Now, those of you who live in France will know that the French protect their work-life balance quite jealously. Thus, if an organisation or business is open on a Saturday, not only will it almost definitely be shut on Sunday, but quite likely at least part of Monday will be taken as compensatory leisure time … Continue reading Operation Kitchen Collection 3 days away…and no van!
The time has come. We’re ready to tackle installing a new kitchen at the mill. We’ve found the kitchen we want, designed it all and ordered what we need. That took quite a while in itself, but that was the easy (and fun) bit. Having looked at furniture and appliances in France, investigated the choice … Continue reading Take delivery of the new kitchen – sounds simple but…
Given that it’s nearly five months since I last did an update on our renovation progress, you might be wondering what we’ve been up to in all this time? Although it’s been a long time since my post in March, we’ve actually only spent 3 weeks in France between then and our current visit. So … Continue reading Back to the building site
Back in the spring of 2016, when we first saw our new house advertised, we were fascinated by the description of an ancient water mill with a working wheel that the present owner had adapted to run the central heating. When we first visited the mill in April the owner was ‘asleep in bed’ and … Continue reading OMG, we have heat!
Our Christmas New Year break at the mill was never going to be a lazy one, was it? We had originally intended to set to and rip the upstairs bathroom out. I had even brought over the new floor tiles that I wanted to put down. We had managed to strip the heavily embossed blue … Continue reading T’is the season to be…FREEZING!
“So what happened next? You left us all hanging! You need to keep posting” Last weekend we were out celebrating a family birthday, back in England, when the birthday boy surprised me with this question. It’s true, I’ve neglected my blog - Workaday life very quickly got in the way, as soon as we got … Continue reading The next chapter begins…
It seemed like ages since we had come back from France in August but the time had not been wasted. Plans, bookings, lists and more lists - I AM the epitome of a list maniac. But now everything was happening with military precision. We’d caught the overnight ferry to arrive in Avoise first thing on … Continue reading Ready to go
Only two weeks to go until we jump on that ferry and drive down to La Tourelle for the last time; two weeks before signing those magic papers and handing over the keys to our buyer and picking up the keys for our gorgeous mill. Or so we thought until yesterday. Although the notaire had warned us … Continue reading In SAFER hands?
In 2002 Colin and I had only been together for a few months when we decided to spend a couple of weeks camping in France. As we toured the beautiful areas along the Loire and Cher rivers I fell in love with the country all over again and the seed of an idea began to grow.
