Making progress - thanks to friends

Our friends, Keith and Julia, from Plymouth came to visit for a week, including a weekend of partying for the 'Flamme d'Armagnac' of which more later.  This put the pressure on us to really get the house sorted with a shower and a makeshift kitchen.  This we managed to do the Monday before they arrived on Wednesday! Phew!  It would have been a little cramped in the caravan.  We were given some old kitchen units and a sink by a builder friend here, so that helped.  We now have a shower...

...and a temporary kitchen in the utility room with light which was a welcome addition...

... and some furniture only light here being standard lamps but at least we have power.

So, we spent most of the time fixing external insulation to the house.  We got 4 complete layers done which was more than expected.  If it takes 4 people 4 days to fix 4 layers... ?  It's about one third of the total required so a bit left to do.  We're waiting for builder friend to come and fix some scaffolding but he's become French in that you never know when he'll turn up.  Demain or Demain....

But we also managed to walk (Keith, Julia and Judy and a few hundred others)

and cycle (Chris) which included breakfast - bacon butties and red wine - in a distillery.

Then, it was party time in the evening.  A meal for 500 with music and dancing and of course plenty of liquid refreshment!  Good time was had by all.

The Sunday was another walk (stroll) to a wine tasting and back for large lunch (with more liquid refreshment).  Not much happened that afternoon surprisingly.

So now we're on our own again and hoping to complete the external insulation before we return to UK for Xmas. 

Will post on progress before we leave.

Camping in the house

We now have water and electricity connected and on 29th October - the night the clocks changed - we spent our first night in the house.  Had the loo connected and cold water - luxury!  Celebrated with a bottle of pink bubbly and a game of Scrabble (in English) in bed.  As you can see from the rubble stacked around it's not exactly luxury living!  Still it's not the caravan which is becoming more important now we're getting into winter.  The poppies have finally given up as have the french beans but the weeds live on.  How do they do that?

Connected a temporary hot water system the next day, so even better.  Next week's push is to get the shower installed and tiled and to get a temporary kitchen up and running so we can move out of the caravan permanently.  We do have a working bread maker so that's a start.

Last week was spent plaster-boarding and filling the gaps, strange French system, you don't use plaster, just fill the joins and then put a kind of primer over it.  Jury's out on the finish at the moment.  Also managed to get power circuits in all rooms, but not complete, just enough to get by, at least we can have the computer and telephone in the house.  The lighting is more tricky but started - that will be a breakthrough so we're not stumbling around in the dark.

Finally have the caravan registered in France - a great success as it was a very tortuous process taking six months but the paperwork came through at last so we celebrated with a very nice lunch with two friends at a catering school.  Cheap and extremely good.

 Picture below is of a walk with the local group.

We're still going walking, playing badminton, doing our French lessons and playing cards (badly) but the card players are very tolerant - especially when we lose - and try to explain the rules to Belote and some of the playing tricks (it's quite difficult  to understand what they say as it's the accent and they talk at a hundred miles an hour).  It's all good fun.  We managed to win one round out of four last week, so two bottles of wine were the prize so it's not all bad.