What
is happening to our family at the 21th century, in a state of Law, at the heart
of Europe, is so unbelievable that we cannot accept it. No we can't!
We
already have Facebook, a petition and a two minute video (see above) to help us
to inform other people about what is happening to us. What if this would have
happened to you?
With
this blog we will give you regular news about this incredible story that begins
like this: once upon a time in Brussels, our family was happily living in a
very beautiful house in front of a lake. During 14 years we had spent our
economies, and most of our spare time, not simply renovating but restoring it
with love.
We
were therefore pleased to learn that the clinic, which had been abandoned for
more than a decade, next to our house was finally going to be transformed into
a complex of luxury apartments.
We
had been robbed several times, had been awaken at night by abnormal noises of
people stealing every possible thing and had witnessed a huge fire that might
have ravaged also our own house.We would soon feel safe, we would have the
possibility to sleep quietly throughout the whole night, we would not have to
call the police anymore, we would have neighbours instead of troubles, we thought....
But
when Lixon started its works the nightmare began.
During
the summer 2012 asbestos was removed with big air extractors turned into our
patio! No more gardening or barbecues.
And
then we had to suffer the demolitions quickly described in our 2 minute video.
Rocks falling, 45 cm long holes through our walls next to electric plugs, an
infiltration when our chimneys were destroyed, humidity, trucks unloading
machines and material from 4:00 am, unbearable noise and dust, with our beds
trembling and our photo frames falling down…
Scared
but determined to see the works finished as soon as possible, we decided to
find a place to sleep, in order to be able to pursue our normal lives (i.e.
studying and working). And every night, for seven months, we caught our things
for the day after and went to sleep somewhere else.
Cracks
appeared all over the house since November, the basement suddenly had 100% of
humidity and mushrooms growing in the walls. Then we had three concrete
"volcanos" lifting our tiles in February and March and Lixon
pretending to restart the works without a plausible explanation…
We
had to go to court and we were astonished to learn that, without our permission,
Lixon had injected concrete under our foundations and had put big 8 and 9 meter
steel bars in our underground to gain around 65 square meters.
Having
gone through two wars, with bombs falling in the lake, the house never had a
problem but, after denying for a while a fact that was easily confirmed, Lixon
discovered that our house had a “structural problem” since the moment it was built
120 years ago!
Lixon is a huge enterprise and we opened our
doors almost on a daily base for them to have the possibility to regularly monitor
the damages at our place.
According to the people responsible for the
works, everything was “normal”, so normal that we had to be evacuated by the
fireman on 13 June 2013.
After 5 days and 4 nights camping in front of
our house to draw people’s attention to what was happening and to try to obtain
a paper certifying our evacuation for security reasons, there was a decree of
the City of Brussels declaring the house uninhabitable and stopping the works
until the house would be stabilized.
It is very difficult to cut such a long and sad
story short…The fact is that nothing happened since June, apart from the fact
that Lixon went to court too to claim for EUR 250.000 for the prejudice we had caused them. And accuse us of denigration by
telling the truth and nothing but the whole truth.
We very often think that if this would not be
happening to us, it would be difficult to believe it!
Thank God we had had the good idea to make an “état
des lieux”, an inventory and statement of state of repair, full of photos of
every corner of the house commented by our own expert and countersigned by Lixon,
in December 2011.
We lost our home almost 8 months ago and, at
present, we have absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel. We do not live
in a country at war, there was no natural catastrophe and we feel like as if we
were internally displaced people for no valid reason.
Only because there are cities that have to grow
so quickly that individual people’s properties and individual people’s rights
cannot be respected anymore. Because profit is more important than respect, and
private interests are stronger than the public entities that are supposed to
defend the citizens’ rights.
Can we accept this? NO WE CAN’T!