The main house remained a patchwork of small dark rooms with walls covered in resplendently vile wallpaper and a beigey-brown mould. The barn at the side was serviceable only as a storage and work area. The rest – apart from the shower and a rather fine example of a 19th century water closet in time-yellowed porcelain – was pretty much a no go area.

But Kevin’s efforts began to make a difference; he cured the worst of the leaks by insulating the inside of the roof and, by removing walls and partitions, the downstairs was temporarily one large room, apart from the kitchen.

This remained untouched because it stood on top of a partially flooded cellar. In effect the existing kitchen floorboards were life rafts suspended over a subterranean lake. This was something that Kevin had missed in his evaluation.

The cellar would have to be fully drained, sealed, and filled with rubble. Kevin’s ‘ball park figure’ for this extra work was £500. Ultimately the bill was nearer £2,000.

When the boards came up there was an air gap of a couple of feet above the water level that was a nature reserve for spiders.

The water meter, which was also in the cellar, had to be moved outside. Kevin phoned the water people.

‘Good news,’ he said, ‘it will only cost you €200 to €300. But there is a slight snag. This is France and this is August. So nothing is going to happen in a hurry.’

He was right. The water board made promises, but nothing happened.

‘You’ll have to wait until after the middle of the month,’ said Kevin, ‘then some of them will be back from holiday. The total staff now will be a few workmen on standby for emergencies and someone fielding the phone calls.’

‘But we are an emergency,’ said Doris.

‘But look at it from their point of view. The lake has been here for ages and nobody, as far as we know, has drowned yet. But after the 15th there will be the odd manager in the office; a few days after that the first batch of working lads, back from their hols, will be getting over their hangovers. Then you will get some action.’

Again he was right. We had already learned that attitudes to work in France are different from those in Britain. Things are changing certainly, but a Frenchman still sees a job for life as his birthright.

You don’t have to work particularly hard or be particularly bright to get it and measured indolence is all that is required to keep it.

It sometimes seems as though ‘the French working week’ is almost an oxymoron. Banks, restaurants and shops are generally closed on Mondays. Tuesday is the day set aside for political activity, which mostly means striking or skiving. Wednesday is a day off school for most children, which means that at least one parent stays at home. Not much gets done on Friday, which is now regarded as part of Le Weekend. This leaves Thursday where there is a sudden urgent flurry of activity.

I was out on the particular Thursday when a young man came round to view our lake. Doris said he was very nice. Sympathetic. Understanding. His was also the owner of a sleek red soft-top car.

‘This is my kitchen,’ she said, gesturing at the water-filled gaping hole.

He read the situation immediately. I think Doris’s cries of anguish may have helped. Anyway, two days later they arrived to do the job.

They were a couple of almost stereotypical French workmen – polite, hard working and easy to get on with. The problem was it was still August and they had not been able to get their hands on essential supplies – most specifically what was required in the way of washers.

‘The warehouse she is still on holiday, Madame,’ one of them explained.

‘But can we get on with it anyway?’ we pleaded.

Goodness knows when they would have come back if we’d let them go.

They said they would do their best but admitted that they had had to improvise. If the washers were wrong, things could be a bit iffy. And sure enough, two days later the joint in the cellar started to leak.

‘You’ll have to go down and fix it,’ Kevin said, looking at me.

‘But I don’t know how,’ I protested.

‘Well, OK,’ he said, ‘you get down there, tell me what’s happening down there and I’ll tell you what to do.’

I know it sounds crazy – as I was paying the bills – but that’s how it was, my head in spiders’ webs, water wobbling over my wellies and working its way up through the wick of my clothing. Can’t beat being retired, I thought.

I worked like a diver under tuition and stopped the leak. Then Kevin had another bright idea.

‘We could cut a hole through the cellar wall into the barn next door, so if the problem happens again you won’t have to pull up your nice kitchen floor.’

He was right in the sense that the barn is attached to the house and is a couple of feet lower. The problem was the wall in-between: it was almost a metre thick.

Kevin had spotted a heavy duty hammer drill with high speed bits.

‘Get that,’ he said, ‘at £17 it’s a snip.’

Kevin, it had to be said, was good as spotting bargains, though I noticed he never paid for them himself.

Equipped with this new weapon I worked by the light of a suspended torch, again I was guided by his voice from above. If he got fed up with instructing me he would make life more interesting by playing a trick or two. His favourite was to wait until I was waist high in water with an electrical drill in my hand before turning off the power. Hilarious. Well, he found it so anyway.

It took several hours to break through to the barn. The drill went through the stone easily enough, the snag was that the bit was only about six inches long, so I also needed the use of a steel bar with a clump hammer. But I knew I was getting there even before I saw daylight: the cellar began to empty.

Little pieces of history began to appear from beneath the water line: there were beer crates, large lumps of charred wood and a pair of soaking but serviceable oars which I resolved to varnish and find a suitable place to display. They make an interesting talking point.

The cellar also contained enough paper, packaging and soaking rag to fill a small skip; clearing it out was not a pleasant job.

