Drafts excluded!
One of the bugbears of owning an older house is trying to keep it warm in the Winter. Thick stone walls may act as insulation, but only once they've warmed up. The process is slowed down considerably when the windows are single-glazed and some of them suffer from rotten wooden frames. As Jean-Pierre once remarked to me "You're warming the birds"!
A couple of years ago, we replaced the kitchen door and scullery door with modern, sealed, double-glazed ones. The improvement was immediate, but when the wind blew anywhere from the south it whistled straight through the old windows into the kitchen and stole all the heat.
Upstairs, we fitted nine-inch thick insulation in the loft. Again, it made an improvement, but we're not yet able to claim the house is warm and cosy in the coldest months.
Until, earlier this year, that is. All the downstairs windows on the southern side (where the sun had weathered the wood the worst) have been replaced. Needless to say, with a house of this age, everything has to be made-to-measure, so they weren't cheap. They were installedwhen we weren't there and they looked great in the couple of pictures we'd seen, but we couldn't wait to see them for real. So, the ferry was booked and a quick weekend crossing organised.
We crossed on the 10pm ferry from Dover to Dunkerque, arriving at 1.00 am, French time. I'd plotted a route that skipped as much autoroute as possible, as it's easier to stay awake when you've got to keep your mind on the road ahead. Needless to say, there was very little traffic on the roads and we made good time, arriving shortly before dawn. We unlocked the granary, switched the heating on and fell into bed for a few hours.
Once we felt a bit more human we did a quick tour of the house, admired our new windows and lit the woodburner in the kitchen, just to see the difference. We were both very impressed. The kitchen warmed up very quickly, the sitting room was even quieter than normal (the one car an hour that passes in the street outside was more muffled than usual) and even the study, the coldest room in the house, felt warmer. When the sun came out and streamed through the windows, it felt almost Spring-like.
This may seem a bit of overkill just for a few new windows, but the difference was so great that we elected to spend our evenings in the kitchen, toasting ourselves by the fire in a cosy, welcoming warmth instead of staying in the electrically-heated warmth of the fully-insulated granary.
Another bonus of the new windows is that David, our builder, had to expose one of the very few original features left in the house. As you can see from the picture at the top, one of the windowsills in the kitchen has three recesses. I have been told that bowls of stock were placed in them with hot ashes from the fire placed beneath to keep the stock warm. The area is renowned for its cheese and cream, so I suspect the bowls wouldn't have contained stock, but milk. I've no idea why the bowls would be square, rather than round. If you know more about how they were used, we'd love to hear from you.
Our next target is to save up enough money to replace the ancient front door and then all the rest of the windows, starting with those on the south side upstairs. We reckon £7,000- £8,000 ought to do it. As a result, we've put our house in England on the market. Just as the house market in the UK has hit its first slump for 15 years. Oh well, wish us luck.
After a hectic couple of days grass-cutting, pruning and cleaning, the house and granary have been left ready to welcome our next guests. As it happens, it looks like the next guests will be us again, with a trailer full of furniture from the UK. Who knows, it may be the first trip to remove furniture from our newly-sold UK home.
Bored of autoroutes, we headed back for Dunkerque by pointing our noses east and crossing the Seine at Château-Gaillard. It boasts an impressive castle overlooking what was once an important border crossing but was wet and windy when we passed by. From there we headed north-east and arrived at Dunkerque without having paid a centimes in tolls, which was nice.
All-in-all, a weekend crossing via Dunkerque is not to be recommended. The ferry is very well-appointed and not too crowded (it's mainly full of lorries), but the distance between the port and Cormolain makes a weekend trip a bit of a slog. Why did we do it? Well, Norfolk Lines had a killer deal on ferry prices and it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Next time, though, we're using LD Lines from Portsmouth to Le Havre. The crossing back to the UK is a tedious five hours in the early evening, dropping us in the UK after nine o'clock for a four-hour drive home, but on the way to France, arriving at Le Havre in the early morning after having slept on the ferry is exactly how it should be. Roll on the next trip!
The other kitchen window (note the water stop-cock beneath) .
