The Coach House Is Done (And France Ran Out of Air Conditioners While We Did It)

The coach house is finished.

I kept not letting myself type that sentence, the way you don’t say a baby’s name out loud until it’s really coming. But it’s (finally!) done. The beds are made, the books are on the shelves, and a couple of weeks ago we hosted our very first group of guests, who arrived as strangers and left having found the good knives and the one light switch that makes no sense. Nobody asked for their money back, which in this line of work I have decided counts as a standing ovation.

Needless to say, it went well. Better than we let ourselves hope, which felt like a small miracle given how we got here.

Because, well, we did the entire thing during the worst heatwave France has ever recorded. Ever.

I’m not being dramatic here. June 2026 was the hottest June ever measured in this country. Météo-France put most of the map under red alert, dozens of départements at once, the highest warning level they have. Towns all over the place blew past 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), and one afternoon Rennes hit 43, which is nearly 110. Forecasters kept comparing it to the deadly 2003 heatwave, the one older French people still talk about the way Californians talk about specific earthquakes. That was the weather we chose to carry four bedrooms’ worth of furniture through.

We are American, so of course we had already decided the coach house would have some air conditioning. This is not negotiable for us. It is possibly the most American thing about us, more than the peanut butter, more than the constant apologizing or oversharing. And for once our Americanness saved us (o say can you seeeee!) because we had ordered the AC units early, back before the heat actually arrived, purely out of habit.

Then, about halfway through, one of our units broke, and we realized we needed one more.

So Sean went to buy another one. Sold out. He tried the next store. Sold out. Every store within a hundred-mile radius, sold out (the way toilet paper was sold out in a very specific spring we all remember). Apparently the entire country had come to the same conclusion at the same moment, which is how I learned that the French have, at long last, converted to air conditioning. Centuries of insisting they didn’t need it, and then one June they all cracked at once.

Then I called one last store. A hardware store a few towns over. It rang once and went to a recorded message.

I laughed when I heard it. Then I cried a little.

This one’s for paid subscribers. On the other side: what that voicemail actually said, the full before-and-after tour of all four bedrooms, the kitchen, the courtyard and the game room, the piano that arrived at 104 degrees, and the injury my husband still won’t discuss. Paid subscribers also get the coach house direct booking link before anyone else. Upgrade and come see what we did.