Rain at last

After so many months of dry weather, as I sit here tapping away, I can hear rain on the roof.

I’m glad I can hear it because it is much quieter than it has been in the past now that Jon has been working so hard boarding up the ‘walls’ in the loft, and we can hear (or not hear) the benefit of all his hard work.

It is very long, slow job as our dear old crooked house never has had a straight line and to make anything really straight would mean making it small too, so to maximise the space Jon has painstakingly cut each ’slat’ to exactly fit its hole.  We think that the end is in sight for this particular part of the project.  But, reader, don’t worry, we still have plenty of work to be carrying on with.

Sorting out

Loft or garden, garden or loft?   Trying to sort out both before the really good weather sets in is a bit of juggling act.

It’s pouring with rain today so there’s no contest, it’s indoor jobs but we are both taking a slow day and catching up on some admin work. Unfortunately it looks as though the wet weather has set in for the next few days so the garden will have to wait.

During a good warm spell we’ve been continuing to take down trees, Jon precariously perched on uneven and loose soil on the bank and me pulling hard on the end of a rope.  Our record was 16 in one day but the last day we barely managed half a dozen due in part to the dangerous terrain and in part to the sheer height of the trees which are beginning to swell with buds and are getting top heavy.

Therefore we decided to call in the cavalry in the shape of Steve the tree man who took down our huge Horse Chestnut last year.  Steve popped round this morning to take a look and declared that it would only be a couple of hours work.

The remaining trees

He’s a good chap that Steve, if we were taking the trees down it would be at least 2 days, and that with the offer of help from our close friend who had offered to pop round and help on rope pulling duties.  So we are very pleased that we decided to ask Steve.  The work will be done in 10 days or so, dependent on the weather and when we return from a short trip down to the Spanish/French border.

A gift of irises

We have had some lovely weather this week.  A friend very kindly gave us a batch of irises which I’ve started to plant on the newly cleared banks, Jon completed the first mowing of the season and I spent the morning clearing up the ground around the areas where we have taken trees down. We even got as far as opening the pool up on Thursday.

We uncovered it with a little trepidation expecting to find at very least our friend Trevor the Toad sitting there and at worst a few rodent fatalities, but no, just a couple of slug and spider fatalities and a few hundred leaves. As it was spotless before we closed it, we were surprised that leaves had managed to get into the water, they must have blown under the cover during the storm back in January.

The water is very clear but the bottom of the pool is very grubby and we will have to run it for a couple of days to get it really clean but as the weather has changed we just cleared away all the leaves and will open it up properly when we get back.

Oh yes, the trip.  Well the excuse for it is Jon’s birthday next week, plus a very nice offer of a ‘free’ night in a Holiday Inn Express on the outskirts of Girona.  So we will be journeying again into Spain and travelling back via the Costa Brava into France and spend our second night in Collioure.  It’s a good excuse to stock up on sherry and cava and a few other nice things that we enjoyed during our last visit to Spain.

Tweet, tweet

Her face, I must say, was a picture.

‘You do what?  Why on earth would you want to do that?‘

I wasn’t quite sure whether I was supposed to take on the look of a guilty schoolgirl found out doing something she ought to or whether to just laugh.  I maintained my straight face and my dignity.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Facebook is for kids and uni students, that sort of thing.  I can’t understand why someone like you would want to do that!’.

Well I do.  And I do it because I can keep in touch with my children, ex colleagues and friends.  And I’ve had more contact with my lovely cousins in Oz than I’ve had for years.  So there.

I will not feel guilty for my Facebook profile  (oh, and I like to play Scrabble too).

A couple of weeks ago I had to admit to the same person (although I have no idea why I thought I should unless it was to deliberatly wind her up again), that I now also use Twitter.  In fact, I have become a bit of a Twitter addict.  I have a computer on all day long downstairs just on the off-chance that  some work might come my way.  It’s a new baby computer which is just used to see e-mails coming in and for ‘Tweets’.

