On Your Marks and Sparks

A wolverine has visited in the night. It's clearly impressed by our new French windows, and rightly so. Despite my penchant for seeing faces everywhere, I'm not a 'Most Haunted' sort of a girl. But... We keep finding doors open, in particular, the piggery door, and the well door, which is quite a stiff twiddle mechanism. And did I mention that my bag of vegetable seeds from England moved about three feet backwards in the back loft of the bread oven/pottery, and it had been comfied down into a bed-like divot? One of the doors of the top barn, that is always tightly bolted, was wide open the other morning. Nothing is missing. There don't appear to be any thieves in this part of France. Not that there's anything worth taking up there, or anywhere here, really. Unless you need a size 16 Phase Eight work dress with a matching cardigan... Or an antique book on lathes or bedtime stories. People in France are trustworthy. I don't feel insecure /unsafe here. The lawn mower petrol can has gone missing since we returned. Look out for it. It's green with LAWN MOWER written in black Sharpie on both sides.

Kevin's an electrician. He'll be cross that I've shared that, as, suddenly, whenever that's mentioned, everyone needs electrical work doing, and we're actually a bit tied up at the mo! The exciting thing is that he's now been unleashed on the the electrical installation part of the renovation. I've been acting as his 'boy', which is a highly demanding role. My main activity is, of course, making tea. But today he had me using a long spring on an earth wire lead to insert into a pipe and bend it over my knee. It hurt.

 I was upstairs pulling gently so that these wires snuggled into this little box.

 This is where one of the sitting room lights will be!

 I was stationed up here with this reel upon reel rats' nest of cables, having to feed them in bundles gently. There then ensued an exercise of Kevin jerking gently from below and me having to feed individual colours.

I've been insulating one of the walls in the sitting room. The two columns to the left are a bit of a patchwork; but fluff puff is expensive and we must utilise every scrap. This fluff puff is 100 mm thick. The other wall and ceiling will be 200 mm thick. We've been given a little coupon by Leroy Merlin to receive a 25% rebate on the cost of the insulation, as France likes people to insulate their homes.

More impressively, I've made this metal structure. Putting it in place requires careful measuring, dangerous cutting using tin snips (revealing razor-sharp edges) and then kicking the uprights until they click into place sideways in the tracks. Then there is the matter of using a screw gun to drill into two layers of metal. Basically, it's a false wall to hide the nasty real wall. Goodness knows how I'm going to retain original features in this French farmhouse!

 Whereas I tend to put fluff puff fluff side in, Kevin prefers to put fluff puff fluff side out.

We paid a visit to M. Bricolage today to purchase some more plasterboard. It's one of the things that's cheaper there. We've forgiven the debroussailleuse incident. We began loading ten sheets onto our sideways trolley, and, all of a sudden, two young red tee-shirted men appeared and took over the task. (We must look old!) One of them then accompanied us to the van to help load it. He was careful not to dent any corners, and winced when Kevin nearly knocked a top edge on the top of the van door. What wonderful service! Additionally, there were croissants and coffee and newspapers being given out free of charge! Kevin had two coffees. I had one. I also took a newspaper. The man said that the 'Jeux' section would help me improve my repertoire of French vocabulary! The cheek of it! I spoke to him in French! 

Something extremely unfortunate happened to the plasterboard on the way home, just as we were nearly home... It all fell sideways onto one of the minibus seats, leaving a big chunk out of the side of every piece. It took a while to come to terms with this, (I nearly cried) but it turned out that if we cut off the damaged parts, we were left with just the right sized sheets to do the ceiling! We had planned to buy twenty sheets, so luck was on our side.

At M. Bricolage, at the moment, every time you make a purchase, you are given a funny little beveled purple token. You then put this into a one armed bandit machine after the tills, pull the arm, and see what you have won. We receive the message 'perdu' every time, and so does everyone else we've seen. Kevin is thinking of going for more plasterboard tomorrow, and he, perhaps seriously, thinks that he will 'win the million'. I think he'll be lucky to get a 50 cents off screws coupon. What he needs to win is a voucher for straps to hold things in place whilst in transit.