Still raining - so there's the challenge of trying to get a picture that reflects how things really are. I liked this one, and with difficulty managed to upload it to here. Getting it the right size wasn't too difficult. The raindrops show nicely on the blossom, and the camera isn't too tilted either, so the house looks pretty well upright. The muddy tracks from the builders' lorries show regrettably rather well: the latest one was delivering the floor tiles for the downstairs, and he couldn't resist driving up the hill to turn round - and excavate a small trench in doing so.
Here is the new, almost finished concrete slab outside our bedroom window, with all the floor tiles stacked up on pallets on the two older sections. Eventually we hope that when the slab is tiled over it will end up pretty well level with the ground on the uphill side.
Back at Lessal with Jane and Mike, but the spring weather is not exactly a joy. We've had two or three days of good warm sunshine, but the rest of the time it's been raining or strong winds or both. Still, Mikey has helped me get the final slab of concrete down by the bedroom door, and Jane has helped Caro with painting the dark red hessian wall in the farmhouse - I was surprised at how much it makes the room look brighter.
The boiler is now at last running, 24 hours a day, and drying out the heated floor. The whole barn is warm, even without the radiators upstairs, but that's hardly surprising as the lower floor is more like a sauna than a house. A rather smoky sauna, though, as the temporary chimney fits rather loosely on the boiler, and a good proportion of the smoke goes into the barn rather than up the chimney. It is giving the barn more of a lived-in character (old wood-smoke, quite a pleasant smell). But except when we've got the fire in the farmhouse going full blast, it means the warmest spot is where we can't actually sit around.
Jean-Louis Aymar and Michel Goutel have got the silo sufficiently finished to be used, and it contains our first load of wood chippings. The rain doesn't seem to be coming into it anywhere, but we'll need to keep our eye on it. It looks a little odd seeing the temporary chimney smoking away at the edge of the silo, and it'll be a few weeks (months?) before the proper chimney is in place. We do have a start date for the tiling too - St George's Day. And I've volunteered to be the tiler's mate. Maybe I'll learn something (if only how to avoid doing my back in).
Today it's a very wet Easter Sunday - but there's a leg of lamb in the over for later (3pm?), and Mikey and I are off out to see about some asparagus (well wrapped up).
