Owl Windows vs fenêtre œil de taureau

I should perhaps issue a “health and safety warning” at this point, as some of the following is not for the squeamish!  But first back to the beginning!

Nearly every old house has one, an attractive stone framed oval window, not dissimilar to the “owl windows” found on the eaves of many old Cotswold houses, the function of which was to allow owls access to the loft space, which would often have been used as a food store, so the owls could have a steady supply of food – the mice who thought their luck was in and had found a steady supply of food – your winter stocks!!!  

But, in France they are invariably on the ground floor and often have a waste outlet set into the wall below them, as does this one that is on the gîte opposite our house. 

And our house also has one, well when we moved in it had the remnants of one, it’s here to the right of the fireplace above the tiled shelf with no drain hole on which the tap emptied – presumably the previous inhabitants relied on using a washing up bowl and emptying it into the gutter outside.  But, as for the window, the previous inhabitant obviously like his privacy and had bricked up the window, leaving the glass in situ, having first tried to keep out prying eyes by white washing the glass.  The bricking up, which interesting was also done to a number of other windows, and not a window tax in sight, just neighbours intent on seeing what was going on or simply a paranoid resident, referred to by our new neighbours as “special!”  Initially, thinking that we had a lot to live up to, to become special ourselves, we were quite relieved to discover that special in this French context, would be “special needs” in an English context – what “translated it for us was the tendency of Monsieur opposite to accompany anything about their previous neighbour with what seems to be a universally used gesture – the forefinger turning small circles in the vicinity of your temple!!

Nevertheless, back to the bricked up window, or indeed the haphazardly, albeit it sturdily closed up window with a  variety of cemented bricks and stones, as I was to discover when a heavy duty jackhammer was necessitated to remove the debris, miraculously leaving the glass intact!  And as a quick aside; when DIYing in France, the local paint may be rubbish, and many a expat car returns from the UK with a boot full of B & Q’s finest, or for reasons of equality, Homebase, Great Mills or any other number of national DIY chains, but the cement is something else and once in position it is not intended to be removed again.  Indeed, just incase any unwary house renovator, particularly of English origin, has other ideas, then often it is reinforced with intertwining metal bars!!  Well, one of the things we were keen to achieve, possibly before we knew about the cement and the metal bars, was to try and return some of the original features to their former glory, which as you will see we have achieved in the photo with the small iris, which is actually an enormous IKEA clock on the far side of the kitchen – imported from the UK and purchased with a silver wedding anniversary gift from good friends, although IKEA is sweeping France as it has already done in England and is cheaper than many of the other similar shops, but as the pound weakened the prices are now more expensive than in the UK.

Having been lent the electrician’s jack hammer, an extremely powerful tool, which I’m sure should require a licence to operate, I decided to also see just how well the house is constructed – they don’t as a rule have surveyors cast their eye over a property before purchase, and I’m glad to say the house withstood my inexpert onslaught magnificently!

Not so however the kitchen shelf, purporting to be the kitchen sink!  I had over several days carried out what could have been misconstrued as half-hearted attempts at breaking up the “sink,” but on each occasion, despite a large chisel, a heavy lump hammer and enough welly to result in an aching back and stiff arms, I quite literally barely scratched the surface and where the metal reinforcements were just below the surface, I failed even to scratch it!!  Hence, the electrician taking pity on me and lending me the jack hammer as he went off for the evening, or was it simply that he thought by setting me loose with a machine worthy of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, I might demolish the house by morning and save him some serious hole drilling.  At times between the electrician, the plumber and various “mates” there were two of them both heavily armed and trying to attack each other through a sixty centimetre granite block wall!  So not only the cement is hard in these here parts, so are the walls and the artisans (trades people) come to that!!  Suffice to say that in about half an hour, not only had I rattled loose most of my bones but also made significant inroads into the seemingly endless block of reinforced concrete – then a gaping hole appeared towards the base above which it became obvious that there was a large block of stone, which I managed to stop jack hammering just in the nick of time, a moment longer and it may well have been reduced to a pile of rubble.

It was about this time that I hatched a plan, instead of removing the whole thing, to be replaced by a tasteful but not necessary piece of furniture, I could reinstate what had possibly been the base of an old sink, prior to modernisation in the Le Corbusier style!  My only concern was that the jack hammer, whilst not turning the large stone to dust had quite badly dinted it at the front, and so decided it would be better to remove it and possibly turn it over if the back was better.  Suggesting my plan to Linda, she was in agreement, however suggested it would be better if I simply flipped it over and didn’t remove it first!!

Two near hernias later, a friend and I by an amazing feat of engineering technically called “aggling,” managed to remove the capping stone, it was too heavy for the both of us to lift, despite Linda’s suggested “pancake” manoeuvre!  But, we got it outside without injury or mishap, left it by the step and removed the rest of the stones to allow the alcove to be tidied up, the base concreted and the base stones reset whilst I scratched my head as to how I could possibly get the capping stone back into place, and after the difficulties of the removal it crossed my mind that a pleasant light weight wooden seat / shelf on top might be the answer, but blithely dismissed this as it didn’t “restore the origin features” that we were setting out to do.  More head scratching and a throw away comment to another friend who was surprisingly game to try and get it back, but hadn’t been there when we first moved it!  The comment, simply that it would be easier if we could cut the damaged bit off the front, tidy it up and make it lighter.  But easy as it may sound, cutting a block of solid stone at least fifty centimetres thick and eighty long posed another problem.  Simple, say the friend use my angle grinder, should go through that like butter and amazingly it did!!  A five centimetre cut top and bottom a sharp tap and the damaged front fell neatly away leading about two thirds of the original stone, and still two of us could barely lift it, but by brute force, aggling and certainly not ignorance, we managed amazingly to reposition the cut down stone and restore the feature as shown here!!  And we didn’t even break any of the newly lain floor tiles!       

But, now we get to the squeamish bit!  Shortly after successfully relaying the stone, and having paid due reverence to the master masons who had constructed Stonehenge, who weren’t, due to the size of their blocks, even able to employ aggling as a technique, I was visited by French friend from the village!  He admired the window and feature and said it reminded him of his childhood, when one of his jobs was to clean, by the light of the window, œil de taureau ready for subsequent eating, hence the window’s French name fenêtre œil de taureau – not there yet?  Bull’s Eye Windows and it doesn’t refer to the bit in the middle of the dart board – hence the warning for the squeamish!

Now that’s one original feature that we won’t be reinstating!!  Instead the light from the window sets off a lovely plant and also allows us to see who is coming down the road, as well as the other day neatly framing a pair of grazing deer in the field beyond!