I had been told that Germans had been billeted in the house during the war and as they left they set fire to it, either on purpose, or accidentally. Those in the ‘deliberate fire’ camp hinted at some sort of retribution, possibly linked to a scandal, while those who believed the fire was accidental talked about a log falling from the kitchen grate. We would probably never know, but there was evidence enough of the fire itself in charred roof timbers and those that appeared as the water drained away.

Upstairs we had decided to remodel the space to create three bedrooms (one en suite), an open office area and a bathroom. Because of the size of the house we could create for ourselves the size and scale of bedroom in which Marie Antoinette’s dresses could be easily accommodated, but this meant that we had to be less generous elsewhere and the other bedrooms would be more modest.

We pushed on with partitioning work. Hollow clay blocks – which have excellent damp and sound proof qualities – were simply too heavy for upstairs. Gypsum fibre, which also has admirable damp resistance properties, is excellent for lining walls but can be a touch pricey, so we went for plasterboard which is both inexpensive and easy to use while being relatively light – which is perfect for upstairs and ideal for non-load bearing walls.

Until recently, plasterboard was most commonly mounted on a timber frame which was often used as a feature itself but we opted for light metal which helps keep the panels flat and rigid. The other benefit is that it is easy to slide insulation material – such as rockwool – between two panels. A similar system of waterproof panels (plâques hydrofugées) was to be used for the separate bathroom and en suite.

The plan now was to fill the cellar with hardcore – around 30 tonnes of it. Kevin had already bought the hardcore which was stored at the local farm. In the meanwhile we threw into the cellar every stone we came across.

As we waited for the cellar to dry we fitted a back degreaser. Like most rural properties in France, we are on septic drainage which means that everything from the toilet is channelled into a fosse septique – a large tank fitted with overflow pipes that filter the excess underground. Everything else in the tank is dealt with organically, but it is surprisingly easy to kill off the fermentation bugs – one person in the home taking antibiotics can do it. To make sure the system remains efficient every three months we put in a commercial product called Eparcyl (Septifosis is a popular alternative). These products contain microbes that feast off the solids and are a massive improvement on the traditional method of activating bacteria which featured a deceased and well rotted rat.

The back degreaser takes away grey water – that is any used water that does not go down the loo, it separates grease by floating it to the surface. The tank itself – a second large concrete container with a minimum capacity of 200 litres – is buried in the ground, again with pipes which drain the excess water. This goes into a bed of gravel for filtering and the rest finds its way via a pipe system to the fosse septique to join in the fermentation process. Well, at least that is what is supposed to happen.

It is tricky to check just how well an old fosse is working because it is buried underground. Complete excavation is horrendously expensive and a Time Team type dig may not pin-point smaller leaks. There are inspection covers but even an expert can miss something, and it is often the fitting of degreasers that causes the problem because old septic tanks – fitted a generation or more ago – are simply too small to treat all the extra waste flowing from showers and sinks, washing machines and dishwashers. In the past this was allowed to drain away into the ground but as this is no longer acceptable, degreasers have become de rigeur. But systems that are inefficient or overloaded have become ecological time bombs. Eventually someone will impose monitoring – there could soon be a Septic Police.

Some very specific regulations are already in place: extractor vents must be positioned at the exit end of the tank which itself must be placed more than 20 centimetres underground, 35 metres from a well or watercourse, and a minimum of five metres from the property it serves.

The hole we needed for the degreaser was a big one. Kevin hired us a tracteur pelle for two days – this is basically a JCB with a digger. Kevin had a great time using this. Two of his daughters came along to watch him and it was great to see the swelling pride in their eyes as he swung the bucket about. We for our part flinched a bit when he hit our caravan with it! It was still our home, but the damage wasn’t serious.

Perhaps I should have seen the lake under the kitchen floor as a warning of where we were going wrong. At least symbolically.

I could perhaps put down the fact that I was paying the workman and doing most of the work myself as a significant, if sometimes soggy learning curve, but the problem went deeper. Kevin’s guesstimates and ball park figures always seemed to be as optimistic as joining the Dutch Mountain Rescue.

But we were novices and he knew it. We were not expert at DIY and had little knowledge of French building regulations – particularly with regard to electrics. Worse still, although our conversational French was adequate, we did not have enough of the specialist builder’s vocabulary or an understanding of the subtler nuances and differences in the materials used in French buildings.

Working on the principle that a little knowledge is generally more dangerous than none, we had long determined that we would put ourselves in Kevin’s dinner-plate sized hands. Indeed, finding him still seemed to be an extraordinary stroke of luck. Apart from anything else language problems were limited to Yorkshire talking to Black Country. Bad enough but not insurmountable.

There are two main ways of paying a builder: the first way is to agree a daily rate and buy or pay for the materials yourself. The rate is around €100 a day. We later learned that most French builders also prefer to work this way because they are on the ‘Micro Enterprise’ scheme which significantly cuts their tax bill if they can earn less than €29,000 a year. Buying materials themselves clouds the issue. It is surprising how the income of many ‘small’ builders remains just below the (annually adjusted) threshold. The second way to pay is to get a devi which is broadly similar to an estimate in England. Because there was so much work to do we started off with an initial large devi from Kevin.

