La semaine douzième

Well bit late on it this week - usually blog on Sunday nights but had a game to watch so it didn't happen.  Is a bit miserable here this morning - low cloud - chilly and light drizzly rain.  Good time to stay in my jammies,  drink several coffees and sit on the computer and sort out banking stuff and do the blog! 
I am actually struggling to remember what we did this week but think I have got it now.  Monday and Tues we were going to start doing the new flooring but then Paul decided he needed to finish doing all the water blasting so the house could start to dry out - there are issues here with wood getting 'champignons' - french word for fungus funnily enough - makes sense - and we have been making the perfect environment for it - water and warmth - so Paul has been having to spray a chemical to kill them as they pretty much just eat away at the timber leaving a light shell of rotten wood - not what you want in your house!  But before he could water blast in the last area to be done - our 'living' room - we had to finish digging down the floor to the level we need for the underfloor heating.  This took quite a few hours of both of us either using the crowbar or shovel.  We have ended up filling in the old duck pond with the dirt and stone - I wasn't sure if this was a good idea but it was a bit of a nesting place for mosquitoes so it's probably for the best.  Will be a good little area for a herb/kitchen garden.  Anyway we finally got to the end of it and Paul did the spraying, then on Wed Paul started doing the setting out for the flooring.  It took a while as it looked quite level when the old boards were on but once the stringlines had been set up it became apparent it wasn't so level after all!  We have nailed timbers to the beams that the boards can be nailed into to even it all off.  Paul is now just putting the last few boards that we have in this morning - the merchant didn't have enough and aren't getting anymore in until tomorrow so we will go and get the remaining 10 or so mtrs sq then.

Something else done- de nailed and stored this lot!

Nearly done

Duck pond - no more - future vegie patch

Paul doing last bit of water blasting in the living room

New attic floor from underside.

Getting there...

We had an adventurous day on Saturday picking up our beams that we had bought a couple of weeks back.  The French couple selling them to us said they didn't want us trying to take them with our old 'Trafic'van so luckily we spotted that one of the local supermarkets hire small trucks and moving vans - so that's what we did.  We had to do two trips (it was about 30km or 40 min away) but that was fine - it all worked out really well.  We got slightly concerned when the boys lugged the first two big beams onto the truck and the front part of the tray made some fairly concerning cracking noises but we didn't break anything.

Cottage where the beams came out of

 As the story goes as told to the couple with the cottage by their neighbors, the beams came from the village chateau which would have been dismantled during the revolution - all the locals used the stones and timbers to build their own houses - this is actually quite likely and happened all over France during this time.  The beams have very old mortice and tenon (spelling??) joints in them so have definitely been in another building at some time. 

Very heavy - according to Paul anyway ha

Nearly in place - well not quite..

 Had a lovely lunch on Friday at our local Auberge with our friends and neighbors - Don, Anne & Aileen & John - such good value - four courses of really great food - 12 Euros a head including wine - thanks to John & Aileen was even better value this week ha. 
 
Ok, well I better get organised for the day - not much I can do in the house when Paul is flooring - I will be in charge of the girlie stuff like oiling them later on today... I did make a heap of fig jam yesterday - our fig tree is loaded and neither of us really like them a la natural but don't mind the jam - I didn't use a recipe as I don't have scales - just figs sugar and water into the slow cooker for several hours - looks ok to me so we'll see!

From this...

To this...