Le 18 Janvier

All packed up and ready to go - we are off on the train to Paris this afternoon for our flight tomorrow headed towards Australia - with a pit stop in Bali to break up the flight and have some r & r.. we really are not looking forward to the 13 hour flight but oh well it will be over soon enough. Haven't seen our daughter Gabi for 6 months so looking forward to catching up with her and the rest of our family in Aus.
We have had a busy couple of weeks with some small but important achievements. We finally found the oak beams we needed which Paul has now installed. We went to a reclamation yard near us and bought and loaded the huge beams in the pouring rain with Paul and the owner wrangling them onto the trailer.

We have also bought and got home a lovely old wood stove that will be perfect in our massive fireplace in the kitchen. This is very heavy and we had a few scary moments unloading it from the van but didn't end up with any breakages to anything or anyone so all good.

Paul has nearly got the floor ready to have boarding put down on the second floor. And the weather has actually been fine for about a week after what feels like months of rainy days. We have been very lucky as far as winter goes though as it has been very mild and we haven't found it too bad at all. It was minus 4 a couple of nights ago but it's pretty toasty in the attic as long as you have a few layers on!
Last week we went to a birthday lunch for our friend Yves - they are lucky enough to have a very nice friend and near neighbor who owns an awesome traditional bread oven that he has renovated and since the weather was so lovely it was great to be able to eat alfresco in the middle of winter. It was a very multi-cultural occasion with some French, Belgian, us Aussies, a couple of English people and even a Dutchy there - three languages being spoken at one point or another. It definitely helps with your French being in situations like this! Both Paul and I are in total awe of Yves and Kathleen who are pretty much fluent in all three languages - I would like to just be able to converse in two thanks!
Here are some pics of the oven and hut and the lunch..

We were lucky enough to get invited back this week by the owner for a traditional regional lunch he and his friend had prepared in the oven - ie Confit de Canard - Foie Gras etc yummo... Again the weather was great so work can wait ha.
Anyway - will be a few weeks before we are back so no blogs for a while.
Hopefully then there will be some quick progress on the house as our first visitors arrive in March! The caravan may be getting some use again perhaps..although I don't think I could do that to my mum and dad!

Here is the house as of today - doesn't look much different from when we first got here from the outside - hopefully it will start getting a face lift in the next few months..

Janvier le troisième

So that was Christmas! We had a great time down in the Pyrenees - the weather was perfect for the week over Christmas with clear sunny days. We stayed in a catered chalet which is nice as it means you get to meet other people as you all have your dinner together in the evenings. It was a pretty good mix of French and English families with lots of little kids running around. We even had a visit from Santa on Xmas Eve although one of the kids was hilarious when he announced 'that's not Santa - he was in the kitchen cooking'! As it was our first cold white Christmas it felt quite different for us Southern Hemispherers but is a lovely change and having the traditional mulled wines by the fire after a day in the snow was great. We had the room with a view over the valley - here is a shot I took from our window one morning of the sunrise.

The three of us had never skied before so on the advice of a few people decided to first try snowboarding as it is meant to be easier to get started in a short amount of time. Not sure if this was wise but we sure had a lot of fun trying. We had a couple of hours lessons the first day then just kept trying after that. We all provided the ski resort in general with loads of entertainment and laughs as one by one we had major, extremely ungraceful stacks from the ski lifts. Chelsea even had a nice Frenchman say "stylish" when she managed to get tangled up in a chair lift dismount and get wrapped around the supporting post. I often would manage to get going initially on the pull up lifts, only to get a bit of the way up and then get all off balance and have to let go. One time they had to stop the whole thing as I was obstructing it by laying in the path and doing a good impression of a turtle on it's back waving legs in the air! Not embarrassing at all! I think Chelsea just about fell off laughing at me that time.. We did get the hang of it more by the last day although I would take a good while getting down the runs as my legs were so sore that I would have to keep stopping and giving them a rest.
Here are some fun in the snow shots..

This was the ideal place to be on the snow - unfortunately a lot of the time it was more like this;

Paul and I have decided we have to try to go back soon (once all our sore parts have restored back to normal) so we don't lose all our new found skills - although I want to give skiing a try next time and see how that goes!

So a couple of days after Christmas we headed back to Toulouse to put Chelsea on her plane back to Chicago. We won't see her for nearly 6 months so wasn't fun saying goodbye - it never is - but c'est la vie I guess!

Since being back Paul has continued to do some work on the beams for the next floor. We have been finding it hard to source the beams we need to replace a few that are either rotted out or too short to cover the span needed. John came to the rescue with one that Paul initially thought might have been too far gone as it had been outside for a few years, but after lots of wire brushing it cleaned up fine. He found an interesting method yesterday of getting it into place which involved loading one end on the van and backing the van in towards the house - very unconventional and probably dangerous but it did the trick!

I have been sanding back some of the windows that we took out from the second floor. We had been going to replace them with double glazing which I have talked about before but when in the snow we noticed that the chalet had the same old french style single glazing and we were still getting hot at night and having to turn the central heating off so we have decided we are going to try and repair the originals - they look so much better and we would much rather have a more traditional look. Plus with shutters as well as drapes from my research they should be more than adequate. Time will tell I guess - it has taken me a couple of days to get one window ready to putty so will take some time but hopefully will be worth it.

We are going out today to try and find some more reclaimed timber. There are a couple of architectural salvage yards not that far from us which we have been trying to avoid using as they generally pretty expensive compared to buying privately but we feel a bit like we are in limbo waiting for something to come along - so we will see how it goes!

Ok - so update on today. Have hopefully got some timber via the website Leboncoin and the local sawmill and have done the deal on the very old wood fired stove at the salvage yard we have been looking at for a while. So it's back down there tomorrow to pick it up in the van. We had a lovely lunch at an Auberge near the river at Prayssac that had been recommended to us by our friends then on the way from there to the yard we found my next renovation project!

Strangely enough Paul's not that keen!!