If you are just reading the blog of the first time, you may want to read the prior blog post “Part 1” to get caught up. Where did we leave off? Oh yes, the renovation was about to take a turn for the worse. Unbeknownst to any of us, there was some water damage to the building involving our flooring and the neighbor’s ceiling that had never been claimed to the syndic. The syndic is what we would call in the US the HOA, or the management company. These apartments are like condos in the sense that each owner owns their own space but the structure overall is cared for by the whole.
Our contractor, being responsible, did not want to risk doing any demolition with a potential structural issue that could be compromised by the work he would be undertaking. So we had to involve the syndic and wait for a plan to repair the damage before work could begin. We didn’t know the timeline, other than it was not going to start in October 2023.
November and December go by…and radio silence. Our contractor had to deploy his team elsewhere that he had slated for our job. My heart was breaking, thinking that we may have to scrap our plan altogether. We were also extremely frustrated that we weren’t hearing back from the syndic and they seemed really unmoved by our concerns of structural integrity of the building. We also considered the option of doing no renovation and using it as is. This option seemed pretty unlikely to work in the long run, as the plumbing and electrical needed to be brought up to code in this very old building. We didn’t want to furnish it temporarily only to renovate a year later. But we did consider many options and I’m sure I lost countless hours of sleep contemplating what we had gotten ourselves into.
Meanwhile, our family debut to stay in the apartment for the first time was supposed to be for the Tour de France and Paris Olympics, July 2024. But as each day went by the hope of that dream started to fade. I booked us an apartment around the corner as I feared things would start booking up quickly.
In January our contractor decided to make his own waves by hiring a structural engineer to assess it fully and create a plan of action. Brilliant! Why didn’t we think of this sooner? He wrote up a plan, and we felt that this would get us back on track. Seemed like a reasonable fix. We even offered to pay for it. But the syndic needed to be apprised and approve said plan. This process continued to take another month and change and finally warranted a meeting between our team and the syndic. They claimed they did not realize the gravity of the situation needing to be fixed. We had the correspondences to show for it, but it is what it is. We finally got the green light to proceed, with the blessing of the syndic. The repair work finally was able to be started in April 2024, with demolition soon after.
There was a glimmer of hope that this project would have a start and an end date, and at some point we would be able to stay there! I wasn’t sure when but I felt cautiously optimistic that we would start to see some progress, After all, we had owned it for nearly a year! As they say in France “On y va!”, or “let’s go!”