So another of my rare weeks resident in Sigogne has flown by and I am sitting at the airport again, (Poitiers this time) however, as you can see from the picture quite a bit of progress has been made to phase 1. The weather was awful but that has probably contributed to the amount of progress made this week. This might be the second sunniest region of France, but we do need some rain to make the grape vines grow, ands they are growing like crazy at the moment having had about 10 days of wet weather! Now its time for the sun to return, I hope.
This week my main aim was to freshen up the area that will become the guest lounge, which is code for de-browning it as all the decoration in the house is either brown or cream. I discovered that the skirting boards were only glued on so with a brisk tap of the hammer they all fell off, unfortunately leaving the glue on the wall, which meant 3 or 4 hours of removing the glue, but having done that though the walls look good and we do not really have to bother with skirting boards as the walls have a good finish all the way to the ground. So Saturday night we had a fire, or to be precise two, and burnt the lot, and just as well really as quite a few of them had woodworm in. So the guest lounge now has a nice Provençal blue wall and three white walls, just the chimney breast to plaster now Peter!
I was remarking to Mrs P as we were heading for the station in Angoulême that I have not seen many [French] people this week on account of working on the house the whole time. This was not very good for my fledgling French, but there is always next time. Why were we going to Angoulême? Well I had to catch the train to Poitiers and then taxi to the airport, to head back to Stansted on Sunday evening rather than my usual Monday morning trip back to the UK. For the regular reader, I did not do my usual car hire because it’s a waste of money to hire a car and have it sit in the drive all week. Poitiers is the nearest airport to Sigogne that has a railway station close to it, it costs about €7.00 or €8.00 for the journey in a taxi, or 30 minutes walk if you are my brother, then an €18.00 trip on the train to Angoulême, though if you do not get the TGV it takes an hour and a half, the TGV takes 45 mins, which for a longer stay is not too bad, not to be done for the usual weekend commute unless its an emergency.
Back to the building work, in the second half of the week I became the builders mate, and got a crash course in dry lining. What is dry lining I hear you cry, well its putting up a metal framework, insulating it and then attaching plasterboard, this then forms internal walls and ceilings, have a look at the photo and you should be able to see the framework exposed above the door (waiting for electrics) as well as lots of plasterboard ready for a plaster skim.
After a busy week of physical work I shall be heading for my desk in the office tomorrow morning to recover, having once again discovered and re-activated muscles I had forgotten about.
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