Working Hard - Honest

The past couple of weeks have seen us working hard on the barn, and making a fair bit of progress. Tina has now gone the length of the room with her pointing, up to ladder height while I have more or less finished the jointing on the walls up to ladder height as well, so we are both queueing up to use the scaffold.






The inside of the fireplace shows of the pointing quite well, even allowing for my slanting photo.

I'm not sure how well my jointing of the plasterboard on the walls is going. It looks OK at the moment, and I have been checking them all with a flat edge, but the moment of truth will be when we paint the walls, when I have a nasty feeling that you will be able to see every single joint that I have slaved over. Still, if the worst comes to the worst, we can skim all the walls and repaint it!

Mr Chatillon has now finished all of his work, including fitting the internal doors. I ended up working as a carpenters mate to help him finish, working until 7pm on Friday night. Outrageous!I hardly ever worked that late at the Banque de Cheval Nior, only if we were doing and installation, or if I was being threatened by fat Welshmen and coke head contractors (allegedly) .

We are not quite sure what Mr Chatillon made of our music. We like to listen to BBC 6 Music while we are working, and we're not sure that he was ready for indie guitar bands, and we could have turned him into a 60 year old goth after hearing the new Queens of the Stone Age single.( Je suis le seul goth dans le village ... as he goes to the news agents for his copy of Kerrang).

The doors look even better than we had hoped, and start to make it look like a proper room. Tina quickly varnished them, to try and stop me from dripping plaster all over them, as if that will stop me.












Away from the building work, we temporarily acquired some livestock last weekend. On Saturday night, at about 10 o'clock Tina looked up and saw a sheep at the top of our drive. We rushed out and tried to herd it up the road to the gate so we could put it back in one of Thiery's fields, but it was having none of it. We tried using French commands, venez, allez, allons y, but to no avail. And cats are no substitute for a collie at times like this.

Next, I ran over to Thiery's house to get some help, but there was no-one home. So I ran back home, got my bike out and cycled down the hill to get Thiery's dad. Five minutes later we were back, after me pushing my bike half way up the hill, but the sheep was nowhere to be found. Tina had gone back in the house for a minute, as she was worried that the sheep was getting a bit panicky, and when she came back out, it had gone.

I searched along the road, but there was no sign of it.

So the next day I went to tell Thiery what had happened, but I needn't have worried, the sheep was waiting for them when they got home on Saturday night. It turns out that the sheep had just been separated from it's lambs for the first time, so it had escaped and gone looking for them.

I also found out that it was an English sheep, so if we had tried herding it in English, it might have understood us!