The grand reveal...

It was a strange weekend this time, great weather on Saturday and dire weather on Sunday making us all feel rather lethargic.

Arriving on Friday evening I had the great reveal of the new wooden flooring and the new bed that arrived for Room 1 (we must come up with some decent room names), which both look fab-a-roony (as a certain Tweeny would say), well when you have small children strange words start cropping up in your vocabulary. Finally the first en-suite starts to look more like a bedroom and less like a building site. Jean -Luc our carpenter who laid the floor also had a second bite of the cherry, when he remade our built in cupboard doors and they now look fab-a..... and he put architrave around the doors and windows and in doing so knocked a few jobs off the snagging list for me. Merci Jean-Luc

On Saturday we went to Reinold and Karin for lunch and the weather was great, as was the food and the company. Fleur took her swimming things because Karin and Reinold have a pool but she only wanted to sit on the edge and splash with her feet, even though Reinold dived in to tempt her into the pool, but it did not work, I think she just wanted to play with the water. Karin made a really nice duck fillet with a great sauce, the trouble is she cannot re create it because it was one of those sauces where you put in a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

The news on Peter is that he is starting to walk again after his now 'confirmed' stroke, and he will be allowed home on Monday (today) to carry on recovering. I think Franca is going to pop along on Thursday to see how he is doing, and Fleur has made Peter a card, it was two days in the making so I hope he likes it.

I finished off all the undercoating of the wood work and started to install the shower, however I couldn’t find the waste fittings, and then I destroyed my tile drill trying to fix the shower tray to the new tiled floor, so I did not progress very far with the shower, I’ll try again next weekend.

Otherwise it was a bit of a nothing weekend and once again I am standing at La Rochelle airport in the rain, the weather so far this year has been very poor according to the locals, so we wait to see some improvement now we are in a new month.

Continuing my tour of big shops on the way to the airport to kill time, I stopped off this week at Leroy Merlin a DIY store to beat all DIY stores, again so huge that you could buy a whole house if you wanted to, no boats for sale this week though. I did discover the French word for putty, which is handy since I need some to fix our windows, oh by the way if you are interested its mastic vitier, not something you will need in every day French conversation, but you never know. I will be back at Leroy Merlin to buy a few things en route home on Friday, if Hertz can get their act together so I can get out of the airport quickly. Otherwise it will have to wait until I have bought my own airport car, its got to be a cheaper option, as I have already handed over more than £2000.00 in car hire fees this year. It may not be too long in coming as I have my eye on a couple of left hand drive cars in the UK. By the way next weeks store is Castorama, I bet you can hardly wait….