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 :)

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

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..

Here are some before, during & after photos with the bigger sets below.

With the roof now cleared you can really start to get a sense of size of the space we will have available to us. The timbers that we removed we are offering for free to anyone who wants to collect them (see HERE) and the cattle feed rack on the left we’ve given to Jean Luc our farming neighbour so he’s got use out of that. We are also trying to rescue the trough (at the bottom of the picture) that has a water irrigation system still fitted but given the time it’s stood unused and the rust its infested with it looks like it’ll only good for junk, which is a shame. Also not sure what we’re going to do with the old tiles as yet but i’m hoping i can at least crush them down and use them as hardcore rather than taking them to the dump.

Below are the remaining photos from the work carried out by Dad and I, unfortunately the two photos which would have proved popular if we’d captured it we don’t have…

These were :

1. I slammed my head off the main roof beam
2. One of the beams rolled and slammed the side of my head…

How i wasn’t knocked spark out is beyond me, but more to the surprise of Dad i didn’t lose my rag.
There must be ZEN in them bits of wood ;)

And that’s it. That’s where we are at the moment, we’ve got the wall to remove of course but i need to figure out what to do with all those bricks we’ll remove. There isn’t such a thing as a skip hire company around here and taking it all to the municipal dump is going to take many many trips with a car and a trailer so I need to get my thinking cap on!

Do you have any ideas?

In all the time we’ve owned the house Dawn and I have never actually spent a single night in the house with just each other. With all the work we’ve been doing my dad has thankfully been able to help, then in the summer Dawn and Cas were here a few weeks before Dawn and her parents but just Dawn and I it’s never happened!

Time to rectify that then :)

With all the hard work that’s been put in this year the house is not only weather proof but actually quite comfortable. Last year when Dad and I were out here late October it was -10 and we had no heat… This year the weather station is telling me it’s a barmy warm 13 inside the house and -1 outside we have the log burner going, the wind is kept outside and with the lights, stockings and “Fred” the house is looking very homely.

We’ll keep you up to date with a few things we have planned like a meeting with the Architect on Monday, but we really are planning a holiday and not a renovation week. There is a nasty rumor that we may be going horse riding with Dawn God daughter but we’ll wait and see :)

Also i’ll be posting a round up of the year, some interesting news on “Petite Assistante” and of course lots of photos from this week. I will confess however to pulling a fast one and already installing the weather station to start to get some stats on the amount of wind & rain we get up here and i’m fitting the solar logger so as much as i want it to be all rest you know what they say about idel hands being the devils work etc etc :)

And on that note from Me, Dawn & Schubert (on his 1st trip to the house) we bid you Joyeux Noël

Update 28th Dec
I remember why and how much I LOVE BEING HERE!

You can download your free app from iTunes or in your iPhone & iPod touch HERE

If of course you want to show us some Google add clicking love that would be great too… More shortly, lots and lots to tell you .

We first used LDLines back in Sat 29 August 2009 & I remember twittering at the time about how poor the service was and that they were obviously looking to be the Ryan Air of the English channel. I also said i’d never travel with them again due to the chaotic nature of the booking in process, loading process and the fact the facilities on the boat just weren’t up to scratch and today i eat a lot of humble pie!

I ended up on LDLines this time not by choice but by what turned out to be my own good fortune. I left it late this time to book a ferry for a quick renovation getaway and by that time the main players were asking around £150 / £180 for crossing, so i reluctantly booked with LDLines for £55 return and just figured i’d sit here with gritted teeth..

On arriving this time booking-in was slick, loading was now organised and not like the wild west park anywhere we’d had previously encountered and the boat left only 10 minutes late and zipped across in the promised hour. Previously it was 50 minutes late leaving and it seemed like we limped across in “normal” ferry time (we’ve left dead on time this return crossing).

The ships facilities were all up to speed, the (very) small duty free shop was open & both front and mid facilities were also open. This is so night and day compared to what we’d experienced before and it didn’t stop there!

On arriving at Boulonge you are no longer in town, at the bottom of a round about going through a check-in desk that was a glorified porta cabin, this is all new. LDLines look like they have taken home in a totally new birth and part of the port thats a fair distance away from the old place. By moving to the new facilities they’ve really staked their intention to provide a new quality of service across the channel and from this experience they are achieving that.

Not everything unfortunately is roses, we spoke to more than a few people who either ran later than usual for the boat or were just plain confused that they’d moved. Everyone agrees that this is a lot easier but the website and tickets MUST be updated to let everyone know of the move. For us when we arrived and unloaded we like a lot of people had no idea where we were and you can forget the SatNav having any idea where this place is. To help you and LDLines i’ll be posting my POI (Point of interest) and the long and latitude that you can pump into your SatNav.

