Saturday

We’re almost fortunate that the weather has gone rather grey again as there is a lot of work to be done in the house before the plumber comes on Monday.

Water pipes run and fed from the kitchen ceiling, under Room 3’s floor to the pink bathroom and round the corner ready for the new sink. Next to run them across the bathroom for the bath and into Room 2 for the toilet.

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Of course there are a number of things missing so after lunch we are off to Rural Master. I have no interest in plumbing bits but was happy to look at paint colours and sinks etc. [Not sure either of these are right but at least there is plenty of space to put your makeup and toothbrush.]

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Back at the house and as usual I am on hand to pass bits and pieces while Matt does the real work. It’s looking pretty good up in the kitchen ceiling, although there was quite a lot of swearing trying to crimp some of the connections in the tight spaces. He’s clearly getting good at this multicouche (special french water tubing) thing. As Matt points out however, this isn’t like electrics (where things are easily tested) and we will only know if it leaks once we actually turn the water on.

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Now he’s done with the stuff up the scaffolding he can fetch his own bits and pieces so rather than sitting on the unattached toilet chatting to him I should probably spend some time doing something a bit more useful. I’ve been meaning to make some progress on Tonia’s room (Room 6) removing the ceiling wallpaper. Not a bad start and it already feels much bigger.

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Some more support with some plumbing and I need to get some more research done on what bathroom fittings I want, Matt is becoming increasingly insistent that we need to know so he can get stuff ordered soon.

[24 July 2021]

Sunday

Ugh, is the plumbing still not done yet?! Apparently not. Matt has been up finishing running the hot and cold water from the family suite while I looked after my beauty sleep.

‘First job of the day’ though is to build the wall that the pink bathroom toilet will be attached to. It’s not easy as it can’t be attached to the floor as that is where the waste pipe is. Thankfully Matt was up to the challenge.

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Next job is to do the wall upstairs in the blue bathroom. After getting the basics done I went to do some more research on what fittings and fixtures I (we) want. Thankfully I wasn’t away too long as despite my advice to have the join at the bottom I came upstairs to find he’d entirely forgotten about that and was putting the bracing in at the top. Back off it came and put in the right place. Thankfully he’d only done a couple. Also need to put some bracing from the wall to stop it flexing. Eventually job done.

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I wish Graham was here to help so I could concentrate on making decisions about pretty things. Most of these jobs aren’t overly complex (and he’s very handy I’m told) but they take a surprising amount of time, at least they do for novices like us anyway. [Starts day dreaming about what would happen with even one builder at the house for a week, ahhh…]

Unfortunately, as we went to do the quick job of popping the plaster board around the pink bathroom toilet we found it wasn’t remotely straight. No idea how that happened as the laser level is auto-balancing (apparently). After taking the whole thing off, we found it was actually a result that the short corner by the wall wasn’t straight, blast it! Oh well, so it goes. We are however completely over it all by this point but with the plumber coming tomorrow we have to have it done.

So I thought we’d be done early afternoon, Matt apparently thought 10pm would be good (probably best that he hadn’t mentioned that to me). Eventually we finished up around 11:30pm.

Tired and fed up we retired to the sofa before Matt went to bed and I got onto the blog. Well, I tried. I thought I’d just rest my head for a second and, before I knew it, it was 4:30am. Despite being in the house later than ever the cat was belligerent about leaving, when I put some biscuits out for her she got half way there and sussed me out, running back in before I could stop her. This may be a turning point in our relationship.

[25 July 2021]

Monday

I don’t think we are good at having days off. Matt and I both worked all morning waiting for the plumber only to eventually get a message to say that some parts hadn’t arrived and he’d come tomorrow.

A new project has just landed from Job 2, so kick off call for that and need to get the client docs reviewed and trying to get a head-start on the other day job so that I have time for it. It’s also the first day of our joint 6-week ‘design thinking’ course with KCL and the community so I need to manage that.

Eventually, Matt coaxes me away from the computer for a trip over the border to investigate what the random Spanish supermarket has to offer. The first thing that I noticed was that of about 70 cars in the carpark, only one had a Spanish plate, all the rest were French. Seems we might be onto something here.

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Once in the shop we realised that it was pretty weird. Lots of: pet food; cleaning supplies; alcohol; a whole aisle of olives; and half an aisle of cured meat (this last one was less surprising). There was however a conspicuous lack of the more ‘standard’ grocery type items. It was all a bit strange, but then it is probably more like a slightly weird bodega than a supermarket, I suspect you have to go a bit deeper into Spain for some proper shopping. We made away with a reasonable amount of alcohol (including some rosès for the inevitable next Huxtable visit) and random selection of bits and pieces at a fraction of the price of France so it wasn’t all bad.

Back at the house there was time for a quick tour around the garden before some more work and a relatively relaxing evening, we were exhausted after such a busy weekend.

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[26 July 2021]

Tuesday

Our last day of ‘leave’. So we relaxed and did nothing. Yeah right!

I was up earlier than usual to try to get work out of the way and be at Matt’s disposal. However work took over and before I knew it it was already lunchtime. While waiting for the plumber however apparently there wasn’t a great amount to do so I resorted to type and went back to work while he pottered about doing Matt stuff. Turned out that meant researching more French artisans for me to call. Yay!

We did manage to get one positive response from a company down in Luchon, and, heaven forbid, they say they will actually have someone here tomorrow to provide a quote. I don’t think I shall be holding my breath.

No sign of the plumber however so I also sent him a message to find out what was going on. It seems that the message yesterday was actually intended for someone else but he would pop round later this evening to check what needed doing – no doubt to tell us we’d missed something.

Time to get into the garden and sort out the last of the tomato plants. Matt has now added the last cross wire and then helped me to string up bed 1 which has gone rampant. It’s not perfect but it will do and hopefully will serve us well for this year at least.

Eventually the plumber arrived and he was quite happy with the results of our work, seems Matt is actually pretty good at plumbing. He can’t finish it today but the toilets will be completed tomorrow and he will come back to us on the other work (installing the showers, basins, baths, etc, none of which we have purchased yet) after his August holiday.

He was confused why we had only run cold water to the basin until I explained how late we had been working to get it to this state. The big issue however is the evacuation of the shower from Room 2 (the Mums room). It seems that the drop isn’t sufficient to run it where we wanted and it will have to run it along the wall instead of under the floor [Not so bad I hear you say, just box it in, nobody will notice.] However, apparently even if we put in a raised cubicle shower it will need to be raised up a little more meaning a step. Space in this bathroom is already very tight so this will further reduce the it and impact on where the door can go so you don’t trip over it when you enter, so this is going to need some careful consideration. [If anyone is an expert in designing small bathrooms please let me know and I will send you the plans, if you tell me it is too small and we need another 10cm, I already know but that is what we have.]

As you can imagine, the visit was followed by a great deal more measuring, debating, measuring again, debating, and measuring again. Eventually we went back downstairs and revised the plans to send to the new ‘cousin in law’, John. Hopefully he or one of his crew might be able to help.

By this point, it was time for bed and blog updates.

[27 July 2021]