Furnishing Chez Nous In Toulouse

Cracking secret culture codes.

I’ve been writing about the early days of our lives in Toulouse.

You can read Part I here: Finding our apartment in the summer of 2014.

Part II: Learning to love that ‘shabby chic’ apartment despite its problems.

This is Part III:

Having found the apartment that would be our home in Toulouse, we faced the challenge of filling it. When we arrived in France, our original plan was to stay for 3 years. So we packed most of our belongings into the attic of our Oakland house and shipped one crate worth of stuff.

This was a nightmarish experience because we opted for a low-budget shipping service. Basically, we got a reinforced cardboard shipping container that one self-assembles and then packs. We were charged by size, not weight, and so the game was to cram as much stuff as humanly possible into a container that did not feel super solid. We drove a rental truck full of our belongings carefully selected from our home in Oakland to a warehouse on the San Francisco Peninsula where someone dropped a pile of cardboard and some straps on a wooden pallet outside for us and wished us luck.

Watching numerous YouTube videos on how to assemble such crates didn’t really prepare us for the task. Instead, we fumbled around in an attempt to put the container together, a task made even more daunting by the gale-force wind that swept across the parking lot and constantly undid our limited progress.

Eventually, we finished as the sun was setting and warehouse employees had grown impatient waiting for us. Among the stuff being shipped was only a limited amount of furniture: 2 leather chairs and a wooden table. It would take almost 3 months for the crate to arrive in Toulouse.

The rest of the furniture we would need to scavenge once we got to Toulouse. And considering that our apartment had twice the floor space as our Oakland house, this turned out to be an epic undertaking.

Let There Be Light Fixtures

As we visited apartments that summer, we learned that when the French leave, they take all the appliances, all the light fixtures, and sometimes even all the kitchen cabinets. Otherwise lovely apartments looked like they had been ransacked following a riot.

In our case, we had some luck because they had left the cabinets as well as a stove. But we still needed to buy a refrigerator, dishwasher, and washing machine. We managed to acquire all three used from a Spanish couple returning to Madrid who even helped me load them onto the truck and then carry them up 2 flights of stairs into the apartment.

The light fixtures would prove trickier.

The apartment had 12 rooms, each silently mocking us with a stream of wires hanging from the ceiling and a sad, solitary lightbulb dangling from the end. The need to constantly buy light fixtures has created a kind of fussy, fetishy culture in France around these objects with numerous boutiques throughout the city offering a fantastic array of choices.

Amassing enough light fixtures by buying them new could have cost a small fortune so we skipped these stylish shops. Instead, we found a few bargains at the Ikea just outside of town and gradually new friends donated more elaborate and unorthodox fixtures they had stored away.

Getting the light fixtures installed proved to be a chore. We called an electrician to put them in place. He arrived and quickly became dismayed that we only had 4 of the 12 fixtures. It didn’t make any sense to hang some, he explained, and said he would return when we had all of them. That would be more efficient, he insisted.

We begged him to at least hang one in the living room, a large chandelier-like fixture we had acquired. After several weeks, we still felt unsettled, what with a gaping hole in the ceiling and lightbulbs swinging above our heads. He relented, though made clear that this was not the right way to do things. It took us 9 months to scrounge all the fixtures and get them hung.