Kevin’s devis looked so reasonable that I immediately commissioned what had now become high priority extra work. This included having the cellar filled in. It was only Doris’s note of caution that prevented me from letting the list of new work and ‘ball park’ figures get out of hand.

‘I think we should see how it goes,’ she said.

And she was proved right. Particularly as it all went horribly wrong.

I should perhaps have seen it coming but there is no fool like an old fool. However, it is impossible to anticipate everything that will need doing when you renovate a property and, if that property is in France, the problem is compounded by kinds of infestation and rot that are unknown on British shores.

Typically, what happened was this: Kevin would be about to deliver the coup de grâce to a wall you had asked him to remove when he points out a rotten joist. What you should do is say ‘Hey, I can see that this is going to be a whole new job, so go home and write me out a new devis.’ But you don’t, you say, ‘OK, let’s replace the joist.’ And in the process of doing that you find that three other joists have been termite breakfast. Again you should say, ‘Hey, we’ll wait until they’ve had their lunch and then we’ll put in a set of treated timbers,’ but what you do is to pick up the yellow pages and start ringing round the timber yards. And so, on it went. A little extra expense here. A little more effort there. What was worse was that we were beginning to hear horror stories of renovation projects that had got so far out of hand that the owners had been forced to give up and sell. It was becoming clear how this could happen.

The time had come to take stock of the situation.

We came up with a mixed strategy: first we would re-prioritise. There was no hurry, for instance, to do anything with the barn, equally we could leave a lot of the external restoration. The pointing was tatty in places but, as the building had stood for centuries, it could surely wait a bit longer.

As far as the interior was concerned, we would just have to say no to anything that was not absolutely necessary. Equally, we would have to do rather more for ourselves. But there were still some important aspects of the renovation that could not be done without expert help. We still had two main rooms downstairs, for instance, and wanted one large one. We therefore asked Kevin if we could take down the dividing wall.

‘That’s no problem,’ he said ‘it’s not load bearing.’

And with this assurance we said ‘go ahead please’.

He removed the dividing wall and reinforced the ceiling above with substantial pine beams supported by pine uprights. We were surprised only that he had used pine because hard woods – oak for instance – are relatively cheap in France.

However, within a few days it was clear that the beam in the middle was sagging and twisting. This could be seen clearly from beneath it and from both sides – when crossing the landing we walked down a small hill and then back up again. What was even worse was that between the walls of the bedrooms and the floor there was now a gap big enough to push your fingers through.

If there was a moment when we could have thrown in the towel, it was now. But we could not afford to live in England, it would be near impossible to sell a property with such a glaring defect, and we also had the children to think of.

‘We’ll have to tackle Kevin,’ Doris said, ‘but it won’t be easy. He does not like admitting mistakes.’

So it was decided to attack him with stealth. We had taken a lot of photographs before we moved in and had continued to do so as the work progressed. These pictures had been intended as no more than a personal record to help us remember events in our dotage.

Kevin claimed that the floor had always been dropping away but we had the pictures to prove that this was not true. He eventually conceded the point and ordered a replacement steel girder. A few days later he turned up with one girder and three large lads. We hid, mainly in the kitchen, whilst the operation was carried out. It was not only a success but was boxed in so neatly that we scarcely knew it was there.

Perhaps we should have said that this was a builder error too far. Kevin had only recently drilled holes for a toilet exit pipe four centimetres too high which meant I then had to shape a wooden pedestal to bring the toilet up to the level. We’ve lived with it ever since, but still think it looks bad. But we were so relieved that our ceiling was safe we backed off. Even the best builders make the occasional mistakes, don’t they?

On days when Kevin did not turn up – and to our minds this was happening far too regularly – we had already begun to tackle some jobs we would not previously have considered taking on. It was also part of our new cost-cutting strategy, but even the apparently simple job can turn into a nightmare.

There was a dado rail about a metre long in our living room. It was spectacularly ugly. One morning Doris suggested that we remove it.

‘No problem,’ I said.

And it really was no problem. Two tweaks of the claw hammer and out it came. But the rail was rotten and the plaster underneath was blown; damp had got under it and lifted it away from the wall.

‘I’m not sure about tackling this,’ I said.

‘Just take it back as far as you have to,’ Doris suggested.

So it was back to the claw hammer. With only the slightest encouragement a large rotten cupboard decomposed before our eyes exposing another area of blown plaster, then this came away equally easily revealing the bare stonework of the original recess. This, in turn, made the whole wall appear unbalanced because of a second matching cupboard. Back to the claw hammer. Same result.

There were now two gaping holes in the wall which at least created a measure of symmetry. Closer inspection confirmed that we had found the tip of the iceberg, pretty much all the plaster on the wall was blown, and the same applied to the window recess. We would have to strip back to the bare bones and replaster the lot. An hour later the room looked marginally worse than a bomb crater.

When the doorbell rang we swam in different directions through the debris to answer it and arrived at precisely the same moment. We must have looked like flour graders at the end of a long shift.