Happy New Year

Bonne Annee

 Planning

 Monsieur Le Facteur (Mr Postman) handed us the approved planning permission for the pigeonnier gite, on our first day back, January 2 nd 2006 . Our initial thoughts – good that we got planning but we are a long way off starting that part of the project!

 Gite

Finally we finished building the dividing walls and plaster boarding upstairs. That was a long job! A really nice guy came and plastered some of the walls and ceilings Dan, being Dan, thought that doesn't look too hard. A fewf tries on some cast off pieces of plasterboard later saw Dan turning his new found skill to the walls in the gite, the look is however a little 'rustic'

Meanwhile, the macons have built up and pointed the remainder of the upstairs internal stone walls to meet the plasterboard and it's looking pretty good, if you ask me:

And they constructed a little chimney top:

I returned to England for 10 days to make curtains, cushions, to frame some pictures and of course, to see the newest member of out family, Thomas Kinsey. There are no photos of the curtains as yet…to be seen in situ….hopefully very soon…. but I won't hold my breath!

I returned with a stray couple (Click here for visitors page), found wandering around Birmingham airport:

I actually hijacked them and made them carry some of my numerous packages of curtains.

The stray couple actually turned out to be Mels and Christofarr - who it has to be said showed a slightly worrying enjoyment of chopping the fire wood up with the axe…my concerns about criminal tendancies were founded when they broke into Castlenaud without paying!....of course, we followed as we were clearly in great danger if we didn't do exactly what they said at all times:

After Chris and Mel left, the weather changed. What we thought was going to be a slight sprinkling of snow turned into 36 hours of gorgeously fluffy stuff. Dan snowboarded down the road and down the path…I had great photos but Dan deleted them but just so that you get a feel of how beautiful it was, here are some other photos:

it snowed:

and it snowed

and it snowed but that didn't stop the macons coming for the morning and building one of the stone walls to the porch outside the gite:

in one hour this is what they built:

And more snow:

We were wondering if it would stop…we were snowed in….nobody passed, all was quiet except for the cracking of a few branches and the fall of large amounts of snow from the trees. We woke up to winter wonderland, the only tracks being the deer that had been walking around the garden during the night:

And the pool had more water in it than ever before: