Thank Cheesus – she’s finally here
Super early start to the day as the chimney guy (who incidentally is also the plumber) is coming at 7am! I know, ridiculous, I mean who even knew that there was a 7 in the morning?!
There’s only one thing for it. Multiple cups of tea. Few messages from Tita (the previous owner) to confirm that I’m up and that he’s coming this morning. They’re here, thankfully the junior guy seems to understand my somewhat broken French, which is helpful as I have a long list of things for them to look at.
Seems it’s a no go on the fire. Even if he cleans it he’s quite clear that it would be incredibly dangerous to use and probably set the house on fire. That’s convincing enough for me to agree that it is a bad idea. If we want to put a new fire in we should apparently go to St Gaudens to buy one and he will provide a quote to fit it. Pretty much the same story with replacing the boiler.
We have a look at the plumbing. He seems much less worried than we are by the state of the rust. Of course, it will need doing (as will almost all the plumbing throughout the house) but his nonchalance makes us think it probably doesn’t need to be done urgently. Another thing to add to the quote though.
Off we go upstairs to try to find out why some of the radiators won’t turn off. Apparently, it’s just the fittings on them, they go down to almost off but these ones weren’t designed to be fully off apparently. Seems odd to me but just another thing to add to the list of future jobs. Having watched the guys take it apart a bit Matt seems confident that he can do it.
We get the guys email address and will need to put together a list of questions/things that need to be done and he will send us a quote.
Busy day of work for me today as we draw towards the Christmas break. Matt pops to the shops for some essentials so that we have some food (and wine in before Tonia arrives. At least we didn’t have to get up as early as she did. Poor little mite was getting in a taxi to the airport at 4:35am. Regular updates as she progresses along her journey. Turns out that the guy she was sat next to on the plane is also at the station waiting on the same train. He’s off to his place in Tarbes apparently with his Christmas pudding in hand. I tried to convince her that she should get his number but she didn’t. Would have made quite the Christmas movie script though.
Seems that French trains are quite nice and run on time. Matt’s off up to St Gaudens to collect her as there’s a few bits and pieces up there that he wants to get. LeClerc first – cable so that he can wire up the oven so I can cook Christmas lunch, he’s also looking at Christmas trees so there’s quite the discussion of which one to get. As you’re probably aware, Christmas trees are pretty spendy, particularly (if like me) you want one with the roots on so you can plant it in the garden after. Matt’s pragmatism won me over and we are getting a fake one. It’s not my ideal solution but we are getting close to Christmas now and if we don’t do something about it I’ll end up with nothing.
Then they’re off to my favourite place, the Troc. No joy with the curtains or rails but they have got the gravy boat I asked for and some plates. Apparently, they also saw ‘the best toilet ever’ but it was already sold – thank god for that!
Both of them are now starving so I put on the oven and start on lunch. They’re here! She looks pretty happy to be here, I wonder how long it will take before the mountain of work we have to do drives her to distraction. We also have another 3kg of cheese [that makes 6kg of cheddar which should keep us going a while] 🙂 She’s threatened to stay longer, we are of course happy to have all the help we can get, she however may regret ever raising the idea. But for now we will settle into some well earnt baked camembert for lunch. Sante!
Seems the shutter is rather temperamental. Thankfully Matt jumps up to fix it. Glad it wasn’t just me being a bit thick and why it remained closed the whole time he was away.
Let’s start Tonia off easy and with a fun job – removing the remaining tiles in the kitchen. Matt has turned off the power and removed the ones around the power so this should be safe. Looks as though there was some nice little greenish tiles below the grey ones around the sink. Unfortunately they have to go as there’s no way we can save them.
That’s most of it done so they’re off to work out the route from the kitchen to the basement, via the old fireplace to see if we can use it as a cabling route. I’m trying to get some more work done but it’s hard not to be distracted by this repartee between them:
Tonia: Ooh, that’s a long drill bit..
Matt: Go down and let me know when you are in position
Tonia: Ok, I’m in position
Matt: Is it there yet?
Tonia: Not quite
Matt: That’s me all the way in there as deep as I can go… I’m hitting something solid here. Let me try another angle… No, I’m still getting something solid.
Now that we have some condensed chicken soup, I can make a variation of Jasco chicken [a ‘family’ dish created by Janet and Sandy I believe]. The variation was going to be swapping the chicken for turkey. They’re pretty similar right. Unfortunately, I thought that we had curry powder, we do not. We have other spices though so I muddled through. Eventually dinner was ready and we had ‘not at all Jasco chicken’. I had to call mum during the preparation to check what I should be doing and how long to cook it for. At least she was amused by my somewhat failed attempt.
After dinner and we head up to select Tonia’s new room. She’s settled on Room 6 (the one she chose on the previous visit – it does come with double glazing though which currently only exists in three rooms in the house). Rather demands that she gets the first of her Christmas presents… I don’t think waiting till the actual day would be ideal for sheets, pillow cases and a duvet; I’m not sure that the surprise and relief would be sufficient to outweigh the immediate inconvenience. This response tells me I was right.
Now that’s done all that’s left is to settle down to have some wine and play Masquerade. Matt is tired so he’s off to bed. Tonia, somehow considering her early start, isn’t tired so we watch a couple of episodes of Money Heist before we finally retire.
All locked up for the night and we’re off to bed.
Don’t say mature Cheddar is hard to get out there? Our removal truck has 90cubic meters of space – so there should be plenty of spare capacity after we are fully loaded. I guess if I brought out 1 cubic meter of Cheddar that should keep me going for at least 2 years. Only 9 more days till we enter the channel tunnel on the way to our new home near Saint Gaudens. Sign the Acte de Vente by proxy this Tuesday – already living in a sea of packing boxes. Looks like there may be a visit to the Sainsbury’s cheese isle in the coming week.
Cheddar simply doesn’t seem to exist here in France, or at least not in any of the supermarkets in this area. Apparently the French look down on it as a sub-standard cheese and tend to use Emmental instead however we find that it’s super mild compared to a nice mature cheddar.
We’ve managed to import 6kg so far… after Brexit it might be worth more than gold so definitely worth chucking a few in if you can. It freezes fine also.
Other useful things we’ve imported are tea bags (we bought a bag of 1100), prawn cocktail crisps, custard and 10kg of sushi rice.
We’ve been here a little over a month and we’re still living a sea of boxes, but at least now the sea is gradually getting smaller as we slowly unpack.
Hope all is still ok with your plans to head over. And bring the cheese, all the cheese! While France has some brilliant cheese the lack of cheddar, and indeed Stichelton, and it’s better known cousin Stilton, are somewhat of a disgrace.