(Please note that this post reflects our experience in the early 1990’s – I can’t speak for what anyone would experience today.)
When we moved to Ste-Foy, we rented what was considered a luxury apartment. (This picture was taken when we first moved in and the grounds were landscaped later. If you look closely, you can see Vance on our balcony.) It was considered luxury because it had closets and cheap, industrial wall-to-wall carpeting in the bedrooms. What we didn’t realize at the time was that every household has to pay an annual habitation tax – it’s based on the number of rooms in your dwelling – and closets count as rooms. Our apartment had a kitchen, family room, three small bedrooms, a water closet (toilet room), two bathrooms and five closets! Our apartment was on what the French consider the premier étage (first floor) but we call the second floor. If you needed light in the corridors or stairwells you had to switch them on and they were controlled by a timer.
There were three apartment buildings in our complex. The whole complex was gated and you had to have a key for one of the two walk-through gates or an opener for the drive through gate. There was an underground parking area and each apartment had a garage (but no garage door opener) and a cave (storage space).
Our apartment featured roll up shutters (which I loved!) but there were no screens on the windows. The door had four or five deadbolts and you couldn’t leave it unlocked. The doors to each apartment were inside the building and no one could get into the building unless they had a key or were buzzed in. It was like living in Fort Knox.
When we rented the apartment the only thing in the kitchen was a sink. That’s right, we had to buy cabinets, appliances and light fixtures (there were no light fixtures in the apartment anywhere). Electricity was very expensive, so the only appliances we bought were a stove, a refrigerator, a washing machine and a microwave oven. All of the appliances were small by American standards. The washing machine had to be placed directly next to the sink, because I had to place a drain hose in the sink whenever I used it. We did go with an electric stove, even though many people in France used propane gas stoves because of frequent electric strikes. (We lived through many strikes – postal, truckers, mass transit, etc. - but, luckily, never had to survive an electric strike.)
We had one telephone in our apartment and we were careful with our usage of it, too. We were charged by the second for all calls – even local calls.
One of our bathrooms contained a bathtub and sink and the other contained a shower and a sink. The shower head was very low and had very little water pressure so we rarely used it. One overnight guest remarked that he “had to run around in the shower to get wet.”
Since our apartment did not have air conditioning, I insisted on getting ceiling fans so we would be able to survive the summer. We never turned them on. As a matter of fact, I don’t think we ever wore shorts while we live in France.
When we left France, we sold our appliances, light fixtures, cabinets, etc. (People would take their trees and shrubbery when they moved, but of course, we didn’t have any of those.) The one item that we could have sold over and over again, was our television. You see, there was an annual tax for owning a television and our television was unregistered – but don’t tell anyone.
