It’s holiday season – most of France has the whole of August off work, especially in the building industry. So we decided, when in France do as the French, so as many of you know we went to England for two and a half weeks – which was fab. However, not much work was done this month as a result. Dan and I found it very strange to be going on an overland trip across England, by way of a holiday – but just as you would in Africa, we took our water (well wine) bottles in our jeep (ok car) and went and saw the big six (our friends and family). We also saw a few vultures (traffic wardens).

The Planning Application for the House

The planning application for the main house was finally submitted – it has only taken the Magical Le Glaive (architect) 9 months! We should receive permission by 1st November but probably shouldn’t get our hopes up – we still haven’t received the swimming pool permission.

Swimming pool

A little bit of cheating, whilst we were away, we paid 2 chaps to render the interior of the pool:

Gite

As soon as we returned from Blighty, we set about taking the roof off. Starting with the tiles:

How many tiles?

Don’t worry tomato world was relocated.

Then the lattes (the bits that go across the roof to hold the tiles on – apparently):

Then the chevrons:

Then the rest of the wood (which I think are called the perlins and the wall plates) :

Roof off, we werel eager to put the new roof back on, we had the new wood and tiles delivered:

A nice man, who agreed to come and give us instruction as to how to put the roof back on, came and…..told us we had to put the two windows in the far wall first:

The reason for this is that if we put the roof on, then made the holes for the windows, because there is not much wall left between the corner of the windows and the roof, the wall and roof may fall down when we made the openings! Great….. so we had to wait another week before the macons could come to make the openings…taking us into September. Things never go that smoothly, do they? So Dan and I decided to go back to the steps down to the pool. Dan built his first wall out of breeze blocks (this will then be clad with stone so it won’t look like this!)

Tomato World

Tomato world demanded vast amounts of compensation before agreeing to relocate and even then warned that its crop may be affected! True enough, tomato world took a slight turn for the worst and the size of tomato began to reduce. It was not happy and refused to be photographed this month – this was not helped by the strong competition from Mr. Villards’ tomatoes – which were not as tasty but were numerous. All in all, we had so many tomatoes that I had to resort to www.deliaonline.com for the recipe for tomato and basil soup – which was v good. Delia has been very useful recently, as many of our neighbours have very kindly given us all sorts of fruits, to include grapes, peaches, cherries, figs, tomatoes….:

Wildlife

This was in the bathroom – ca me donne le peur (that gave me the fear):

Shopping

Obviously, not including anything bought in England, I have not been able to continue with this article each month, because..well, I know its sad, but I haven’t bought anything worthy! But Dan bought a corker the other day so I thought it my duty to share it with you:

If I had a hammer holder, I’d hammer in the morning….er, geek! But then the chainsaw thing going on improves him no end.

He also bought a nail pouch which is strapped around your waist like one of those guys starring in the nasty American diy programmes - no photo of that I’m afraid because even Dan hasn’t brought himself to wear it..yet!

And then August was over…….so quickly!