I’ve heard that French plumbing has a reputation for being rather poor. From what I’ve seen recently, it’s not poor. It’s appalling!

The house the dynamic duo are working on at the moment is the first one they renovated just after they arrived as total greenhorns in France. They could barely change a lightbulb when they came here, the big eejits, so they were a tad on the over-confident side when they took on a house that needed complete renovation from roof to basement, including total rewiring, installation of a new heating system and, yes, new plumbing.

They therefore enlisted some help. Sensible idea, one would think. If you weren’t in France, that is.

This help came in the tidy shape of a self-proclaimed builder called… Oh, you’re supposed to change names to protect the innocent, aren’t you? Well, this guy was definitely not innocent, so here goes … a self-proclaimed builder called Jean-Luc. His plastering was pathetic, his tiling terrible, but his plumbing was by far his pièce de resistance!

Unfortunately, the leaks only appeared after he had finished the job, and just when one was sorted out, the next one appeared, so the Oldies have been paying the price for his abominable workmanship for years.

The tally in this house so far is a leaking sink, a leaking toilet cistern, three leaking wash hand basins and the crème de la crème: a leaking sewage pipe. On closer inspection of the installation, the Oldies found that neither toilet was screwed down, most of the waste pipes were not glued, either the wrong joints were used or correct ones installed the wrong way round or rather than using joint pieces at all, the wastepipes had simply been heated and bent.

     

The copper piping is hilarious. Quite creative actually. Jean-Luc definitely missed his calling as an artist. How he managed to get these pipes so wavy along a straight line is beyond me!

Apart from all the other unforeseen jobs that have cropped up, the plumbing mess alone has set the Oldies back at least a couple of weeks. They’ve had to enlist the help of a real plumber. They are on first name terms with him at this stage and when he passes by each day on his way to the boulangerie to buy his lunchtime baguette, his standard greeting is, ‘Salut! Any more problems today?’

I cannot tell you all the names that the Oldies have been calling Jean-Luc. They are far too rude for publication. But suffice to say that he has been long been rechristened…you’ve guessed it…Jean-Leak.