The chaos continues

The chaos continues chez nous…

We have the builders in. well, to be precise, at the moment they are outside doing something, I know not what. But they have kindly left the back door open, so time for me to don another jumper methinks.

The job in hand is forming a bedroom for Rosie out of half our loft space. At the moment she is sharing with her sister and it’s not ideal. So we made her room the top of the list when it came to getting building jobs done in the house. Sadly my office will have to wait for another year and I shall remain snuggled in amongst the Playmobil and Lego…

So the builders arrived yesterday. In the end we went with a local english guy who was recommended to us by a friend. The same friend had also recommended some local French builders, but, although they are clearly true artisans and would have done a beautiful job, they were hugely expensive and couldn’t start work for another 3 months. So, sorry folks, but quick and cheap wins the day. Not that the guys we have will do a slap-dash job. They have been working on a house nearby and done a great job, so I have no worries at all.

The first task for them was to knock through the wall from the loft into the upstairs corridor to form a doorway. Now, it only seems like a small gap, but when the walls are almost 3 feet think, that’s a heck of a lot of stone to remove. About 3.4 tonnes of it to be precise! As we had a small hole in the floor of the loft anyway we suggested they made it a bit bigger and just flung the rubble down into the wood-store below. Unsurprisingly this was seen as an excellent suggestion – carting 3.5 tonnes of rock along the corridor and down the stairs was going to take quite some time! As it was, they managed to open the doorway up in just a few hours, which was quite well ahead of schedule I think.

Now, perhaps that’s why there doesn’t seem to be much happening today. yesterday it was all banging, tapping, crumbling, crashing etc. Many cups of tea and coffee, chirpy French radio blasting out all day. But today there are a few yells from outside and not a huge amount of action. Think I’d better go check…