Looks like we screwed up on the roof and the required red tape. Apparently work finally commenced yesterday, they had taken off half of the rear when M. le Maire turned up and put a stop to work because we don't have the required permits.
Having been to the Mairie and spoken with the secretary and with various builders we were under the impression that no permission was required just to renovate the roof, but permission is required for the windows (as these will be changes to the exterior) and we have submitted the necessary demande de permis de construire for those.
However, we were all under the impression that we could commence work on the renovation as long as the windows did not appear until we have the permis. As the windows will be the final component of the work, we were hoping that the permis would be in place at that point. The roofer was under the same impression. But apparently not in our village!! This Maire is newly elected so don't know if he just wants to make himself visible (!) - whatever we have emailed the Maire to find out where we go from here. It is upsetting as the roofer and his team have obviously committed themselves to our job and now cannot proceed PLUS we have no rear roof now.
I know for sure where I live we don't require permission to replace our roof!!
My Heart is in France
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- softinthehead
- Updated Sep 2012 Moved back to Ontario, Canada while still renovating an old cottage in France. It is our little retreat where we go to unwind as often as we can.
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11 comments:
How annoying is that! Someone throwing their weight around - grrrrrr! Sure hope you get it straightened out soon and don't lose your workers.
M. le Maire? Sounds like M. le Merde to me!
Sorry about the troubles. Hope it sorts itself out. Roof or no roof I'm still jealous you own a home in France!!! ;-)
SITH
The granting of permission by the mayor can depend on who you are I've heard but as the mayor is newly elected I would think he's just trying to do it by the book. And you will find over here the book is very long and over complicated. One of the joys of France.
I do hope it's all sorted soon. Do you have someone overseeing the project for you?
It is frustrating, we have sent our groveling email to the Maire in the hope that something can be sorted out. Our friend H is overseeing everything - he went over yesterday to take photos and found that work had just stopped.
That is SO annoying! Sorry about the hold up.
SITH, this is so unlucky for you. Let's hope the Maire mellows after a while in office, ours is lovely we have been lucky. Good luck with the permis. Debs
We rehabbed this house five years ago and the mere mention of permits makes me want to weep. You need permits for every little thing in Chicago - it's all a money making exercise for the city. Drives me mad.
You are so brave to take on the red tape of a foreign country. I don't know that I could do it.
Typical beaurocracy isn't it? I hope it gets sorted soon. It does sound like the maire wants to do everything properly, hopefully he'll mellow out a soon. It makes me laugh that we have to check with the maire if we want to paint our shutters, paint the outside of the house (from dingy grey to cream), to remove our dead fir hedging and put something better in its place. We had no problems with anything, but then in the middle of a really pretty, ancient village (not ours) that we passed through someone had built 4 or 5 manky new build bungalows with PVC windows! It is just bizarre.
Is it a case of "not what you know, but who you know"? How frustrating all that red tape sounds, enough to make a person swear!
Thanks for all your empathy and no-one saying "I told you so". It really is frustrating. Still as it keeps raining I guess they wouldn't have been doing much anyway.
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