Slow Progress

May in France is a month full of public holidays. Virtually every week, there's a day's holiday. This last weekend, the Thursday was a holiday, and the Monday was a holiday. We made the mistake of going shopping on the Friday and the shops were full of people who'd taken an extra day off ( un pont, or a bridge) to make a very long holiday weekend.

I've got the bathroom as far as I can without any tiles, so I've started to put lining paper on the walls and ceilings. This is all because Sue is neurotic about not seeing any marks, depressions or pinholes in the filling of the joints in the plasterboarding. Having put 4 pieces of lining paper on both wall and ceiling, Sue has applied some emulsion so that she can assess if my paper-hanging, and the joints between each length of paper, is good enough so that she won't be able to see any join in the finished effect! I think that the verdict is that, provided that I'm very carefull, the results of my paper-hanging will just about be OK.

We've had a couple of nice sunny days and the roof has advanced. We now have the majority of the roof ready for the tiles to be laid tomorrow (Thursday), but this evening it has started to rain again, and the forecast is for rain till about next Wednesday!!!!!!

Yesterday our 'stairs' man arrived to start fitting the first floor landing. He is a funny little man who always wears a fedora (or something like that) and who is always confusing me. Normally I can follow his french fairly well, but I still end up totally at a loss as to quite what he is going to do. I get the drift of what he'll do, but the details defeat me.

He spent all day yesterday fitting 3 beams into the walls either side of the stairs passage upon which the planks for the landing will sit. But, after he'd gone, and we did our tour of inspection, guess what? She was not happy. The landing was not how she'd imagined it from the architect's plans. Sue's problem is that she has no imaginative powers. Unless she can physically see something, then she can't visualise it.

So......this morning we ( Sue, plus me acting as translator where necessary) were ready when Monsieur Brugere arrived to explain our dilema/requirements/new plans. We explained that the landing was about twice as big as it needed to be, and we wanted to only have 2 beams giving a 'bridge' effect. He was very good about it all, and we think that he also thought that the landing was too big. So we now have two beams fitted and we can see how the landing will work, and our stairs man has fitted the 'redundant' third beam to act as a support for the first floor flooring.





We've got to be out of our friend's house by the end of the month, so the pressure is building. The plumber is due to be here tomorrow, so I'm hoping that he'll be able to lay on temporary supplies before we move!