Easter snow & wellies

Easter & it's typical British bank holiday weekend weather here in the south of France. Windy, cold & snowing! Last Friday I'd been slaving away in temperatures in the 20's, this week we had to call it a day at lunchtime amidst sleet & hailstones. I'd clocked up a few more days work with Thierry and had picked up a few tips that I'm sure will be very useful. We've been well looked after with regular coffees served, as the French do, in a glass tumblers with no offer of milk but with lots of sugar. It had been quite entertaining trying to explain to the gentleman we're doing the work for that the English refer to rubber boots as Wellingtons and that they are named after The Iron Duke who is not all that popular in France. Fortunately he'd not read the Wikipedia page that goes on to explain that the French company Aigle was the pioneer in manufacturing 'wellies'. Another conversation centred around the difference between a spade & a shovel but I'll save that for another time.

With the continued dip in temperature we'd used a bit more wood on the stove than we'd hoped and if there was no dramatic change soon we were going to run out of fuel. Last weekend I'd rang Etienne who has a small wood supply business and on Monday he called to say he could let us have a stere of mixed wood. We arranged to meet that evening and had great fun picking the wood up from his yard in the pitch dark. It was definitely the right time to go as when I unloaded the trailer in the morning there was considerably more than just one stere and the majority of it was oak. Hopefully we've now got enough to see us through to the warmer weather.

We'd decided over the weekend that it would be a good idea to get another estate agent involved in the sale of the house. There's no reduction in fees for sole agency so working on the principal of the more publicity the better I rang an agent on Tuesday & asked them to co-market the property. They asked me to email across some pictures which I did straight away & as it turned out it's just as well I did as we received a phone call a couple of hours later to say they'd shown a client the photographs and they were very interested & would like to view the house on Wednesday afternoon. So on Wednesday at 2:30, with the sun blazing down, the freshly ground coffee was brewing & Barbara was baking bread. It obviously worked as the couple were most impressed and said that once they'd exchanged contracts on their home back in the UK (hopefully this week) they'd be making an offer. To say we were happy is a bit of an understatement and although it's early days it's great to think that someone actually likes what we've done to the house. Our only problem will be if all goes ahead is where are we going to live! But we'll worry about that if things proceed.