Do dont
I think I've made a decision on the accommodation issue. In the meantime though, a linguistic interlude.
A quick test for anyone who speaks French - how would you say ‘I don't know what I need?’.
It's come up a couple of times for me in conversation, because everyone is still expecting me to hand in endless administrative forms. I start off by saying Je ne sais pas ce que.... and then run out of grammar. The first time it happened I improvised Je sais pas ce que j'en ai besoin, but really that means something like ‘I don't know what I need it’ which is, obviously, rubbish. There are a couple of grammatical ways you could make the sentence work but none of them sounded very natural in French, and I forgot to ask anyone, so I ended up making the same mistake again without having learnt anything.
Then by chance the sentence appeared in a Le Clézio short story I read.
Je ne sais pas ce dont j'ai besoin.
Beautiful, huh? It makes perfect sense, but I would never have thought of constructing the phrase that way, and I am mystified about why I've never come up against the problem before. Even in another language - but then in Spanish they have a simple transitive verb for the job, in fact among the languages I have played around with I think it's only French in which one has need of something rather than just needs it.
I love the French word dont, so elegant. I think I've written about it before. Every time it pops up I get a pleasant surprise. Saying C'est la fille dont je t'avais parlé! is so much cooler than saying ¡Es la chica de la que te había hablado! (yikes, such an effort to think in Spanish now..). But in general this kind of relative connection mechanism is always a tricky thing to predict in foreign languages, or it is for me anyway.