I have a gismo attached (other gismos are available) called Tweetdeck which tweets at me when someone I am ‘following’ on Twitter updates their status or sends a message.

So, I get updates all day long not just from the girls and other family, friends and acquaintances but also from ‘Celebs’.  You might be interested to know that Stephen Fry is currently in Malaysia filming a TV series, he was in South America when I first started following him.  He’s very interesting and uploads some fascinating photographs.  Philip Schofield (what a lovely man he is) was devastated last week when Fern Britton announced her departure from their TV programme – he is a reall Twitter fan and helped me (unknowingly) set up my Tweetdeck.  Chris Moyles is another person I follow, he’s a very interesting and amusing chap too.

Another interesting tweeter is Rory Cellan Jones, the BBC’s Technology Correspondent.  Now he is an avid Twitter fan and I wonder if he ever sleeps or takes a day off, he’s always twittering on about something interesting.

Now I don’t want you all to think that I do nothing all day apart from watch the computer.  Oh no.  Jon and I have been very busy tidying the attic room to make it resemble a room more than an attic.  Jon has been lopping trees left, right and centre while I have been nursing my poor arms and back following a ‘flat on her back’ incident last week whilst hanging on the end of a rope attached to a recalcitrant tree!  I’ll be back out there tomorrow trying to steer trees in the right direction again.  I’ve also had quite a bit of work come in over the last week, so that actually has kept me at the computer more than normal.

On Friday we were allowed out as it was quiz night, the first in our village since the end of November and, boy, was the bar packed.  You will be, no doubt (places tongue firmly in cheek) delighted to learn that we came second, pipped by 1 1/2 points at the winning post by a team called the Hill Billies!

So, life here in the wilds of France continues much as it should.  A bit of DIY here, a bit of gardening there, the odd spot of work and a twitter, tweet and game of internet Scrabble.

I have about a dozen packets of seeds to plant, about 100 irises that a dear friend gave me the other week (they will be going just under where the trees are coming out from) and the veggie plot is just having to wait, we’ll be having the late cropping varieties this year.

That’s all for now folks.  Just off to check my tweets again.  Eddie Izzard has just woken up in New York, I’ll just see what he’s up to today…..

Spring is sprung

You can almost hear the grass growing out there.  The birds are yelling at each other across the valley, especially at dawn and dusk, and our friendly robin thermometer tells us it’s been hovering around 21 degrees over the last few days.  It does rather drop down to below zero first thing in the morning, but there’s certainly some heat in the sun at last.

While I’ve been getting some work recently, Jon has finished off all the bits and pieces in the lounge.  We’re really happy with the extra space we’ve got now, from two smaller, darkish rooms, we now have a lovely large salon.

If you’ve been here, I hope you’ll agree it’s an improvement.

Tomorrow we will spend the day playing at lumberjacks.  We’ve been putting off doing the tree work for too long and the time has come when we can delay no longer.  We will be clearing around the perimeter of our garden to let more light in for the pool and the new planting that we hope to get on with soon.  Watch this space.

Photos will follow, promise!

We have been working away on the lounge.  It took poor Jon days to fill, sand and wash and we finally got to the paint pots on Sunday.

Although we’re almost finished I don’t want to bore you with the pictures until we are totally satisfied with it which will probably be this weekend.  There are still the picture rails to replace and furniture to move back into place.

Meanwhile, we’ve had some lovely weather, nice sunny and quite warm days and then some really miserable chilly days too.  Today is glorious but we’ve just checked the forecast for the rest of the week and find that snow is likely to be with us again on Thursday and Friday.  According to the French weather website we will have two flakes of snow on Thursday and one on Friday.  I’m not quite sure whether they mean for the whole village or per house.

Thursday sees us gathering at friends for this month’s book club lunch.  This time we are discussing Alan Bennett’s Four Stories – one of which was dramatised on BBC Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago with lovely Maggie Smith – and the other book is Andrea Levy’s Small Island.    We enjoyed these two books, it’ll be very interesting to see what others make of them.