I will be writing to LD to see if they want to comment on this post as i’d really like to understand what they did to turn the whole travel experience around and i’ll also be rubbishing my own Tweet saying i’ll never travel with them again…

LDLines now have a guaranteed repeat customer, lets hope they do frequent traveller or positive blog discounts ;)

Links :
www.LDLines.com
www.LDLines.co.uk

New wood burning stove
heat in this house has always been somewhat of an issue. With the old stone walls and rather large gaps in them and lack of a “proper” heat source we’ve always struggled to heat the house. We’ve used paraffin heaters to heat the rooms etc etc but these cost a lot to run and the only other source of heat possible is from an old cooker stove that is very inefficient and doesn’t throw out a lot of heat at all and all that changed today.. Welcome the Poele Godin to the house.

Now Poele Godin isn’t a name i’ve come across while searching for a wood burning stove and that’ll be because it’s a very French brand. This particular one is 40 years old and belonged to the parents of a friend of ours. A quick search on ebay.fr brings up a few available for sale in our area ranging from ¢300 to €500 and given the amazing change in heat this house has i’ll be bidding on one asap (eBay search : http://bit.ly/Poele )…

With the amount of heat kicking off this thing we thought we’d try out cooking bacon on it and since that was a success we even threw in some potatoes! Genius! For the first time in Autumn/Winter since we’ve owned the house i’m sitting here in a t-shirt and not a t-shirt, jumper and a body warmer If i can get one for €300/€500 then it’s really priceless.

Clearing the barn & more hedgehogs
Enough said about this, needless to say another 5 found, i’ve got a bloody hedgehog farm going on here!

Sorting the lawn
Today was full of goodies from Jacque and this time it was the ride on mower. Given the amount of sun and rain we get here the garden grows wild, and since Jacque has bought himself a ride on mower over the summer it was time to put it to good use. I’ll post a picture shortly of me smiling like a big kid riding it (it could be below by the time you read this) and trust me the smiles were involuntary but there is something that makes you feel great riding around on a mower feeling like a cross between a racing driver and a master gardner.. Anyway job done and i’ll be volunteering to do it a lot more i think :)

PS : The smoke isn’t from me crashing the mower in a hail of flames but still some of the hay from yesterday STILL bloody burning.

That’s it for today, as i said we took a short one and listened to Tottenham hotspurs beat Portsmouth 2-1 (great result) and watched the longest F1 qualifying in history and Jenson Button somehow blow a great opportunity to take the title.. Tomorrow we’ve got a day of lifting, lagging and roof removing if all goes well.

Task 1 – Repair the rear window.

Somewhere in a storm in the last few months we appear to have lost a pain of glass, so Dad has task #1 of fitting a new piece of glass to this rotten old window. Easier said than done as he had to be so careful not to either break another really thin 2mm thick piece or damage the window itself. Time & patience paid off and he got this done. Looking forward to the part of the renovation where we replace all the windows :)

Task 2 – Get the bloody car out of the barn!

This car is starting to be a right pain in the arse. The owners haven’t turned up, we don’t have the right paperwork to take ownership and we’ve got a guy waiting to take it but we can’t give it to him (at the moment) , plus it’s not been out of the barn in around 8 years we’re told, so starting it isn’t an option.
Now i don’t know a great deal about these Citroens but Jacque Chirac loved them and they have some great funky hydraulic suspension but after all this time it’s sunk and is actually below the level of the barn so getting it out proved to be a mission for NASA, a structural engineer and 2 English guys sheer stubboness..

An hour later, with some pushing, pulling, choice words and creative ramp building it sees the sun for the first time in just under a decade and now the barn clearing can really start.

The barn is full of hay as you’d expect but its not been used as a hay loft for as long as the car has been in hiding and there is a LOT of it.. With the help of the local farmers tractor we cleared most of it away ready for burning.

Take it from me any romance you had about growing up on a farm in Smallville moving hay like Clark Kent well forget it… It’s horrible, itchy, gets everywhere..

Task 3 – Rehome the wild life!

During the move we found a next of hedgehogs hibernating. Now being a city dweller i’m sure i was a little over sympathetic about their plight and rather just turf them out or burn them with the rest of the hay i found the Nature Channel watcher in me and we rehoused them. Seriously we rehoused them! I’m not going to be taking that part of the barn down till next year so we moved some hay, had a new bed then physically moved the rather cute rodents to the new area and buried them again. Not so much as a thank you or an uncurling ( see below ) but it felt really good and a dose of positive karma all round.

And that’s my good karma deed for the day well except feeding the local wild kitten

So a good start to the week, tomorrow is a very busy day of pipe lagging, tile removal, mowing of lawn (my first time with a ride on mower) &  fitting a new wood burning stove, so forgive me while i sit back here put my feet up and have a Leffe beer.

Lots more tomorrow…..