Looking good - nearly finished

The alterations to the attic are nearly done. All the building work is finished except for the wardrobe cupboard in the bedroom so now it's down to us to finish the job.

So sister and brother- in- law come to stay for the first time and what do we do??? Hand them paint brushes of course!

Then when the walls were painted and the woodwork varnished we got brave, hired a French van and went to our nearest IKEA in Rennes. (It's almost 2 hours away but still the cheapest way to buy a decent bed in France). It was a very successful visit despite the foggy journey and we came back with everything we wanted and, as usual in IKEA, a few bits more!

The next day was a build it fest but we ended up with a very pleasing new bedroom in cream and red and an almost complete bathroom in terms of furniture - painting is waiting for a rainy day!

Note the very elegant candles on the chest - a gift from Gwen. Well she did have to buy something on her first visit to the new John Lewis in Cardiff and we were a good and very welcome excuse!

Making the new space ours

In the new shower room we now have beautiful tiles and a very smart floor as well as our simple but very classy washbasin with its elegant tap column. We're just waiting for the electrician to come back to fit the bathroom cabinet we bought on Saturday.

The new bedroom is now full of light but nothing else! The electric heater recycled from the kitchen is now on the wall and functional.

We now have a door between the new landing and the new bedroom. The design is "chapeau de gendarme" - apt we thought!

This shower takes some believing!! Not only does it have a roof, a radio, a light and a fan but it could also have a telephone connection!!!! We decided against.

The loo smart and understated is all that can be said really but oh how good to be able to make middle of the night visits without having to negotiate the narrow stairs. The heated towel rail behind the door means the room is lovely and warm too.

It sounds ridiculous to say it but this newly created little landing is what makes all the difference to the alterations. We now have light and space to manoeuvre at the top if the stairs and the whole area has been opened up. The lovely oak door you can see is a fabulous little cupboard.

We are so excited to be back in France and to see the work that our wonderful builder has done in the attic in the flesh so to speak. We have seen the emailed photos as he has gone along but the real thing is so much better and so impressive. We have done further work since these photos were taken and, with help from my sister and brother-in-law, we have now painted the walls and ceiling in the bedroom and stained the floor and other woodwork. It is looking clean and elegant and is just waiting to be filled. This afternoon we arranged van hire and tomorrow we shall have an adventure in going to IKEA in Rennes to buy a bed and other furniture, rugs, bedspread etc. Can't wait!!! Watch this space.

Wow!! Rooms!

The top of the stairs

The landing from the bathroom

The bathroom with water pipes

The bathroom with loo bits

The bedroom looking to where the cupboard will be

The bedroom with light streaming in

Our lovely builder, Mike, has sent us more photos of the progress he is making with the conversion of the remaining part of our attic in France. We now have an embryo bedroom, bathroom and landing with walls and doorways and the whole project is starting to feel real instead of just some fanciful idea. I'm feeling a bit like I did when we had agreed the purchase of our French house - very excited but just waiting for something to go wrong - but so far so good! Mike has the doors to fit and a bit of finishing on the walls then it will be full steam ahead to tile and floor the bathroom before installing loo, washbasin and fancy shower (with roof, radio and lighting, no less!).

Let there be light!

We are very excited to have had a phone call and an email with photos about the progress our builder is making in the attic chez nous en France. The first photo we opened blew us away! A view up the stairs with a huge pool of light at the top instead of the usual black hole. The whole thing looks completely different now he has stripped out all the eccentric insulation (cardboard and old carpet!), put 4 Velux roof windows in, removed the bit of plasterboard wall and door at the top of the stairs, insulated and plaster boarded the whole area and generally made it habitable. Mike the builder is a gem and we are very grateful to friends who put us in touch with him. He's going to put the floor covering in the new bathroom and tile the walls, possibly sand the lovely wood floor on the landing and in the new bedroom and replace or repair the rickety stairs and bannisters. We are dying to go back and see it all in its new incarnation. Roll on the end of September.

Technology revisited

We may have cracked getting pictures onto our blog but there are many technological issues that remain totally beyond our ken! However,fortunately, they are not beyond our Peter who seems to have some sort of automatic access to the powers of the ether. Poor lad, he comes to have a cuppa with his ageing parents and almost every time gets asked either "Can you just show us how to-----" or, more frequently "Could you just fix-----". Bless him, he always comes up trumps. Today he and Emma popped in and connected the Wii that the children bought us as a joint 60th birthday present to the internet. So, we can now access international and national weather reports and news, download games etc through the Wii and, more amazingly play games or challenge sporting or fitness records by linking our Wii to those belonging to other folks. We've never been interested in having gaming consoles of any sort especially not those involving fighting or wierdnesses but having seen the Wii system in action elsewhere we really fancied having one and we're having such fun!! We introduced Abigail and our grandsons to the joys of Wii Fit tonight and I'm still laughing at the memory of the boys (6 and 3) doing ski jumping and hula hoop with varying success! I hope the vision of their grandmother dressed as a penguin catching fish on an unstable icefloe doesn't have a permanently damaging effect on their psyche!!

Technology!! We're getting there slowly!

Up to now you've only been able to read our blog but today we've cracked pictures!! Well one picture but it's a start. Prepare to see our adventures (?) in glorious technicolour from now on.

