yet been acquainted with.  No.  He was Irish and I guess his mother was partaking of recreational pharmaceuticals back in the day, but whatever.  As long as he knew about building with Lincoln Logs, what the heck did I care what his name was?   Music was not a bringer of glad tidings.  Apparently, because our renovation plans involved ripping out the fireplace wall and the fireplace, we would not be able to start until after Christmas.  (Remember, it was October 2nd, three days after we moved in.)

Really, Music?  And why the delay, pray tell?  Well, because “the fireplace guy” is busy until after Christmas.  THE fireplace guy?  What?  There is only one guy in all of France who builds fireplaces?  Surely not, Music.  France is a pretty big country, after all.  I mean, compared to IRELAND, or something.  It turns out there is only one fireplace guy IN THE VALLEY, who speaks English and whom Music trusts.  OK.  I can accept that explanation.  Mr. Big, however, is really feeling cramped.  When Mr. Big is feeling cramped, he starts to feel itchy, which leads directly to claustrophobic, which leads directly to the Land of Power Tools.

Y’all.  It took about 3 hours after Music left with his sad notes, before Mr. Big was muttering around and measuring various things.   You have to realize that he and I have a motto.  “If someone with no teeth can do it, we can do it.”  This motto has served us well in the past and saved us multiple thousands of dollars.  I’m not saying Music had no teeth, (he had a full set, as far as I could see), but you get what we are saying.  We ain’t skerrt, as we say in the south.

You saw in the previous blog post that he started practicing on the powder room.  That one wall involved at least 8 trips to the hardware store (which is 20 minutes each way up and down the mountain into Switzerland).  I now know every word for every kind of saw in French, because I had to buy every bloody one of them.  And then, I had to return every bloody one of them because the engines burned up.  BECAUSE THEY DON’T CUT THROUGH FRIGGIN’ MADRIER.  Apparently, it’s like trying to cut down a pine tree with a pair of pinking shears.  You need a chain saw.

Please tell me you can picture in your mind’s eye, Mr. Big, INSIDE THE HOUSE, cutting down walls with a chain saw.  Yes.  Picture me rushing around like a madwoman trying to protect what few pieces of furniture I have purchased from flying DEBRIS that’s coming out of the back of his saw like ordinance.  Please try to picture this scenario.  I finally resorted to staple-gunning bed sheets DIRECTLY TO THE WALLS in a semi-circle around him.  Truly, it was like the Texas Chain-Saw Massacre inside my house, except with projectile pine shrapnel instead of brain matter.  Oh la la, indeed.

It is now one month later of being “weekend warriors” and the fireplace wall is gone.  The fireplace, itself, is a story for another day.  The additional, 6th bedroom, that we don’t need, has now been incorporated into the “great room”.  This is a slow process but soon Mr. Big will be able to retire from The Company and just become an expert “en madrier” renovation and fireplace construction.  I hear there is a real shortage in the area.  I can see his little placard now, “Have Chain Saw, Will Work”.

Chalet Shenanigans, Chapter 4

Renovation Rules

Once we finished with the notaire and officially owned the house, (which is called Chalet Ruisselet, or Chalet Near a Little Stream), we drove directly up the drive with plans to start immediate demolition.  This is how we roll.  We are crazy people.  Ahh, see, none of you really know THE REAL US because I’ve only been writing this blog since we moved to Switzerland.  Because we RENT an apartment in Lausanne and our landlords live directly below us, I think they might notice if we started ripping out walls and jackhammering through the floor even though we really want to and we have to restrain ourselves on a daily basis.  I don’t think we are even allowed to paint, if you want to know the truth.  I’m not sure because I haven’t been brave enough to try.

But, now that we OWN something, we are off like hounds to the scent.  Happily for us, Mr. Big and I each have our own different paths that we follow when a renovating a house or a commercial building.  This time will prove to be no different.  We pull up in the driveway and say to each other,  “Off we go then.  Ta ta, luv, see you next Wednesday!  Come find me if you do anything really spectacular!”

Here’s the key to a happy marriage and a happy project:  don’t try to do anything together.  Ever.  It will end in disaster.  Trust me.  In fact, the more square footage you can put in between you and your spousal unit, the better.  If he is working in the upstairs bedroom, you should be working in the basement.  Get it?  Meet for dinner and compare notes.  Works every time.

