A long drive last night after work in London meant we arrived here at 03:30am French time, so it’s a day to recover, appricate the house, land and scenary and then i’ll get back into painting, fixing, gardening and blog writing.

WOW

• Bathroom now finished & painted, there’s even a toilet roll holder to add some luxury to the experience
• 2nd kitchen sideboard & cupboards installed ready for new appliances
• The rear bedrooms new ceiling is up & plastered
• New lights & power sockets run into the new bedroom
• 1st wall totally pointed ( this is VERY time intensive )
• Old electric, phone & data points replaced & secured
• 4 new windows ordered to replace the current rotting ones
• 1 new stable type door ordered. Delivery & fitting the windows & doors should be 4/6 weeks
• Roofs on the grange & the house repaired (again)

I’m sure i’ve forgot something but i’ll be speaking to dad in length tonight when he returns from his mammoth renovation trip (it’s Good Friday today), the write ups, photos & podcast will be hot on the heals of this post.

There’s at present no further work planned for the next 4/6 weeks until Dawn goes to the house to supervise the windows being fitted but we are on the cusp of achieving what we wanted to for this year and IT’S ONLY APRIL :)

Now being a city dog Schubert’s never enjoyed a garden this big in his life or seen cows! Being a Giant Schnauzer he’s normally the biggest thing on 4 legs around, but i guess if he’s going to be a country living dog he’s going to have to learn he’s no longer the biggest fish in the pond :)

There was no paperwork, no inspection, no photographs just a chat on the phone with some figures from our builder with a cost to repair and then a “Yes Mrs Caller that’s completed, the money will be in your account on Monday”… WHAT WHAT WHAT?

Yep that’s it! The quote from our builder has been accepted and he’ll be starting work in the next few weeks to repair the roof on the house and the grange (again) and this time they’ll be using a different technique to make sure the tiles stay on since this will be the 4th time of securing them. Maybe lessons have been learned.

I LOVE OUR INSURANCE COMPANY and that’s something i NEVER thought i’d say about any insurance company.

You can read the original post HERE and see latest pictures of the roof :

This week top of the hit list was the bathroom, while the shower has been in for a while we’ve lived with a few bare wires hanging out of the wall for light, no loo roll holder, no mirror and the toilet seemed to buck like a bronco if you sat down without thinking and then there was a gaping whole in the top of the wall so privacy was always a premium.

It’s a real shame we never got any good photos of the old bathroom as it’s hard to explain how horrible it was, how (or why) anyone used it before we purchased the house still a mystery. Sure the new shower made a massive difference but you needed to be a member on MENSA to work out how to fit it in such a small space and the somewhat fitted new toilet made life liveable but it was never quite like it should have been. Now with the new accessories fitted a proper light finally fitted and the wiring channeled into the wall and not forgetting that the toilet is now anchored down it’s fantastic but to top that all off the opening in the wall had now been sealed so that is very much job done on the temporary bathroom.

The next job that is coming along nicely is the 2nd part of the kitchen. You’ll remember THIS POST i wrote about fitting the kitchen and while we were in the house every few months it was fine,  I even cooked Christmas dinner (link) on the current stove so there is no complaints, but there isn’t is a washing machine or an electric oven (we’ll use the gas one as a backup) and that’s now whats being worked on.. A €100 new work surface from Brico Depot, some leftover cabinets from MFI (UK) and now it’s time to buy a washing machine and small fridge. This will be luxury like we’ve not experienced before.

So 1 week in and that’s the bathroom finished except a bit of painting and the kitchen is ready for appliance fitting…

FANTASTIC for just 5 days from my Dad working on his own.. Kudos Papa

This renovation task is to finish off making one large liveable bedroom out the the two tiny, dark and damp rooms that were there before. Below is a picture of when Dad and myself could hide our pleasure making these two rooms into one and this is the 2nd push to rebuild this room to make it an enjoyable space.

Dad wasted no time today in getting stuck in to ripping down the old ceiling as we need to rewired the room, replace the insulation and put up some plaster board plus we had an idea things were living up there, and unfortunately we were right.

While removing the wood cladding (that we hate so much) it soon became apparent that the old roof above this ceiling wasn’t sealed at all and every animal seemed to have taken a chunk of the old insulation for bedding and some wildlife had taken the liberty of just moving right on in and were living up there, breading up there and of course crapping up there. Yes unfortunately that black stuff you see in the photo is rat faeces (ewww). I am so glad we’ve never spent months living in this room :)

Finding what we have, we are so glad that we are now at a point to renovate this room and especially with the new windows coming can really start to make this a fantastic, liveable, cosy & clean room.

I’ll be updating this page through the week as there is progress on this room so check back regularly but here is todays instalment of Dads hard work with some before and after pictures.

Don’t worry the wallpaper is going as well as the wood.

We’ll be opening up this to have a nice big window overlooking the garden.

Making solid progress.

Oh my! Is that what we think it is?

All down time to remove the insulation now.

Here’s a quick picture of the hole we now have in the barn and the damage to the grange will look all to familiar to regular readers as these are the tiles that were repaired and replaced previously. It’s no surprise the insurance company and the builder are now looking to use a different technique to make sure they stay on this time for good, a welcomed bit of logic.

Total price of repair just over €1300, thankfully we’re fully insured.

The Barn

The Grange

I’ll post more pictures next week when we are on site so keep tuned :)

Previous storm damage posts can be found here : http://www.montpillard.com/?s=storm&x=0&y=0

So after the enforced winter’s break we finally have a break in the weather from high winds (more roof damage), very low temperatures (no frozen pipes this year is a WIN!) and a generally very tough European winter.

