It's taken me a lot longer than I thought it would to get back to [something approaching] normal, and at times it felt like it would never happen. Still, I seem to be managing to do more than just get some exercise now, so let's make the most of it!
I feel that things not happening is much more tiring that being manically busy!
Regarding our lovely house in France:
- Continuing lack of communication from M. Torelli meant that at Christmas we called M. Huguenot of Schwartz to ask if we could arrange the boiler service and have his chap check over the piping to the bedroom/turn-on the central heating in there and the bathroom. We're really glad we did; it was getting cold in there without radiators (7°C, and not even very cold outside, so it would only get worse), and more importantly the lovely plumber dealt with the four or five leaks that would have had me panicking! One radiator doesn't get terribly warm, but the room is fine now. The electrics to the bathroom radiator don't work, either, but the central heating part does, so that's another thing I'm going to add to the "worry about it later" pile. M. Antoni was due on 2 January, which would have taken us into the third year of a two-month project, and the fourth calendar year, but as he came on 29 December, the heating was connected in two years to the day! [Obviously the unfinished plumbing takes us into three-year territory.]
- We have since tried to get in touch with M. Torelli by registered letter, but that was returned "no response", so we're guessing he's no better and his business is over. Sad for him, but I'm past caring at the moment. The plumbing that doesn't work/isn't connected is small enough for me to be quite blasé [or should that be blasée?] about it!
- We've finally stopped getting threats and pleas from Jean-Marie, so that's another bonus. We're not sure if that's because we responded to a begging mail from Joëlle with the list of things that hadn't been finished and saying when they were we would make the final payment, so she finally found out how much of the "finished" job he had left undone. The Mairie still wasn't finished last we heard, so we know it's nothing personal, just really bad management [not what one wants from a project manager!], so I had managed to forget all about it (apart from updating the blog, obviously).
- Having heating in the bathroom meant I could enjoy lying in the bath, looking out over the meadow and vineyards - bliss after moving stones/slabs/bricks and chopping logs!
- We got all the stone slabs, unused building stone, and bricks into a neat pile under the walnut tree and covered them all with a tarpaulin (I know that's not necessary, but we want to stop walnuts falling down the cracks and germinating, and it's not as though we are short of tarps!), and being able to get the wheelbarrow to the compost heap/meadow is a real bonus.
- I had a lovely birthday - Christmas Eve spent with the chainsaw, axe & log-splitter is my idea of fun!! So much more so than spring cleaning someone else's home year after year [hi, mum!]. Because I'm in control of cleaning my home, it got done earlier!
- Laurent had installed a door upstairs, and we've moved a huge quantity of 'stuff' to the other part of the barn for when I feel like painting furniture/stripping cast iron etc. It's looking way better up there, and we may even get it all tidied this year...
- We also started tidying the barn: our new trailer is a godsend - a load of cardboard to the dump, and another load of other builder-abandoned rubbish, and it looked way better. The scrap being collected also helped massively. We sorted out the beams/joists, as well: the rotten ones were chopped up to make firewood later, the OK looking ones are separated out, and we've sacrificed the ones that the carpenter wouldn't re-use and aren't attractive to the firewood pile also.
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