First of all – French craftsmen are as good as any other in Europe – they might be different to what we are used to though. The worst thing you can do to get the wrong start in France is not to use local craftsmen or not buying local construction material. Our experience is that village people in France welcome anyone to be a part of the community if you are willing to contribute. The best way of contributing is to give opportunities for people to make some money. In most of the regions, where we foreigners love to spend our holidays, the level of unemployment is high so everything is welcomed.I admit that there might be a language problem, but you can get a long way by pointing, sketching and using your hands and body. If you get a problem, get some help from someone. It is worth it - I promise you!
Our experience from dealing with craftsmen is Sète is that they might be a bit unreliable in terms of not coming on time or at all sometimes. I have talked a lot with a friend and colleague who is from Algeria and have lived in France for long periods and is now Swedish since a few decades. He argues that the problem we have had with craftsmen is only our problem as Swedes, as we have totally other expectations than a Frenchman would have. For French people this is not a big problem because the habit of not doing what is agreed goes both ways, so nobody really takes offence or get irritated.
Knowing this we contacted a number of construction companies to get their offers on the major job to redo the entire roof of our house in the Corbières. We got three offers and they did not differ a lot in Price. One company was from the village, one from the nearest big city with an office in the village and the third was from a neighbour village. Off course everybody in the village knew everything about our project, they followed it closely and every progress was carefully reported to anybody in the village grocery shop. We soon found out that the local guy had a very good reputation for doing a very good job. He also was the kind of person who finished things before taking on new jobs, unlike the habit of most construction companies. Mostly they have many projects going and jump from one project to another, so you had to hunt them with a torch all the time to make them finish your job. We also felt that it would not be taken well by the people in the village if we did not follow their advice to choose the local guy as there was no real difference in price. If someone else got the job and we got into problems there would be a lot of “what did we tell you?" Everybody would follow the progress of the work closely and if something went wrong or the work wouldn’t be up to our standard everybody would know. We realised this could work to our favour if we engaged the local company. We would have hundreds of quality controllers and the social reputation of the local guy would be damaged as everybody would feel a collective responsibility for his mistakes. It is also important to mention that we got a very good impression of the local contractor but the other competitors seemed very serious also. So, we signed a contract with this local guy and he agreed to do the job and we gave him the keys to the house and went back to Sweden.We also needed to change all the windows in the house as they were very old; some of them in bad condition and had only one glass. Our neighbour’s son owned the largest company in the area who sold factory made windows. We however were not happy with the detailing and the Price of the product he could offer. As the windows are the eyes of a house, and it is of major importance to the impression you get of the house, we wanted to make the new windows as close in style to the old as possible, only with double glazing. We asked our contractor for advice and he happened to have a brother who was an “ebeniste” which is both a carpenter and a cabinet maker. He could do both the windows and a new staircase from the attic to the terrace. This guy turned out to have a very good reputation, had a reasonable pricing and was also a very nice person. Nowadays we regard him and his wife to be among our best friends in the village. So now we have engaged two brothers in the project. The good thing is that we get the co-ordination of the construction work for free. If they, as many craftsmen do, make things difficult for each other or get into co-ordination problems, they can deal with it within the family. This was of course a great advantage for us, being in Sweden most of the time.
Later it turned out that the little brother in the family did plumbing, electricity and some interior building work so we engaged the third person in the same family for all the small details inside. The lady next door, with the son in the window business, turned out to be the aunt of these brothers so we contacted the cousin to deliver the glass house to protect the landing of the staircase on the terrace. And the whole project was co-ordinated by the main contractor we first engaged. Great!
There are some peculiarities about construction contracts in France that we are not used to from Sweden. First, if you have an old house there is a VAT reduction so you only pay 5%. Small one-man companies under a certain annual turnover are regarded micro companies and do not have to pay VAT at all on labour, which makes it all less costly. Another very strange thing with our contractors is that the Price in the offer is the actual Price you pay in the end. Even if we have made many changes on the way and even made it more difficult for them, they do not change the Price unless you add substantial amount of work. In Sweden the habit is that the final Price is around 40% higher than the offer and the contractor charges you for every little change even if it does not cost more and adds your own telephone number to the total in the end. That last thing was a joke!
I think the philosophy might be that dealing with an old building you can never know if something goes wrong or if you discover something that causes extra work so, calculating these risks is a part of the professional skills and misjudgements should not be taken out on the customer.
By the time we have engaged these three brothers in other parts of the renovation. Most of the work is now finished and we are very happy with the way everything has worked out. We have been a little worried from time to time, being so far away from the site, but it has always been satisfactory in the end. By the time a cousin who represent an electrical company has also been involved in installing a climate system in the House. Do I have to say they have done a great job. What amazes us is that the craftsmen clean up after them. WE have a joke in Sweden that you recognise a skilled craftsman on the mess he leaves after him.
The people in the village are very happy that we are happy with their “local sons”. From time to time they have however been worried when they have seen a stop in the construction work for a period and always reported to us on the phone. So we have had a strong social quality control of the building project.
One thing that makes people so engaged is off course that many families have a relation to this building and are very happy we do something about it. Many of them can however not understand why we insist on having these old fashioned materials like wooden windows when there are so beautiful new plastic windows that you never need to paint or anything. A house from 1762 is obviously not a big deal to many pragmatic people in the village.
Again a final piece of advice! There are a lot of negative stories about British people buying property and transporting both building materials and craftsmen from their home country. The French are not only insulted by this, they also think they do not get any economic benefit from being a place there people from other countries likes to settle down.
