Busy, Busy, Busy

Although pleading poverty, as always, I've managed with the help of a few assistants to get a few more jobs done as winter closes in on us. Having had the approval of the management to knock the wall through into the banqueting hall, I thought I'd best jump on it before she changed her mind. With the most delicate of hammers and chisels I carefully took the 18 inches of stonework away from behind the bath room wall while leaving the tiling and block work intact.

We have also been busy, in between rain showers, felling more timber in an attempt to get through this year without having to buy in fire wood. Josh has been good using the cut wood to rebuild one of the straw walls of the round house. Depressingly the round house is not holding up to the Norman moistness and I feel there is an urgent requirement to finish turfing the roof at the earliest opportunity.

Tuesday will be Janes birthday and, having hit the big 40 last year, this year she will be on the down hill stretch so celebrating 39 I think. She's not a happy bunny as her training course at work coincides with her planned holiday which means she has to go to work instead of relaxing at home. Things are also not helped because I've volunteered my services for a long days work too putting me in the dog house as well.

Another year older

October has been so hectic, It appears that I failed to blog at all. I shall make up for it now with an update as to the ins and outs of the past few weeks. In an attempt to get motivated to working, I have volunteered my services to various people helping out with their projects. This has seen me roofing, dry lining, installing electrics and scaffolding to mention just a few of the jobs. To coincide with that we have had a pretty constant flow of visitors ending today with the departure of my chief motivator, Stevey, and Laura after a week here without their children.

During Steves visit, we managed to get a whole load of jobs ticked off the list. The key one being the building of a hard standing outside the workshop where we have parked the roulotte trailer in preparation to start the building works. Following on from that Steve got out his tyre fitting kit and changed the two perished tyres on the trailer, no mean feat I have to say and all credit where credit is due, he did a fantastic job. We also had Greg over for a day to help fell some trees in the valley and burn a huge pile of rotting branches and twigs. If the rain holds off for a day next week, we may try and do some more.

On the night before my birthday we were ravished by the same storm that hit the UK taking 23 tiles off the various buildings and leaving us very exposed if the weather was to turn wet. Because of this, I spent 5 hours of my birthday on the roof in the gales replacing broken tiles, crochets and battens. Hopefully this will be the last time this year that I need to get up there.

With a small amount of persuasion from Laura, Jane has now agreed that we can get rid of the only bath in the main house replacing it with a double shower. The washing machine is being moved over to the gite and the toilet will be moved to where the washing machine is. You may wonder why we want to change things about. The bigger picture is that we are going to put a door way through the wall right where the toilet is at present. This will mean we can access the banqueting suite without having to go outside which should, in the long term, allow us to incorporate the room into the main house and therefore get much more use out of it. Watch this space.

Tomorrow sees the arrival of MIL which in turn will see anything and everything spring cleaned and polished including the kids if they stand still too long.