We left Kieran here to look after the animals while Nick and I had a lovely few days with my brother and his family in London. So imagine what a shock it was to find that, while Kieran was driving to the airport to pick us up today, someone had cut through the chain securing the garage doors and calmly let themselves in.

They’ve propped loads of scaffolding up in one corner, put a heap of planks against the wall and  drawn lines all over the new floor, where the walls are going. So not your average burglar, but if he’d said, we’d have left Joel a key!

Joel and his employee, Sebastien, arrived at 8 this morning and the first lorry, containing 6 cubic metres of concrete, at 8.30. Nick, Kieran and Sebastien barrowed the concrete to the back of the floor, then the lorry driver tipped the rest of it into the front part. He then went to get a second load, to make it up to the 8 cubic metres required. The video’s rather grainy because it’s quite dark in the “house-to-be” at the moment, but you can get the general idea. I don’t seriously expect anyone to watch the whole of both videos though; they’re hardly the most riveting!

By 10.30, it was all done and levelled; Joel and Sebastien went on to another job and we sat and drank celebratory coffee in the sunshine.

Nick and Kieran then started work on the arrière cuisine, insulating the walls, plasterboarding them and building the cupboards by the time evening arrived. They’re cheap cupboards, with horrible white melamine doors, but Nick intends to build decent, replacement doors in the near future; the carcasses are OK, so the room will be functional without too much effort.

Some days you work your socks off, and for no apparent result; today wasn’t like that; it was great to see the progress made!

When we go to Sarremejean to ask for a delivery, they scratch their heads and say “Yeah, it’ll be next week at the soonest”. When I phoned the plumber to ask him to do an estimate, it took 6 calls before he even responded to my messages; I’d have given up if he hadn’t been highly recommended by the builder.

When Joel goes to Sarremejean to order stuff, it arrives within the hour and when he asked me to phone the electrician and the plumber last night, to ask them both to come round today, they appeared before lunch! It’s great having such a good bloke working for us.

The three wise men had a conflab about what’s happening, what needs to happen and when (and were here such a short time I didn’t even get a photo!). They also discussed our heating system, which we haven’t yet made a final decision on, and all three said that air/water is fine around here and that it would be a waste of money to go down the geothermic route. It was good to get some truly impartial advice. Then WHOOSH -they were gone!

The floor is now ready for the next layer of concrete, which will arrive on Friday, then Joel will start building the downstairs walls on Monday. The terracing is dug out; the old ground level was 80cm higher than the inside; but with Joel’s big digger, it was only an afternoon’s work.

In the meantime, the gardens looking – well – not quite at its best and seems to be sprouting mountains all over the place; rubble mountains, soil mountains, bonfire mountains…..

Tomorrow we can have a rest and a clear up as Joel won’t be here till the evening, by which time we have to make sure we’ve marked exactly what walls we want, where, on the plans, as Nick and I will be away on Monday.

8am Joel arrives, with a BIG digger. By 8.15, he and Nick are repairing the cement mixer, which has a problem, but it was soon sorted.

8.30 The first lorryload of gravel arrives from Sarremejean; it won’t fit through the front gates, so has to use the back ones and dump its load slightly further from where it’s needed. Nick and Kieran are instructed to barrow the gravel into the floor of the new house, while Joel starts laying the blocks onto the foundations. Joel is a man short at the moment, which is great for us as it means Nick and Kieran are acting as labourers – it keeps them out of mischief and our costs down. It also means we get the boss working on our project 🙂

Once the blocks were done, Joel took the big digger to break up and remove the old patio and level the ground to where it needs to be. Kieran was green with envy as he used our baby digger to load the gravel into the barrows.

I was out while a lot of this was going on, having been invited to the “English Ladies’ Lunch Club” AGM and lunch, in order to do a bit of networking. I’ve avoided this group up to now, paying my subs but little else, as we didn’t come over here to spend our time exclusively with the English, as seems to be quite common. However, my teaching English to the French business hasn’t got off the ground yet, but I have been asked to do French conversation classes for English people. I thought TEFL stood for Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, but maybe it’s Teaching the English the French Language!

Once the AGM was over, we adjourned to the restaurant. You must have seen the film of Roald Dahl’s “The Witches”; remember the scene where  the witches are convening for their big meeting? All looking like ordinary women? But when you look closely, and know what to look for, you notice that they’re all wearing flat, sensible shoes (because witches have long toes), that their eyes have a curious purple hue, and that they scratch their heads a lot (they’re bald, and their wigs are itchy). I had great difficulty containing my giggles as I found myself looking at their feet and eyes and trying to see the join where their facial masks ended!

They turned out, however, to be a very pleasant group of people (I hope none of them reads this blog!), who were happy to take my flyers, and several of whom expressed an interest in coming to my classes. So we’ll see what happens.

By the time I’d taught my English class at the CLAN in Nogaro and got home, work was nearly finished for the day and it was getting dark, which is why some of the pictures are rather gloomy. One of these days, I’ll find time to learn how to use Photoshop; in my spare time, no doubt 😀  Nick and Kieran look pretty flattened tonight, but Joel was impressed with the work they’d achieved, saying it would have taken most people 2 days to do what they’ve done in one; I can’t say I was surprised.

As good as his word, Joel, our builder, arrived pretty much as soon as it was light this morning and whisked Nick away to open an account at Sarremejean, the builder’s merchants, his logic being that if he buys the materials, he puts a margin onto the price, so we might as well buy them ourselves. We can’t argue with that!