Our General Rules For Renovation Projects work so well because he and I operate in two completely different solar systems .  I tend to gravitate to the THING THAT IS BUGGING ME THE MOST AT THAT PARTICULAR MOMENT, get rid of it, fix it and make it pretty.  That’s my modus operandi in a nutshell.  Mr. Big, however, just wants to wreck stuff.  He finds the biggest project that involves the most power tools and the most demolition and the most dust and he is as happy as a pig in slop.

For example, take Day One.  Day One, I just wanted to set up the air mattress so we would have some place to sleep, go to the grocery store so we would have some wine and cheese and make sure the fireplace was working so we could light a fire.  Mr. Big wanted to take four doors off of their hinges and dismantle the jambs because they were giving him claustrophobia and making the hallways “too squishy”.  So he did and I sat in front of the fire and had some wine and cheese.

At dawn, though, on Day Two, I was up and at ‘em, Atom Ant.  I had decided that the thing that had to go first was the pink and purple kitchen.  Oh, let me be more specific.  The pink and purple kitchen with the orange terra cotta tile floor and the red painted stenciled flowers on the cabinets.  Yeah.

So, I was up with cows tearing out the backsplash, taking the tiles off the floor, pulling the oven and hood out onto the patio and generally having a heck of a good time.

Mr. Big wakes up groggy, stumbles into the kitchen and says, “Um, what happened to the oven?”

I glance up, way up, actually, because I am sitting on a tiny footstool dislodging floor tile with a hammer and chisel.  I nod in the general direction of the kitchen door and say, “It’s on the patio.  Why?  Did you need to bake something?”

“Er, no, just wondering.  And the microwave?  And, um, the countertops?”

“Already in the dumpster with the range hood and the backsplash.”

He knows he is in violation of The Renovation Rules just by virtue of asking me these questions, but I am in a forgiving mood because it is not even 8 o’clock in the morning.  Technically, he should not even be stepping foot into the room where I am working, but I will let him slide because I know that all he is really concerned about is if I have thrown away the coffee machine or not.

“Um, honey”, he ventures tentatively, “will there be any coffee available this morning?  Or should I look elsewhere?”

Snookums!  Good Christ, of course there is coffee!  What do you think this is?  Guantanamo Bay?   Look, there’s the Barbie fridge, still intact, and, directly on top of it, voila!, the coffee machine.  OK, now, only in Europe is the fridge the size of an under-the-counter appliance upon which one can put things.  In America, if one put something on top of the fridge, only Yao Ming could reach it.

Off he went, coffee warming his little fist, to do whatever he wanted to accomplish on Day Two.  Which, apparently, involved a Sawz-All because the house shook when he fired it up.  I didn’t even have to leave the kitchen because I knew that he was attacking the bathroom-slash-powder room.

Here’s the deal.  Europeans don’t get the concept of the powder room.  I don’t know if it is because they don’t have guests or entertain, or what, but they just don’t get it.  They are trying, bless their little Froggy hearts, but they are not there, yet.  Consequently, you wind up with the most bizarre bathroom configurations imaginable.  The most common attempt is to put a separate toilet, by itself, somewhere near the living room.  No sink.  No, no.  The sink AND A RANDOM SHOWER/BATH is in another room by itself, somewhere in the general vicinity.

So, say I am having a party and a friend wants to “freshen up”.  Do they go in the room with the sink?  What if they have to pee?  Do they go in the room with the toidy and then go into the room with the sink?

  And, why is there a shower in the first place?  Do we need this extra shower?  It is adjacent to the living room.  It’s bizarre, I tell you.  And don’t even get me started if there is a bidet involved in the equation because it just makes my little head spin.

Anyway, I know what Mr. Big is up to.  He has a plan to turn the two weird bathroom configurations into one room.  Picture this:  there is one skinny, little coffin of a room with just a toilet sitting in one end of it.  (I wouldn’t even pee in it.  I felt like Patty Hearst.  It gave me the creeps.  The outside of my calves touched the walls when I was sitting.)  Then, directly adjacent, there is another long, skinny room with a sink at the end and a random shower.  You know what’s coming don’t you?  Mr. Big was taking out the wall in between so we could have one normal sized bathroom with A SINK AND A TOILET IN THE SAME ROOM.  No so much to ask, right?

However, it was not going well.  Major curse words were coming out of the two bathrooms.  Why?  Ah, well, that is a story for another day.  Let me just say this.  We are not dealing with sheetrock and framing here, folks.  This chalet was built “en madrier”.  And there I will leave you until next time when you will learn that “en madrier” are big boys’ Lincoln Logs and why French children within one half of a kilometer radius of our house now know multiple swear words in English including, my favorite, Rat Bastard.