DIY Archives - Curious Provence

How to Renovate in France on a Budget

October 11, 2016 by ashleyt 11 Comments

How to Renovate in France on a Budget

So you’ve bought your fixer-upper in France. The romanticism of Peter Mayle has snared you into the dream (or perhaps my blog?). You’re not a millionaire but you’ve got essentially a ruin of stones to work with. At least that’s a start.

You most likely don’t know anyone. You’ve heard horror stories about local tradesmen. Everything in the DIY stores seems more expensive. You’ll have to be careful about your budget…

We had a budget of only 25,000 euros to completely renovate our tiny house. We were able to accomplish this because we did most of the work ourselves. I have to admit, that Robin is a certified tradesman so this helped enormously. His experience really helped us stay within budget.

If you’re planning on doing the same, here are some tips on how you can spend the least amount of money possible while not compromising on your materials or safety building codes.

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DIY Stores and Builder’s Merchants in France

October 11, 2016 by ashleyt 10 Comments

A Builder’s Advice

It can be difficult to find stores near you in a foreign country. This is especially true of builder’s merchants in France. Your common knowledge of simple store names just isn’t there. If you’re renovating a house in France, depending on where you’re located, this is where you’ll find your building materials:

Fun Fact: Robin, in addition to offering project management on renovation sites, offers to take his clients to various antique and repurposed material warehouses depending on your needs. Find him on Facebook, Instagram, or renovationprovence.com.

DIY Stores (equivalent of B&Q or Wickes (England) and Home Depot in North America)

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Renovation in Provence: Bedroom Reveal!!

August 8, 2016 by ashleyt 12 Comments

Well, it’s missing some art on the walls, and a few finishing touches. This is the result of the upstairs room from our renovation in Provence.

Behold the Bedroom Reveal! Voila!

I just love the stairs.

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Renovation in Provence: Kitchen Transformation

July 29, 2016 by ashleyt 5 Comments

It’s been a long eight months of renovation in our tiny village house here in Provence. We had a deadline. The house was going to be filmed. Ever since the mania of trying to get everything to look like it has been done by a co that does million dollar projects, we’ve been taking it easy. I think Robin is still a bit too knackered to function. He pretty much single-handedly transformed this house, that hadn’t been touched since the 70s, into the beautiful little nest it has become. We’re not entirely finished, but I thought I’d finally let you in on some of the action of the last few months! If you’re interested in the process I’ll be posting throughout the next few days images of the transformation of each of the rooms and will next week be posting pictures of what it looks like now! First up a special kitchen design and renovation: (and a large one indeed!)

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Our Renovation in Provence: a stone sink!

May 21, 2016 by ashleyt 8 Comments

We figure that our kitchen is so tiny that in order to make it look good, everything in it has to have character and charm (well, maybe not the damn washing machine). I’ve fallen in love with all the shabby chic/farmhouse french kitchens that I’ve seen on pinterest. I’ve particularly fallen for the beautiful stone sinks. Of course, a stone sink costs about 800 euros. Not within the budget.

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Shopping for Antique Tiles

May 5, 2016 by ashleyt 9 Comments

Antique Cement Tiles

Robin wanted to stick to the traditional non-baked cement tile. They add a lot of local character. Check out my Instagram for a couple photos of local cement time floors. We realize just visiting a Tile Store in Brampton would be a lot easier if we were back home in Canada, but we’re in France, so we don’t know of any well-recommended tile stores. These tiles are well known in Portugal, but have been used all over Europe. In Provence, they are quite popular and if you’re not used to them you may think they are a bit too “busy.” Finding these beautiful tiles is not difficult here in Provence. However, to make our lives more difficult, we wanted the antique tiles rather than the reproduced versions. This is our search for the patterned bathroom tile…

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Our Reno in Provence: The Builders Arrive…

March 23, 2016 by ashleyt 23 Comments

Hiring Builders

Up until now, Robin has been doing all of the renovation to standard building codes (he has done some serious homework and seems to be the only person around here actually following the rules), whilst I have been looking for the finer details such as furniture, handmade pendant lights, rugs, etc. We knew we would always need a little help with one thing – knocking down the wall that separates the kitchen and the living room. This actually used to be the outside wall of the house before the extension was added in the 70s. It’s a serious wall. We needed to hire builders to help prop up the ceiling, install a new beam to replace the old beam that would now be too short, and help us with the exposing of the stone. We had 2 workers for 2 weeks. It was a race to see how much we could get done.

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Our Renovation in Provence: a Spiral Staircase

March 8, 2016 by ashleyt 13 Comments

Replacing the steep, narrow and dangerous staircase in our house with a space-effective spiral staircase was always part of our renovation plan. We looked online at beautiful industrial era staircases from Britain and compared those to the rickety plastic structures available at the local DIY stores. We also considered using a glass staircase too but we didn’t feel the space was quite right for this. Places like Pear Stairs offer this, so we might revisit the idea in a different space in the future. As always, it was also a question of price; we knew that this would be one of the biggest expenses of the renovation.

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Our Reno in Provence: Shopping for Patina Doors

January 28, 2016 by ashleyt 19 Comments

Shopping for Antique Patina Doors in Provence

The treasure and charm of antique doors.

It seems that we like to make our lives difficult; dating for 5 years long distance Montreal-London, moving to a new country without proper jobs and buying a tiny house in a rural village. If you’ve followed our journey, you will know that we’ve taken on a lot of DIY projects and this is no exception. Today’s task – trying to find beautiful Patina antique doors for our new home.

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