Shutters...

David spoke with M. Baty; we've got several questions outstanding with him, and the best time to actually speak with him (as opposed to passing messages backward and forward through Mme. Baty) is the evening, so they had a very productive chat on Tuesday night.

He's made the shutters, but because of the cold weather (and I suspect how damp it is), the paint is absolutely refusing to dry.

That's the downside of the linseed oil paint; as it's not full of VOCs there's nothing to dry it out artificially quickly, so it takes its own sweet time.

Not that that matters to us, but it does mean the shutters are clogging up M. Baty's painting/drying room. Hopefully that will make him really keen to get rid of them when the paint finally does dry!

As we're not likely to use the room before April or May there's plenty of time for him to fit them; we might even get the doorway broken through!

He's also going to fit us some temporary internal doors - the one we really need is to close off the unheated bedroom from the rest of the house, but it will be nice to have ones in the other two frames, too.

The thought of losing all that heat from the house is the main reason that we haven't had M. Hamid come and take down the block wall ourselves.

[Of course it's interesting to watch J-M not doing his job/not noticing we can't access the bedroom from the house!]

There's a minor problem with the lock plate (which M. Baty will see for himself when he goes to fit the shutters), and he's farmed out the repair to the back of the buffet to a retired friend of his; I think the 18 month delay on that means he might jog his friend's memory.

We can still use the buffet, but it would be nice to have it back on its columns as it would give us another kitchen surface on which to put things!