No joke

A large hole has appeared in my back garden. The local police are looking into it. That’s a joke and yes, the old ones are still the best.

But seriously, I’ve had to dig a hole in my back garden, the reason being to find the access into the house’s ‘fosse septique’ (septic tank). The reason is that the purchaser insists that I have it cleaned out. It’s been confirmed to me that this is a legal requirement when you move from a house – even if you’ve been renting it, it’s your responsibility to have the fosse septique purged.

I said that the fosse septique has been quite OK in the 9 years that I’ve been here and that the chance therefore that there will be problems during the next 12 months are pretty minimal. As it must then be taken out of service anyway I couldn’t see the point in disturbing it, especially as there was no way of telling where the access to it was without digging up half the garden to find it.

The purchaser, however, disagreed suggesting that there is no way to know what state the bacteria it contained are in and that he thought that there was a danger that they might ‘go wild’ in the intervening period. My mind boggled – imagine rampant bacteria from my old fosse septique raging through the local area, drinking, smoking and making loud noises and terrorising old ladies, children and animals. But he was insistent and as it’s the law I must comply.

So here I was today at this late stage of the game with yet another new task being imposed upon me when I’m already close to being overwhelmed. I contacted the local company who undertakes septic tank purging this morning and they said that if they had to search for the ‘regard’ (inspection hatch) there would naturally be a supplementary charge and that it would be better for me to locate it myself. So that’s what I set out to do after lunch this afternoon.

As it happened, I had a pretty good idea where to start looking from an indentation that there is in the grass and a hollow sound if you stamped on it hard and I was proved right shortly after I started digging. I didn’t even need my pickaxe this time even though I pulled out lots of loose rock which I suppose must have just been replaced there by someone years ago in the dim distant past. Here are some shots of the cover itself which I didn’t lift for fear of loose earth falling into the fosse. I’ll leave that to the contractor when they come next week.

So that was another job sorted ready for the sale hand-over. All it needs now is for the contractor to come and do his stuff, me to pay them and him to issue me with the required paper.

This morning I was back at the déchetterie in Rouffignac dropping off an old ride-on mower that I got hold of shortly after I arrived in France. It didn’t cut too badly but I got it dirt cheap because at that time my grass was full of loose large stones and rocks that had damaged two hand mowers so I didn’t want to invest in a decent ride-on until they’d been cleared. From that time I’d parked it under a tree in my back garden covered by a plastic tarpaulin which has since deteriorated badly leaving the old mower exposed to much of what the elements had to throw at it in that time.

But now it had to go as I have to clear the both the house and garden . When I tried to pull it out by hand it wouldn’t budge because its tyres were flat and it had started to dig itself in. So I had to tow it out using my car and here are a few shots that I took before and after.

I managed to get it up onto my large trailer myself despite the trailer’s floor finally deciding to split under its weight in the process. It’s been threatening to do so for some time and it has to do so now, of course, when I need it for transporting large and/or heavy stuff into storage. Unfortunately, I’ve just had too much to do over the last three months that I just couldn’t find time to put a new floor in but hopefully I’ll be able to manage by placing some old sheets of roofing board in the trailer bed that I’ve had stored in my mower shed for the last three or four years.

Anyway, thankfully the old ride-on has now gone as well as some other stuff this afternoon. As I left the déchetterie I said ‘See you next week’, to the chap who runs it. He’s been so incredibly helpful over the last week or so, helping me unload stuff and what have you. He gave is usual reply… ‘No problem’ 🙂