REMEMBERING 2015. A YEAR OF BUILDING DUST AND CHAOS.

THE SECOND AND THIRD QUARTERS OF THE YEAR

APRIL

The new drive arrives followed by the kitchen units.  Unfortunately several of them are smashed and unusable.  We start fitting the good pieces and manage to knock up some kind of kitchen for when my brother arrives for a ten day holiday.  Nick sets off with the trailer to the UK to fetch replacement units, returning, exhausted, three days later. The weather remains glorious and we take some time off as well.

MAY

Almost the minute my brother leaves to go back to the UK, it starts raining, and continues for days.  The ditch alongside the road fills and overflows across our gateway and huge puddles appear in the new drive.  As the rain continues, the new kitchen starts to take shape.  By the end of the month the weather has picked up again and we hold the second cake club of the year, a huge success, with a record number of cakes on the table.

JUNE

Work on the kitchen continues steadily after a trip to the UK to see Nick’s mum who is poorly.  We wait for news from the carpenter about when he might be coming to fit our new oak staircase to replace the metal spiral one which we loathe.  It is by now six months since we ordered the new one.

JULY

Nick’s mum has a fall and becomes very ill.  I go back to the UK, leaving Nick to supervise the installation of the new staircase.  It doesn’t arrive.  The carpenter delivers the parts the afternoon before Nick gets on a flight back to the UK to join me, leaving the carpenter to fit the staircase in our absence.  Nick’s mum dies hours after he visited her in hospital.  We return to France to find the staircase fitted and almost exactly as we wanted it, then make another trip to the UK for the funeral.

AUGUST

The tomato plants we planted in the garden start to produce huge quantities of delicious tomatoes.  My brother and niece arrive for a holiday.  The weather is hot and sunny and we take time off the DIY to have a holiday with them and to enjoy their company, doing all the usual holiday and tourist stuff that we had almost forgotten all about.  The minute our guests are gone we start work again, clearing the downstairs for the next, and hopefully the last, major work on the house.

SEPTEMBER

In the tremendous heat of late August and early September the decking over the new fosse tank is finished, built to deter vehicles from being driven over the top of it.  My father becomes ill and is admitted to hospital and I dash back to the UK, taking the cat and dog with me, and leaving Nick with the huge task of clearing the rest of the downstairs ready for the mason to begin work in the middle of the month.