You must be nearly finished now?
Just how far from finished we really are (with pictures of the un-renovated rooms in our half of the château).
As I walk across our bedroom floor it creaks ominously, the perhaps two-hundred-year-old oak parquet panels are loose and uneven, there are gaps between them where they’ve been lifted many time for repair work underneath or for the passage of electricity cables and water and heating pipes. I walk gingerly, picking the path that avoids the old iron nails that stand proudly above the surface of the wood, waiting patiently for the misstep that will allow them to tear the skin of my bare sole. I walk with my ears, following the sounds of the old wood, making my way to the bathroom in the dark. I’ve covered the most rickety areas with a large vintage rug, if only to protect my feet from my night time wanderings. One day it will be a beautiful floor again, fully restored, gleaming and hazard free. But I do wonder how long it will take me to learn to navigate the room in the dark once the floor no longer speaks to me?
It’s a distant dream. Our bedroom is so far down the renovation list that it’s almost pointless to think about it. I do dream though. I lie in bed, looking out of the huge window, watching the wind play in the tree tops or the sunlight dapple on the wood panelling that stretches to the ceiling and I imagine what this room might look like when the walls aren’t just bare plaster, cracked with age and hedged with uneven wooden batons, pockmarked with holes made by the nails and staples that once held the fabric panels that covered the walls.
I wonder if we’ll have the budget to reinstate the plasterwork on the ceiling of this room, long lost to a previous ceiling collapse perhaps and replaced by a boring, smooth modern version. Helpfully a previous inhabitant or tradesperson sketched a profile of the original ceiling moulding on the wall in pencil, marking out its curves and details so that one day it could be remade. Though curiously the current height of the ceiling wouldn’t allow for it. The tops of the panelling around the windows and above the doors would be obscured by the lowest section of the cornice. A conundrum for another day - do we recreate the cornice and sacrifice the panels? Or keep the panels and make the cornice less elaborate?
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