Get well soon

Aston Villa Club Captain Stiliyan Petrov has been diagnosed with Acute Leukaemia.

We join all Aston Villa supporters in wishing Stan a speedy recovery, in his battle against a terrible disease.Our thoughts are with him and his family. Get well soon Stan.

I love spring

When everything starts to come to life.

It gets me motivated to get my garden ready.

In our first year in France we tried to garden on what to us was a large scale, it was too much, so this year we are working a little slower, were going to try to do a little, if we can look after this we will add a little more.

Small beds, easy to reach, hopefully I can manage this.

I've got my plants and doing my pots and baskets.

More to do today.

Olive

The extension, Base

Were finally getting round to adding the extension, at present the downstairs of our house is an open plan kitchen diner and living room, were now building the living room as a seperate room which will give us a very good size kitchen diner, most houses in France tend to be open plan downstairs as your taxes are based on the number of rooms you have, my house originally had four rooms on one level, once the grenier (loft) was converted to bedrooms and a shower room we knocked out all the downstairs walls this meants although we now had two floors we still had the same amount of rooms as before, adding the living room will put our taxes up a little but we don't pay a lot here anyway.

First job, dig out the footings.

Easier than it looks.

Mix the cement.

 Fill the hole.

Check its level

Part one finished.

PART TWO
Has anyone spotted the deliberate mistake?
Next job, move all that earth in the middle to the outside!!
Then lay some blocks, these are laid to hold the base that will be built up to the floor level of the house.

 all level ready for cement.

Compact down the hardcore, lay a membrane to stop weeds coming through.

A slow job, we had thought of getting a lorry to deliver some RMC but we decided to do it ourselves.

Just over half done, but to late for anymore, we put a fence round to keep the animals off the wet cement.

But it didn't work!!

Finished.

Out to lunch

Were building an extension, as we needed to get the footings and base in Paul has taken a week off work, it took four days to get these jobs done and Paul says theres nothing more we can do till next week. He has a couple of jobs to do in the house, I want a cupboard under the stairs then I can decide how I want the kitchen built.

 With Paul on holiday it means we can eat out at lunch, in most of the restaurants you can have a three course lunch for around a tenner, service is fast and the food is good.

On the table a bottle of water, a bottle of local cider and a bottle of cheap wine, if you open a bottle you get charged a euro each, so for us two starters, two mains, two sweets, one coffee and we opened the cider, 20€70.