Last week at one of the other book groups we discussed Tang Twan Eng’s wonderful The Gift of Rain which everyone agreed was a lovely book, and my third group book this month was Going Gently by David Nobbs who wrote the excellent Reginald Perrin books on which the TV series was based.

If you know or look up these books you’ll see just how diverse our reading is these days.  From Malaysia to Jamaica, from 1900 to 2000, from fact to fiction.  I just love books!

Still working away

Poor Jon has been beavering away in the extended lounge filling in holes and cracks in the walls and ceiling.  It seems that every time he fills in one visible crack there’s another one right next to it that needs filling too.

The plaster and filler that he’s been using is supposed to dry in 2 hours.  It seems more like 2 days.

So we are still waiting to get on with the painting but hopefully (?) this weekend will see us covered in paint and with headaches from the fumes.  It’ll all be worth it in the end though!

A couple of strippers

Well, that’s what we’ve been up to for the last couple of days. Stripping the wallpaper from the old ‘nothing’ room and we’re amazed how much lighter it is.

We did used to love the warm pink and coral colour on the walls as it gave the house a bit of ‘oomph’ when everything else was rather drab, but now that we are getting everything just as we had always planned, light is the thing we need more than anything, especially as downstairs only has windows facing east – lovely in the morning but then it gets quite dark.

We had to go out this morning, so Jon checked on the paint situation to make sure we had enough to carry the colours through the room.  We hadn’t but were disappointed to find that our local DIY store didn’t have that make.  We were sure we had bought it from there.  We had, hadn’t we?  Or maybe not?  Oh well, we would just have to go out again in the opposite direction to see if we’d bought it from the other DIY store.  But not today, eh?

Well, it made Jon do another check in the garage where he found, surprise, surprise, a second pot of paint, right make, right colour.  I’m so glad we didn’t find another one this morning.

Paint in France is incredibly expensive.  Upwards of €35 for a 2.5 litre pot of emulsion. And it’s terrible quality.  If you want to use Dulux it’s more like €40.  With the pound and the euro almost at parity these days, that makes for very expensive decorating.  So we were really relieved that the other pot was found.

If you want to find us this weekend it will be in the lounge with a couple of paint pots and rollers.  Then the fun bit of putting it all together again starts.  Pictures and ornaments to put up and cushions and throws to find.  That’s the bit I’m really looking forward to.

Jericho

No, actually more like Berlin. The wall came down brick by brick but by the end of the day we were both covered head to toe in red brick dust and whatever precautions we had taken didn’t stop the dust getting in every room in the house.  Every time we sweep up it just stirs it all up to settle again later.

However, we are delighted with the result, a big, light lounge.  (The blobs on the photo are specks of dust!)

“All” it needs now is a little finishing off and redecorating.

Should be done by about June, I reckon!!

In the pink

Is what we will be for the next few days, as will the cats and anything that stands still for long enough.

At last we are knocking down the wall in the sitting room into the ‘nothing’ room and enlarging the lounge.  The ensuing dust has given that Vie En Rose pink hue to every surface, crevice and even the air.  The garden is also taking on a pink coating of this vile stuff.

I’m sure we’ll think it all worth it when it is finished (*cough, splutter*)!

Seeing the light

Jon seems to have developed a passion for making windows!

Having completed the insulation in the loft he turned his attention to the many drafts creeping around the house – especially with the freezing temperatures we’ve been having since Christmas.

Having successfully built a window in the internal wall between the kitchen and the stairwell last year he tackled some more awkward tasks.

The end of the loft was fairly straight compared with the other windows

Looking through the bullseye across the valley is a lovely view, but the new frame for the new glass took a few tries until he got it perfect.

and down in the cave what had been a hole in the wall stuffed with a bit of rock is now a very odd shaped window which fits the hole, blocks out the draft and gives us the only daylight we have down there.

Our next major projects (do you like the way I said ‘our’ when it’s Jon who does all the work?) are going to take a while – the walls in the loft and knocking through the lounge into the ‘odd’ room, so we will be putting them off until we get back from our little holiday – about which, more to follow soon.