A bit more play than work this weekend

Its time for my usual Monday morning blog update, it seems to come around faster and faster, and this time I’m sitting at La Rochelle airport, yes I remembered not to go to Bordeaux Airport this morning, I’m waiting for the Irish cattle truck to arrive, and just to get me in the mood for the UK its raining.

It was a strange weekend weather wise, we had arranged to make lunch for some other Dutch friends who live near by (near by being a relative term, as they are half an hour away from us) on Saturday and the tables were all set up outside for a nice al fresco lunch, then it started to rain so everything was moved inside, then just as Reinold and Karin arrived the sun came out and it quickly turned into a baking hot afternoon, so in the end lunch was al fresco but all the food was laid out in the dinning room, c’est la vie. On Sunday it poured with rain all day, Franca, Fleur and her mum, yes Franca’s mum is back with us for a couple of weeks, tried to go to the traditional brocante in one of the neighbouring villages but they arrived back home again quite quickly and they were soaked through.

On a totally different subject, we have been having an ongoing problem with our 1970’s bathroom, every time we have a bath or shower the scullery floor fills with water, and we could not find a leak anywhere. Over the last week it has got worse and now it seems that everything that goes down the waste pipe appears in the scullery. So it was time for super hero Builder Peter to investigate, we had not asked him before because we thought that by the end of June we would not need that bathroom any more, but it looks like it may have to remain in use until the end of the year. After a couple of hours of searching Peter said he had no choice but to start taking up the floor in the scullery. Luckily in the first hole he found the source of the problem. The pipe was broken and ‘someone’ had attempted to repair the pipe with a plastic bag! the bag had sunk into the pipe and blocked it. Peter has made a more effective temporary repair by gluing another pipe over the existing one, which should keep us going until the end of the year, but we are not going to fill the hole in just yet.

Saturday was a busy day, not only did Karin and Reinold come over for lunch , Fleur had a birthday party to go to at three o’clock given by one of her class mates from school whom Fleur says is her best friend in France. Fleur survived until 5:00pm without Franca being there, then we got the phone call that she wanted her mummy, not bad for a little girl that cannot speak French yet. We (Fleur and I) then went to the football field to watch the local 7 a side tournament, and it was good fun though the standard was not that high. Franca came to get us at 7:30 because we had been there without food or drink for nearly 3 hours, I am happy to report we did not need hospital treatment as a result :-)

As you may have guessed from all this leisure activity I did not do any work on the house on Saturday, which I paid for on Sunday. I had to do lots of filling and jointing of plaster board before I could start the painting, and the filler just would not dry. So I am now a weekend behind schedule. In theory the floor is being laid on Friday and the painting should have been completed, I will have to be very careful when painting from now on. Things are taking shape now though not as quickly as we would like, the new en-suite bathroom is almost finished, the storage cupboards in the bedroom are fully installed, and the new bed is arriving next Monday then I think we are just about finished, ready to move on to phase 1a, the roof which has jumped up the priority queue. Although I think the snagging work will take a two three days work from the builder and 2 or three weekends from me.