Not a bank holiday weekend here ......

... so of course the sun has been shining and it's been a lovely day.

Quite a lot has been going on over the last couple of weeks: we've had Jane come to stay, just back from her honeymoon and still married apparently she says. She's helped out a lot and we've gone ahead with some serious work - tiling and grouting the terrace outside the bedroom, painting the large main room, walls and ceiling, putting up fibreblass wallpaper on the ceilings in the upstairs bedrooms and a whole lot more that I have already managed to forget (it'll come back to me, Jane, really it will).

Here's the finished terrace:



After it was done I discovered that I hadn't quite got the fall of the surface right, and if it should ever rain (I had to simulate it with a sprinkler on the garden hose) there'd be a big puddle right outside the door. So I got out the angle grinder and diamond disk, cut out three of the smaller stones and relaid them a centimeter or two lower as a gutter. This has either solved the drainage problem, or at least moved it somewhere else. You can hardly see the joins.

Then at last the menuisier got his men back on site, and we've now got the balcony in place, with two-thirds of the floor planks down. But there's no sign of a railing round it - that has all yet to be ordered, which is about what we should have expected. Still, we'll have plenty of time to decide what it should look like. Monsieur G has promised us a temporary rail, probably scaffold poles and netting - tatty chic maybe?

Here's the balcony in situ:



It was installed using M Vaissiere's nice new farm tractor. The tractor had to come in via the field and M Espeisse's woods, as it was too wide for the public track behind the barn. Fortunately Monsieur V lives opposite Jean-Louis Carriere, who farms the field, and was able to ring him up and ask permission to cut the fence down. This is how it's done, health and safety please look the other way:



Then on Friday Marcel came with young Sebastian and installed the main doors. We immediately had him take them back off again so we could treat them with linseed oil and turps, and - pricked by our conscience - we recruited Sylvain and Aurelian to help us put them back on, feeling it might have been rather a lot for Marcel to manage by himself on Monday morning. Here they are, and the doors too:



The upper, fixed, section should go up on Monday, and then we might have the "barn door" look we've been aiming for. Four years on and it will look like it did before we bought it, an achievement for sure.

Finally, I had to do something to prevent weeds growing in the wall between the new balcony and the main room. The menuisier suggested concrete, but I decided to use a concrete infill (this helps to hold the balcony to the wall - there are great big bolts embedded in it) topped off with a couple of inches of mortar and some more of our tiles. I liked the result:



I was using up what I had left over, so the larger tiles, which are 28 x 28cms, were cut down from 60 x 40cm slabs, and the smaller ones were offcuts from everything else.

I now feel something of an expert on laying heavy stone tiles. If it needs to be hammered with a heavy wooden mallet into a bed of mortar, then I'm your man. Even the grouting is now something I can make work (funny word, grout, more one of Neasden FC's players than part of the English language. The OED says it was originally a word for a coarse porridge, then dregs or mud, and that the modern usage is only possibly derived from that, noting that there's a Fench word "grouter". Well not round here there's not - it's just "joint" in modern France. Possibly Mr Onions never used grout himself, and didn't see the resemblance to porridge before it sets).