Country pursuits

There are many and varied advantages to living in the country both here and there. On Saturday we went about half a mile up the lane and came back with a bucket full of beautiful damsons gathered from the hedgerow. They weighed in at 15 pounds and have now metamorphosed into Damson cheese (no cheese near it - just a term for jam made after creating a stone free pulp from the fruit) and a pan of almost finished Damson chutney. That will have to go in the fridge to wait until I've gathered the energy to remove the final 75 of 308 stones before adding sugar and dried fruit. Grandson 1, who has been with us since Sunday night, wants to go blackberrying but rain stopped play today and we're off to Twycross zoo tomorrow so the fruit fest will have to be put on hold till next week when he comes again.
Exciting news from across the Channel on Sunday - our builder rang us with an update. We apparently have new Velux windows in the roof and all is going well. Can't wait to see the photos he has promised to email to us this week.

At least six weeks to wait patiently (not!!!)

Today is the last day in France for our daughter and her family. I don't envy them the journey back - leaving St Germain at stupid o'clock then a six hour torture session (sorry, ferry crossing)! We're pleased that they and their friends have enjoyed their stay in our little second home and that it has proved a hit with our grandsons. On Wednesday two important things will happen; we will celebrate our 37th wedding anniversary and the builder will move into our French house. Although he is very good at his job and has promised us regular e-mail updates with photos, the next six weeks are going to pass very slowly until we can go and see the improvements "in the stone". We will, hiccups permitting, then have a new bedroom and - oh joy - an upstairs bathroom and loo, shortly followed by a new staircase all of which will make the place more suitable for seniors who have to make visits to the loo in the middle of the night!
Not that we are without things to do here. Friends to visit, furniture to finish, mother to take to a couple of hospital appointments - and that's just this week! We're also in the throes of arranging a joint 60th birthday party and sent the invitations out today. The idea is that all our guests will take part in a skittles match on the wonderful, old-fashioned skittle alley boasted by the venue. We're getting in plenty of practice on the Wii the family bought us as a joint present and wondering if we'll be as good with a real ball!!

A different sort of day

The seats are ready but the paint isn't dry enough to sand and finish so furniture restoration has been put on hold today. We haven't really stopped all day but don't seem to have achieved anything major. Keith has been to the tip with chair and garden rubbish. I've tidied up the last of the Durham trip debris and sorted through two jewellery boxes full of stuff I never wear and historic memorabilia - how many Queen's silver jubilee commemorative crowns does one family actually need! We've written a provisional guest list for our 60th birthday bash and Keith has written an address data base for the invitation labels. We've also written yet another letter to the company who supplied Mum's defective central heating boiler. That makes at least four and not even the courtesy of an acknowledgement yet!!!! How can these people be so arrogant??? However we have also sent Mum's tale of boiler woe to two television consumer programmes. Perhaps they can get a response!
We're loving keeping up with our daughter's family's holiday exploits through our grandsons' blog. What a brilliant invention!

Furniture Restoration - Volume 2

Having explained to the galaxy yesterday about refurbishing chairs for a ridiculously low price, today we moved onto stools!! Nothing biological or medical I hasten to add. The frame of the stool was great but the cover was - - - - - (on a scale of 1 to 10 - - - minus12). However, the underside of the stool (I wish I could stop saying that) was supported by interwoven hessian (try saying that after 12 pints of Old Speckled Hen) so it was recycled to support a hardboard base (did you know that Black and Decker power saws could cut circles and round corners? I didn't!) with foam padding and part of the cheapo material we got from Dunelm yesterday. Supported with a bit of velcro, if an earthquake of +7 on the Richter Scale occurs, hide under the stool and you should be safe.

It's a bit like expiriential learning (I don't know what it means and can't spell it, but it sounds impressive to me) except next time it might not work as well unless we can find a similar stool (I said it again!) with similar joints.

A new creative venture

There comes a time in the life of a chair when wood fatigue sets in and you land on the floor as the legs crumble beneath you. We had two white wooden chairs that were the remnant of a set of four bought in the mid-seventies from a cheap and cheerful catalogue. They have done sterling service but their moment came when one of them lost a leg about a month ago and the back fell apart on the other. Never mind, we thought, we can get others from IKEA to take their place in the bedrooms without having to spend too much. Then yesterday, whilst gardening, I had cause to go into the garage and found two chairs that our youngest had dumped there when he and his wife had a new dining table and chairs. "Tasteful" upholstery in ginger boucle tweed was more than threadbare but the frames were very solid and showed their upmarket provenance. Having had a good look then attacked them with a stanley knife and a chisel we decided that reupholstery was a definite option if we could work out how to do it. A quick trip to Dunelm today was a good start as we came back with foam and some neutral furnishing fabric which altogether cost us the princely sum of £6.99. By teatime tonight, after a happy hour or so with scissors, superglue and a staple gun - oh and some garden membrane left over from another project that I also found in the garage, we have one very swish seat just waiting for its repainted frame. Painting and the other seat tomorrow and I'll soon be able to sit down to put my make-up on again. Eat your heart out Mr Chippendale!!!!

Keeping up with the Grandkids

Well our daughter has had a blog for quite some time and today her sons have launched theirs so despite being the bus pass generation we're not going to be left behind (much)!