And bad news...

Despite waiting patiently [although that patience is now wearing a "bit" thin] since mid-July, we are still being held up by the absence of the plumber.

M. Torelli is now the only thing stopping the work from being finished; M. Baty fitted the french windows sometime in late October, and M. Waeber has done all the tiling he can do without M. Torelli installing the drain for the shower.

Lately, we seem to have many more emails asking for payment than we have ones telling us of progress!

In fact, the only progress report we've received since (I think) July is the one we had on Monday morning replying to David's mail asking whether T+B and the plumber wished to continue with our job.

Jean-Marie argues that he has been working, but we'll have to take his word for that: the complete absence of progress reports, or indeed any visible progress that we haven't instigated ourselves [i.e. the joiner and tiler, whom we arranged to visit and gave them a key to let themselves in] leaves us somewhat sceptical.

J-M has done a bit of name-calling and cc'ing unrelated people on his emails, but we are trying to retain the moral high ground, and are only copying people at T+B on OUR mails. [OK, posting a blog isn't exactly subtle, but I feel almost like a journalist - I can't just report the "kittens & flowers" type stuff - and it's not as though anyone related to the project reads this!]

Pointing out the timeline for our "two-month" job might have helped [and saying we really did want it finished before the one-year anniversary, coming up later this month], because we have received a mail since saying he will get onto it.

Thankfully David seems to have developed a much tougher spine, and I can out-stubborn for England, so no money will be changing hands until the work is done.

David also emphasised that we paid, in good faith, for a complete set of plans to be drawn up over three years ago, and that we will not be mailing a cheque until we have a copy of the missing page (and the electronic file).

I refuse to accept a hand-drawn plan when we paid handsomely AND provided John Knighton's excellent CAD files. Privately, I think they just copied John's plans and never verified the dimensions in the only place David & I didn't measure...

We've had to apologise to Laurent Mazij for the three month delay in paying his last bill, but did explain that we only received it on Monday morning! J-M had signed it & dated it 'good to pay' 29 Nov right next to Laurent's signature dated 30 Aug. A copy of this has gone to Montieramey along with the cheque!

Hmmm! Hopefully Laurent is as OK about it as David thinks he sounded; we do want him to come and do further work at the house, even if we no longer care about keeping a good relationship with T+B.

It does seem that the only part of our job Jean-Marie is on top of is his invoices to us!

Worryingly, M. Waeber reckons it may be too cold to make good the concrete in the shower area [it was minus 6°C on Tuesday]...

That's another thing we are going to have to watch out for: having asked (repeatedly) whether there was sufficient depth for the drain to the shower and being assured there was, to hear from M. Waeber that M. Torelli had insisted the builder come to site to dig out the concrete [and now return to make good again] we are worried that another item will appear on our bill.

Given that every other trade can knock up a couple of trowelfulls of cement to make good, two visits by M. Hamid when the pipes should have been laid by M. Torelli in June will not be paid for out of our pocket: we'll pay SMS, but then argue with T+B & M. Torelli about who gets to bear that cost!