Anyway, enough boring stuff and on to the posts I've been writing recently. (If you're observant, you will see the underlying theme! Yes, it starts with the letter 'w' and ends with 'e' with 'i' and 'n' somewhere in between!)
24th April
We arrived back in Le Bourg Dun at 5 a.m. yesterday following a trip to the UK for Eastercon up in Glasgow. Managed to do around 1,750miles seeing friends - Stanstead Abbotts, Sheffield, Motherwell, Glasgow, Colchester, Burgess Hill and home! Today the weather decided to turn bad just because I needed to work in the garden, but it didn't stop me - oh no! In fact, done so much work that I need to sit down with a nice glass of red wine now whilst John makes lunch/dinner (well, it's 4 p.m., so what label should you use?). So I thought I'd get on with the blog that I've been making draft notes for but never getting round to finalising them (just like the house that I'm talking about!). Life has been just a little frantic, hence no posts, but I thought I should still talk about what has been happening since it's been an important time in our new life. So here's February - I haven't changed anything, so you can see what I was thinking at the time as well as what actually happened.5th February
Well, it's only the 5th February and already things are moving along like a hurricane! Johanne has been in to finish the placo (plasterboard) in the bathroom and bedroom in the main house, and I was just getting the walls in the bedroom stripped ready for redecorating when Dmitri (VERY French name that!) turned up to say they are going to start doing the kitchen next week! That means we can get up to Normandy for mid February and, more importantly, be there for 20th when the Connect Club has a meal. (That's a club run by an English/French couple designed to allow different nationalities living/having holiday homes in Normandy to meet with each other. We tend to have Dutch, English and French mainly. It's a great idea and they have at least one social event each month. These vary from meals out (as in February) meals/barbecues, book exchanges, visits to local tourist sites, wine tastings, etc. Now we are in La Vendee most of the time, we don't get to attend many, so it would be great to be able to be there for the February.).Anyway, back to the renovations, that means I have to change the order of work a bit now. When John eventually finishes doing 10+ hours a day on the Worldcon website (and no, I'm not exaggerating!) he can finish the preparation work he's doing on the back wall and we can get the final couple of radiators in. Phew, I really am beginning to believe we will have the main house 'livable' by my birthday!!
No, actually it would be safer to not think that, since something is bound to happen which will delay the whole thing.
At least it looks like we'll have a much more developed house for when Alison and Bob (John's sister and her husband) come to visit which we hope is going to be around my birthday - since we could then have a double birthday celebration as hers is at the end of February. In fact, I was talking the other day of perhaps getting all our English friends together for a meal at L'Escargot - a restaurant in the next village where we have developed a good relationship with the owners thanks to Olivier (the guy we bought the house from). We went there for a drink with him to celebrate selling/buying the house, and then later to celebrate his birthday. The owners are a nice couple and the food is OK - not exactly haut cuisine, and not too much of a choice, but absolutely fine. The Brits would definitely have arrived if that came off, since we thought there would be 10 of us if Alison and Bob were here too!
15th February
What a 10 days we've had - forget about the developments in the house, we seem to be constantly taking backward steps. Talk about bad things coming in threes - not that anything serious is happening, it's just really hard work sometimes!Vancendeau came and did 90% of the kitchen!! That's good, but we have to keep on nagging him for things that he's forgotten, like the fact that they were providing us with a dishwasher, and a cupboard for all my cookery books! Plus the wok holder was broken, as was the border underneath the cupboards.
Then the central heating packed up, which we thought was possibly because we'd run out of oil, so ordered some more. The problem was we had to wait a week for the delivery, and it was COLD with no heating. We managed to borrow a paraffin stove, and bought one ourselves so it wasn't too bad in the lounge. The problem was that the central heating still wasn't working after the oil was delivered, and we had to wait for M Mignon to come. As it was all he did was reset the red button and all was well, but we didn't know that!
And then we got up yesterday and there was no water! Since we have a well, and the weather has been somewhat wet over the winter, we didn't think that we had run out of water, and were looking into it when Eric, the electrician came to see what work was needed to finish their rewiring. With his help we identified that the pump at the bottom of the well had packed up, so we would need M Mignon again! In the meantime, Eric phoned the water company for us (we had no mains water in the house at all) who said they would try to get round to turn on the mains within the next 3 days!
Luckily they came within about 3 hours.
Hooray, we have mains water! We should have known that when the water man came within a couple of hours that things don't go that easily for us. First of all when the engineer turned on the water in the house, there was a massive leak! So John spent most of the afternoon trying to fix it - not that it was difficult in itself, but tucked away in a hole in the bottom of the wall, and John just couldn't get at it to tighten it up. Since the dial on the water meter next to this joint said 000, it looks like Olivier, the previous owner, never used mains water! Anyway, John managed to half fix it so there was just a small drizzle, and we thought that would give us time for his knuckles to recover before we had to get it fixed properly.
Oh no, that's not what this week is all about. Once we got the main leak fixed, we could see that it was also leaking on the other side of the meter. That belongs to the water company, and there is an anti-tamper collar on the water pipe so we can't fix it. So we turned the water off again, and thought about what we should do. Oh, that means a telephone call and I hate talking French on the phone, let alone to a help line. Aha! I had the great idea that we could get our neighbour, Laurent, to do the call for us since it was Saturday morning and he'd be at home. So he came to look at it before making the call but of course, as always, it wasn't leaking any more! An hour or so after he'd left, it started again but by then we realised it was actually leaking all the time, but if we turned the water off the residue soaked into the soil below the floor and the dribble isn't very obvious until there is enough to leave a puddle. When Laurent came we'd obviously had the water off long enough for it to drain away and we hadn't noticed the dripping.
By the time we realised this, it was too late to be able to phone again, so we decided to leave it until next week, and just turn the water off overnight. At least the leak is before the meter so it's not costing us anything! We will ask Marie to make the phone call when we have our French lesson on Tuesday.
Still, it's Sunday now and the sun is shining (in between the rain clouds anyway!) and we have three-quarters of a new kitchen! Ca marche (things are moving)!
(It was actually end of March before the kitchen was finished, but it was worth the wait!)
