Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible ....

.... as I am off to England at the crack of dawn tomorrow (provided it's prepared to crack just a bit later than it usually does) to see my new grandson.

As the forecast was rain all day today, I limited my objectives, and just did one more pair of shutters.

This picture was taken first thing this morning - before the rain:



and this one in the afternoon, when in fact the rain had turned out to be a very light drizzle, hardly enough to wet the ground:



I'd welcome suggestions about the rusty door on the electricity cabinet. Do I leave it is it is - after all the rust blends in quite well with the colour of the stone? Or would it be better painted - and if so what colour?

The two other shutters in the picture are in very poor condition. I may well decide to replace them, so it's a good thing they will be staying open most of the summer. They are the shutters for the kitchen and breakfast room, and there's usually no call to shut them. In the summer the sun is off this side of the farmhouse by about 10 in the morning, before it gets too hot. If the shutters are left are open, visitors won't really notice what they look like, as they won't be able to see them without craning their neck.

Spring is late this year. The willow tree is only just in leaf:



and usually it is a good week or two earlier than this. On the other hand, the wild violets in the grass underneath it have been putting on a good show, for at least three weeks now. This picture was taken on March 24th:



Coincidentally, I have been reading Fernand Braudel's wonderful "Memory & the Mediterranean", and he notes (shortly before disagreeing with J L Borges on the merits of Athenian democracy as a foretaste of paradise) that Aristophanes described Athens in its then vanished past as "crowned with violets".

still painting the shutters

Nice spring day today, so I've been treating the shutters to a couple of coats of "lasure bois".

I've been trying to do more than one pair at a time, but in fact the production line isn't that easy to organise:



Wire-brushing and sanding can't be done with them like this (you need to be able to put a bit of weight on the brush and the sander), so I've only been able to prepare two at a time. They have needed a certain amount of repair work - several of them had missing bolts securing the hinges to the shutters, and since I was doing that, I've also used the angle grinder to cut off the ends of the existing bolts, which have always looked a bit unfinished.

So it has been a matter of painting one side of the shutters on the trestles, then standing them up to paint the other side, and then leave them to let them dry. But they look better with a coat of finish, and should be a bit more durable now:



So far I've done five windows (ten shutters) and there are another four windows to be done. But soon I will have finished the least accessible ones. Climbing the ladder and hooking the shutters on and off is a bit nerve-wracking:



These ones will have to wait until tomorrow to go back up the ladder and onto the windows, as they are still rather sticky.

Three of the four pairs of shutters yet to be done are the original ones: the plus side is that they are nicely made, proper joinery, but against that the oak is getting rather crumbly for lack of maintenance. The other pair are more modern - like those in the picture above, with a zed-shaped bracing frame - and should be good for another ten years at least.

And - as a matter of record - my third grandson was born today......

readers' requests

Here is the glass-headed man:



And just stirring the paint made it thicker. I don't know why. Possibly as it's an emulsion, some of the water separates out and floats to the top. It's surprising the paint doesn't say that you should stir it. Next time I'll bear in mind the glue suggestion, Mo. For painting ceilings, it's an obvious short-cut.

The paint bucket in the picture got a second outing today, as I used it to empty the two tons of gravel from the trailer....

Keynes would be pleased

because I've spent the day digging a hole in the ground, then filling it in. Productive work. At least there isn't a hole in the ground any longer!

It was the trench outside the front door - this one



It has been waiting until we'd finished waterproofing the top of the silo (the old cistern, now full of chipped firewood). I should also say that it's been waiting for some dry weather, which finally arrived today.

The other side is a bigger hole (well, not one full of wood and concrete blocks, anyway). The reason it isn't any deeper is that when I cut down I reached the bedrock, and found that the wall of the cistern came to within three or four inches of it. Someone a hundred years ago had worked very hard with a pickaxe to excavate enough rock to provide for the storage of about 30 cubic meters of water. As now the object is to make the silo waterproof, I wanted to lay a drain against the side wall.

So this is where I started:



After a couple of hours I'd dug out a bit more earth, and reached bedrock again, at which point I decided that enough was enough. The picture doesn't give a very good idea of the trench, but it's the best there is, as I only took one picture.....



..... and of course now it's been filled in. Before doing that I remembered to put in the drain tubing, and wrap it in "geotextile" (to keep the earth from clogging the pipe). The geotextile has gravel in it as well as the pipe, to improve drainage.



I put a bit more gravel on top, then another layer of geotextile - you have to buy a full roll, 25 meters I think, and this trench and drain is about 6 meters long. And then I filled it back in with the earth - mostly rock - I'd started by digging out. There were three trailer-loads of gravel in the hole, just over two metric tons according to Chausson's weighbridge, and my back pretty well confirms the figure this evening.



Even all that lot wasn't enough to fill the hole, so I swept up some of the dusty floor from the hangar - where the chickens come for their daily dust-bath - and added a couple of large wheel-barrow loads of this. I will probably go and get some "proper" compost tomorrow, just to bring the levels up to where they were before. Not too much, as the thin soil encourages interesting wild flowers. The hangar floor is all very well as a compost source, but it is full of foreign bodies, mostly chips of wood and bark, but other unidentifiable or unmentionable stuff too (which I removed).

I've also started treating the shutters on the farmhouse. This is a simultaneous "before" and "after" picture. I don't think these shutters have had any attention since they were installed. This is a new pair (25 years old?), made of oak, but not very well made: the original ones don't have a zig-zag framework on the back holding them together, instead they are made with good wide mortised joints at the corners, held together with wooden pegs. The old ones will get a coat of wood treatment too, but they are nearing their sell-by date I'm afraid. Mind you, they seem to have managed more than 80 years, so I'm not complaining.



After the shutters, just some emergency repairs to the actual windows - fixing the rotted frames, new glass, that kind of thing - and the farmhouse will be about ready for the summer.

Painting the ceiling

I'm working on getting the farmhouse tidy for May, when the first visitors arrive. Today, I was finishing off a ceiling. It seems to have been a special ceiling paint. Ordinary ceiling paint is designed not to drip, while this special one has dripped and run all over the place. Possible it was because I didn't stir it. Notrmal paints tell you, usually quite fiercely, that you either have to stir them (and stir them well), or alternatively that you should under no circumstances stir them at all. This B&Q product kept entirely schtum, though it did suggest that some older paints might constain lead, that a pamphlet was available describing the associated hazards of old lead paint, and that I should take great care if using sandpaper on an old surface.

The hazards I normally try to avoid include falling off the stepladder, so I prefer to use a (OK, yes, rickety) scaffolding arrangement:



That said (the "rickety" bit) the platform between the stepladders is very heavy, and difficult to move, so I tell myself it's unlikely to wobble over easily.

And here is a man at work:



A first attempt at this picture produced a man with a large glass head with flowers on.