Joel didn’t arrive till late yesterday; he’d had to sort out someone’s guttering, pulled off by the rain. The heating lady arrived half an hour late, because two roads she tried to take were flooded. The route I normally take to avoid Nogaro centre is closed, and under 1.5metres of water. We haven’t got the snow the UK is experiencing, but we’ve certainly got plenty of rain!

But Joel arrived today and set the boys on to cutting holes in the walls for windows, while he got on with building the internal walls. They are going to put in concrete lintels tomorrow, so that everything will be ready for the arrival of the hourdis later this week.

In Joel’s absence, Nick and Kieran worked on the arrière cuisine yesterday; it’s now ready to tile above the work tops; this is my job and I think it could be quite a challenge. I want an eclectic, rustic look and have bought a selection of different tiles, all 10cm square, but in quite a variety of thicknesses. I couldn’t find many patterrned ones, so I painted some of them. Naturally, I want a smooth finish, so I’ll have to take care to use the right amount of sticky for each one. Could be interesting :-/

Kieran, in his spare time, is building a device to do time lapse photos. Using just the camera for it is quite complicated, so the new gadget is supposed to be simple enough for me to use – in other words; idiot-proof!