A cautionary tale.

When we had a lot of building work going on across the road, the demolition disturbed the sewers and the rats.

One day I was in my lounge and I saw a rat jump over my neighbour’s fence, pass along the foot of the wall at the bottom of my garden, entre my other neighbour’s garden and return with something round in its mouth. This happened several times.

Not something I wanted to see every day, so a search of the internet to find out about the habits of rats and how to get rid of them. Having learnt that they eat poo and that the local Mairie is happy to supply poisoned grain. A nice young man further down the street knocked at the door and said he had killed 5 rodents using a spring trap. The Mayor sent round the rat man who inspected my garden, and gave me some of the grain. I wrote all this up in a letter for the 20 neighbours in the road. The problem was solved and people knew not to leave dog poo in their gardens.

Forward a few years. We had major work on our drains that involved not only digging up all of the road but all of the foot-paths as well.

Ever since we had owned this house we had had water entering the garage during heavy rain, not under the garage door or back door but seeping though the wall we shared with the neighbour. We took the opportunity to speak to the boss of the site and he agreed that water could back up from the drainage pipe that lead from the house down-pipe and across our garden and was supposed to exit under the pavement. We learned some new vocabulary. The concrete hollow cube that our down pipe went into was called a ‘regarde’ – not a very helpful word due it being easily confused in conversation with the verb ‘to look’.

We had tried to find a solution to this dampness in our garage several times. The French way is to contact your insurance company. They will tell you to get three quotes and your insurers will chose which one they will pay for. One expert wanted to fit extractor fans in both the front wall and back wall. Our lounge is situated above the garage. The colder the garage, the colder the floor of our lounge. I had spent a lot of time blocking up holes around doors, and we had insulated the garage roof so as to have a cosier house – causing cold air to enter from either end was not my idea of progress, and anyway that did not address the problem of where the water was coming from.

The second expert wanted to drill water absorbing rods into the wall. Again not an answer to where the water was coming from. Another expert wanted to re-plaster the wall without finding out about the source of the water. We were stuck as the quotes were for different solutions.

I wondered if other homes had the same problem and wrote a note to the 20 identical houses in the street to find out if our problem was replicated elsewhere. Our adjoining neighbour the other side also had the problem and was fed up with her garage being flooded and the damage it was causing to the internal wall. The neighbour who shared her garage wall was also affected.

We passed this information on to the workmen.

One evening it rained heavily. We returned home from being out for the evening . The footpath was still missing which meant that the ends of the pipes that traversed the gardens and exited though the garden walls were able to be seen. There was no water flowing out of our neighbours pipe. That begged the question, ‘Where was all the rain water that fell on her roof going if it was not exiting though that pipe? Our pipe was a mini torrent flowing into the void of rubble that was for the moment our pavement. The neighbour the other side of us had no water exiting though the wall, neither did her neighbour. I took a video of the flowing pipe and the 3 non-functioning ones. An awful lot of rainwater was not exiting away from our houses. In fact every drop that fell on the rooves of the neighbours.

Once again I wrote a note to say what I had observed.

A few days later our French friend across the road beckoned me over. ‘Joy, stop writing notes to the neighbours – they are getting fed up with you.’

‘Oh, don’t they want to find a solution to this problem by working together at it?’

‘No, it’s not how we do things in France. We contact our insurance company, who sends an expert and he finds a solution’.

‘But don’t neighbours work together and help each other,’

His reply was in the negative. He also added that his work had been in water services. He was in fact our neighbourhood expert. He knew that our neighbour was wasting her money when she paid to have a bigger soak away installed to stop water rolling down her sloping drive and into her hallway when there were heavy rains.

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘O.K. No more notes to neighbours, then. No chance of working together and co-operating like we would in England?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s sad but true.’

However, a few days later there was a workman in our neighbour’s garden. He was replacing the old pipe that should be taking water from the downpipes, into the ‘regarde’ and across the garden.

We have not had any problem with damp in our garage ever since.