The French Renovation

When I'm trying to sleep at night, there are a few seasonal obstacles to overcome. The nights can be very warm in the south of France, and it would be so refreshing if I could have the bedroom window open... but, no. Barney, our resident barn owl, hoots throughout the night; I don't know how he can hunt- it really is constant. Owls are supposed to swoop about in total silence in order to catch their unsuspecting prey, but that's not going to go well if you're hooting incessantly. Barney's hooting was difficult to sleep through, but now he's managed to find a mate, and the hooting is now a layered wall of hoot, with no breaks. As if that weren't enough to endure, the Midwife toad is back in the stone trough looking for a mate; this means I now have another layer of sound, penetrating and relentless, like the peeping of a smoke alarm. There are also wild cats; three of them met up on the top lawn last night, making noises like air raid sirens. The window will...

Just off the A20, fairly close to Brive, is a very appealing town called Allassac. I'd never been there before, but there was a vide grenier, and you know how I feel about vide greniers. Allassac is quite a big town, and literally all of its streets were lined with stalls containing a selection of wonders. It's the best vide grenier I've attended so far. So many of the stallholders were selling items of a really good quality, and there was an enormous range of stuff for sale. Stallholders are always happy to haggle, and you can acquire some fabulous things cheaply. There were so many things that I fancied buying, but I only had one big bag, and I filled that up in the first ten minutes, so I had to walk on by. I seriously considered buying a second-hand pushchair to enable more purchases. I did buy a small table, and carried it with my body between its legs. It gave me somewhere to put my bags when we stopped for lunch. Next year, I'm bringing a wheelbarrow. Thursd...

The piggery is under a process of miraculous metamorphosis. At the moment, it's an awful lot like a piggery. Minus the pigs. The plan is to make it into a little gite (or spare bedroom) with a double bedroom, shower room, kitchenette and terrace with panoramic views of the Correze. We need to dig out about a foot of floor, some of it concrete. We then need to put on a tiled roof, for the sake of aesthetics and things that go bump in the night. The first job was to pull out all of the ivy- that took DAYS! And my next job is to re-point the stone walls. They are presently just piles of stones with clods of mud daubed between them occasionally. There have been small attempts to patch it up using cement between the stones, and that's not very pretty, so I'm having to hammer and chisel that out first. You wouldn't believe how tediously slow the re-pointing process is. A whole bucketful of the secret recipe* only does about a square foot. I have a pile of spare s...

In my previous post, I shared with you a glimpse into the world of vide greniers. Since then, I've attended one in St-Yrieix-la-Perche, and it was the type of vide grenier that isn't just about people emptying their attics; there were many plant stalls, which are strangely compelling... even to someone whose fingers spell a slow, inevitable death to all things green. I bought a punnet of local strawberries. The plants in these photos will live to photosynthesize another day. Meanwhile, back at base, I've opened my doors to a sort of kitchen kindergarten for small vegetable and fruit plants. Some (the larger, healthier ones) were given to me (yet again) by my food and plant oracle, Sue, but most, I've somewhat miraculously grown from seed. There is a cold frame of sorts in the stone trough by the well for slightly hardier seedlings, but I've had to fight back hard against two attacks upon them- frost and slugs. These trays in the kitchen include tomatoes,...

As with many old stone French cottages, the loft space was not used for living, more usually just for storing corn and grain. (Okay... I suppose that storing food can come under the general 'living' umbrella.) The space was invariably shared by glis glis, sometimes known as edible dormice. And mice. Not edible ones. I'm sure they appreciated the feast and shelter provided during the colder months.  The word for loft in French is 'grenier'; it's a word that the British in France know well, due to our capacity to hungrily seek out 'vide greniers'. It means 'emptying your loft'. These popular events are actually boot fairs, but they seem to have just a little more allure. Probably because many of the items are (quite literally) antiques from the loft. Old French furniture and fittings are highly prized by the British. Many French people find this amusing. This is what our loft looked like when we arrived: We felt that it wasn't ...

It was all very well buying a 'big bag' of sand at Brico Depot, where a nice man with a fork lift truck deposits it on your trailer. Removing the bag at the other end proved challenging. Kevin and I had a go at shifting it with our combined strength (don't laugh). Unbelievably, it didn't move! There, can you see, next to the bag of sand are two 35 kg bags of lime? We can move them. I don't know how much the big bag of sand weighs... there was a rumour that it was a tonne, which is 1000 kg. But it doesn't look like 29 times a bag of lime, does it? Anyway, it proved to be the immovable object for a while. All we needed was an unstoppable force. The required force began with Kevin's brain and the piggery... and a piece of nylon rope that kept snapping. At first, Kevin's brain told him to tie the nylon rope around the wobbly and decrepit door post of the piggery. I stood well back. The plan was to slowly drive away. The bag of sand didn't m...