More about my home - and aswers to your comments

The building where I live was build in 1865. I found in a brocante a postcard dated 1906; I blew it up and framed. On the left, my building. The trees, that reach the 2nd floor in the postcard, are very high now, they reach the 5th floor! Today the train tracks have disappeared - and the horses too! I live in the 2nd fl (American 3rd) of the building, right above Le Congres, as the restuarant is now called. In this Hausmann style architecture, the 2nd and 5th floors have balconies. This picture shows my side balcony along the boulevard.At the turn of the century, the restaurant in the ground and first floor, called then La Rotonde, got permission for an extension in front. The roof of the round extension is ... my deck!! Here is my living room as seen from the deck in the evening.

Going back to my cellar, it is located in the 2nd basement, and it is pretty big. The second basement means that there are two flights of floors underground. Both have cellars, one per flat, plus one we use for bicycles. The first underground floor also has the elevator engine.

We store wine and "stuff", such as a couple of solid oak beds I had when we lived in Kenya 30 years ago, metal trunks with loads of souvenirs, paint, Christmas decorations..... and more

One of the owners remembers that during WW2 my cellar was used by the building dwellers during the bombings. The Renault factory at Billancourt Island, which was bombed during the war, was only 2 miles away.

If walls could talk!

> You cannot store wine in just any cellar, you need good humidity and temperature conditions. Because only old cellars (dirt floor, stone walls and no concrete) are optimum to store wine, you can buy wine storage cellars that look like a fridge. The challenge for the manufacturer was to avoid the virbrations of the engine that would very much damange the aging of wine - that's why these cellars are NOT a fridge!