When they got back, Nick and Kieran had to dash off to their French class, leaving Joel putting the bits of steel reinforcement into the trenches. He measured and calculated, talking nineteen to the dozen all the while, then left to go and sort the next bit, leaving me with instructions for Nick and Kieran to remove the gates so the cement lorry would be able to get in, and promising to bring a tall ladder this afternoon, to hold the electricity and phone lines high enough for the lorry to pass underneath.

On the dot of 2pm, both Joel and cement lorry arrived; you had to admire the driver’s skill, manoeuvring his vehicle into what seemed like a minute bit of garden and up to the garage doors; there must have been all of an inch either side of the lorry as it came through the gates! Pouring the concrete took all of 5minutes, Joel gave Nick and Kieran their instructions for tomorrow; he’ll start on the blockwork while they barrow in and spread heaps of gravel. By Friday, he expects to be pouring the floor. Another couple of trips later, we have a big cement mixer and heaps of sand and gravel in the garden for the next stage. Then Whoosh, he was gone! (What – you don’t know “Room on the Broom”? shame on you!)

I think we’ll be quite busy for the next little while, Nick and Kieran being Joel’s labourers and me making tea and cake and taking photos

What perfect timing! When Joel, our builder, turned up on spec yesterday, to measure the roof, he was impressed to find Nick and Kieran digging out the foundations for the internal walls in our house.

The order in which they did the digging had to be carefully planned as the the trenches are 60cm wide and 55cm deep, so too wide to drive the digger over without losing it. They did manage to cut through the water pipe a couple of times as we’d laid it less deep than the foundations, but it was no problem to pull some extra length through from outside and they’ll join it later, before it’s connected to the mains. They finished this afternoon and there’s just a bit of clearing up to do tomorrow before Joel arrives on Monday morning to start pouring the concrete for the foundations.

I think things will start to move quite quickly then; it will certainly feel fast as Joel is like a whirlwind on legs – he speaks fast, moves fast and is exhausting to be near for any length of time!

Ever since our car broke down on the top of a Pyreneen col last August, leaving us with a houseful of visitors and no means of transport, having to rely on the kindness of friends for essential trips, for three weeks, Nick has been scanning le bon coin, an internet selling site for a second car. He fancied a Citroen 2CV, but they’re like gold dust, so we decided on a Renault 4; loads of character, but less sought-after. He found one he likes the look of yesterday, phoned the owner (well, the owner’s friend), and arranged to look at it today. So off we went to Pau, arriving at the owner’s vineyard on the slopes of the Pyreneen foothills, overlooking the snow covered mountains in glorious sunshine. The guy explained that his friend had only told him of our impending visit this morning and, since the car had been “dodo” since September, there was a slight problem; it wouldn’t start. So he, Nick and Kieran pushed it out of the garage, into the sunshine so they could inspect it in the warm. For a thirty-year-old car, it’s not in a bad state; the driver’s door needs replacing, but the chassis and floor are solid; there are no bells or whistles and certainly no luxuries like wind down windows, but it’s quite a cute little car and does come with free snow tyres!. I steered while the men pushed it up and down the drive in an attempt to start it, but with no success, and we left it that the owner will get in touch when he’s seen to the starting problem and put it through a controle technique (like our MOT); I suspect we’ll be the proud owners of a beige Quatre L quite soon.

While we were in the area, we did some shopping – well, quite a lot of shopping, actually. Kitchen units and worktop for the arriere cuisine, accessories for the bathroom, woodworm fluid and a jacket-in-training for me from a fabulous new fabric shop I found. We also managed, at last, to get to Emmaus; the French don’t have charity shops as we know them – they have Emmaus. It’s a movement started by Abbé Pierre in the fifties to help the homeless, the unemployed and the destitute. The Emmaus village at Pau is huge; there are static caravans and old railway carriages for accommodation, an organic farm which produces food for the residents and the café and shop and a huge area given over to renovating and reselling items that are donated. Unemployed people are given a job and reintegrated into society through the work of the organisation. You can buy anything from bedding to bikes, from old floor mops to American cookbooks! I left with a quilt that I’m going to use to interline a door curtain and a few tiles for the arrière cuisine – and all for €1.70.

The village New Year’s Eve celebration was great! We helped make the aperitifs in the afternoon, 600 “toasts”, then home for a shower and change before the festivities began at 8pm.

The meal started at 10.30, by which time everyone was already quite happy, on very little food and large quantities of pousse-rapière (a toxic mix of sparkling wine and orange liqueur). By midnight, we’d eaten three of the six courses on offer and we probably finished eating by about 3am. Before the meal started the DJ explained what the strange, red and gold tubular objects on each plate were – Christmas crackers – and what you did with them; several people asked us to translate the jokes (impossible) and the brain teasers (more successful). In between each course and after the meal we danced, on and off our chairs, and played silly games until the soup was served at 5.30am. Adrian and Julie didn’t make it to the finish, but Nick and I were determined to see it through to the bitter end this year; no problem for Nick to stay up all night, but I had to keep dancing as it makes it difficult to fall asleep.

There are some very keen dancers in the village, but when one of them asked me to dance (jive), as soon as we’d finished, Patrick went over to him to tell him to go easy on me as I’m a novice! They’re so protective of their “new English”, bless ’em!

Adrian and Kieran went out after dark on new year’s day to try to reduce a neighbour’s rabbit population, but came home empty-handed; but we put up a target in the vineyard today and all took turns shooting it; another new skill!

So 2013 has got off to a good start for us and I hope it has for everybody reading this too.