Hopefully the weather station has survived and we’ll download the data when we get there to share with you, but for now the outlook for the next few weeks is looking bright and it’s time to make the dash over to the house and roll up ”our” sleeves. I say ”our” rather lightly because really it’s my Dad! Yep it’s once again time to throw the big guns at it and he’s come up trumps again and will be doing most of the work we’ll be talking about (we need to keep him topped up with good food the odd beer & lots of English tea - then we stand a fighting chance of achieving some great things).

Here’s the plan!

• Put the finishing touches to the bathroom
• Repoint the interior walls in the kitchen area
• Remove the rear ”bedroom” ceiling
• Insulate & plasterboard a new ceiling
• Run electrics to the new bedroom
• Create a new floor for the the rear bedroom (lots of levelling to do here)
• Order new windows (more about this soon)
• Order new custom front stable style door (more about this soon)
• Fit new kitchen appliances

Now of course some of this is going to take more than the 3 weeks my Dad is on site but you’ll be pleased to know we aren’t flogging him to death; there’ll be builders in and then after that we have some tenants for 2 months, in Dawn’s parents, so works will continue with and around them, and both Dawn and I will be going to the house as well so it really is a full-on affair.

What does this all mean?
Simply put, by the summer the house will be in a totally liveable state. There’ll be no more rustic ”slumming it” in a house with holes in the walls, ill fitting door & windows and a rear ”bedroom” that’s currently really just a room in the barn we’ve thrown some beds in. From this point on it means we can concentrate on getting all the plans through and the major renovation started on the rest of the house knowing that we’ve always got a water-tight, warm, accommodating  and really rather nice cottage for us and everyone else to go out to without worrying how cold it’ll be or if a window has fallen out. So keep your eyes peeled as there is going to be a flurry of posts, pictures and we’ll even grace you with Episode 7 (or is it 8?) of our podcast..

Thanks for hanging in there, it feels so good to be back..

A few things about this trip were special, this was our first ever Christmas at the house, previously it would have been far to cold in the house (with no heating) plus Schubert now had his pet passport and it meant we could take him with us on his first ever trip out of the country and not have to worry how he was doing at home.

There’s not exactly any progress reports in this gallery but we wanted to share some images with you since it’s times like this that we are reminded why we love the house and where it’s situated. Please forgive the quality of a lot of these pictures they were all taken on the iPhone, just much more handy when needing to snap than getting out the big DSLR :)

The long journey ahead :

Just incase we didn’t know :

Fred came with us :

Christmas Breakfast. Galette  & good coffee :

Dawn with her Christmas presents (far to busy to pose for me) :

Christmas morning, sadly no snow but dry and bright :

The hard work we did putting in the kitchen earlier in the year came in very handy.. Everything working it’s now time to cook:

With dinner cooked it was time to eat. Happy Christmas from us :

Worlds smallest Christmas cake :

Schubert sees his first cows :

Getting a better look :

My Christmas present to myself . The weather station gets fitted :

Christmas evening arrives means marshmallow hot chocolate and Leffe :

More food :

Family & friends time :

Schubert makes himself at home :

Finally a little tradition we have, and that’s to release a Chinese lantern to see the year away. This year has been an excellent year and while i moan about the speed or lack of it with the renovation it’s times like this it is all worth it.

Here’s wishing you all a great and healthy 2010.

let this be a lesson to you and serve as a warning. The desires of this man are simple, give me food and give me heat. Put those things together and give me hot food and as Dawn (now my wife) found out you’ll have me forever.

Living where we do in France we tend to get power cuts so we always plan to have 2 ways to do most things. This means for heat we’ll have a wood burning boiler to top up the electric one, to cook food we’ll have a gas hob as well as an electric oven. You get the point, however this romance comes with a price and up until now i’d not given it a lot of thought.

Throughout the year you would have read that we’ve been stripping wood and burning it in the stove that came with the house. This served a purpose as the wood clad walls needed to go and as we had no heat burning this was a perfect way do use this. Alas we found the stove to be too small to generate any good amount of heat and we found ourselves burning as much of the wood as we had for very little heat output, then along came Godin! The Godin is a somewhat antique wood burning stove our friend lent us after taking pity on us knowing how much wood we were burning through for so little heat. The Godin is a mean beast, it burns whatever we throw in it for a huge amount of heat and thankfully churned through the wood that we’d collected.

Now you see i’m a romantic, the idea of big logs on the stove, keeping the house, my wife and me warm was enticing… A quick phone call and a week later 4 “stairs” of wood were delivered. Now living in London i don’t burn wood (i should) and i certainly have never ordered wood so 4 “stairs” was a guestimate but how hard could it be right? Get it delivered, stack it and burn it for a happy ending…. Kind of ;)

Have you any idea how much 4 stairs of wood is? Neither did I, have you any idea how small it looks in a pile? I did and that’s not very big I thought, i’ll stack that in an hour later… 4 hours! 4 bloody hours later of  lumping, moving, stacking, dropping, swearing and aching and it’s in a pile, only for the dog to steal a log and have some of the end collapse!

Let this be a warning to you my friends, wood burning may be a necessity but unless you have teenage kids who’ll do anything for money or some hired help please only order 1 stair, my back is killing me…

Now i need a hot bath but D’oh we only shower, at least i’ll be able to run the heat FULL POWER for the rest of the time we are here knowing that in theory i’m carbon neutral ;)

This really isn’t a moan as I love the stove and the loading of it, but this is a plea to my wife to HELP ME NEXT TIME… By the way Dawn “where did you go?“.

Yours achingly

Lee

PS : I know it’s cliche but as a man I just HAD to get a big axe, just ask any man it’s an essential tool in any armoury :)

I got the wood. Might as well have a chopper.

I know! It doesn’t look that much.

Still more to go.

2nd time the front load was stacked.