Bonjour. Hope you are all well (as I am this week). It has been a productive week here in our little part of France. We have finally got the car registered – we even know the plate numbers for our new number plates, just don’t know where to the get the number plates! So that is the next joy in the on-going saga of the car registration. So soon, we will have our little right hand drive Ford running around the French countryside looking like a French car (being minus the big GB sticker on the back will also help).
I also finally got the first of our kitchen cupboards sorted, it has been painted and is now up on the wall (see photo). The melamine paint job worked out and I’m really happy with the overall look. Hopefully the rest will look as good. I’m starting on one set of the base units today.
The other thing we have been able to do this week, was get the WC under the stairs completed. As my regular readers will know, we have changed the door and got a sink into the space (we have such an exciting life). This week on our adventures we came across a wooden, untreated bathroom cabinet (with mirror doors) for €12. We bought it and I have painted it and we put it on the wall, along with a soap holder and a towel holder. So it now feels like a proper little WC rather than a toilet bunged in under the stairs. Eventually the wallpaper will go and we will paint in there, but the wallpaper isn’t too offensive (or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it) so it feels like we have completed a space – that is a really nice feeling.
We also had a very special delivery on Friday. Our bath has finally arrived (ok, my bath has finally arrived). Pat spent a large portion of yesterday getting the bath plumbed into the existing pipe work. In anticipation of this event, we removed the bidet from the bathroom. All seemed fine, we had checked for leaks etc. however, when I had my shower we discovered that the waste water pipe from the shower was connected to the waste water pipe from the bidet! Which meant one flooded bathroom, which also meant that I flooded part of the kitchen downstairs. Thankfully the amount of water to escape wasn’t too excessive and we were able to mop it up – however the mop up job did take every single towel we had in the house.
The other issue we have discovered with the bathroom is that the original plumbing job wasn’t the best and it now looks like we won’t be able to do a temporary job with plumbing the bath in. We had wanted to do a temporary job as we eventually hope to be able to re-do the bathroom (when we have the money). So it looks like we may have to get a plumber in to plumb in the bath, and then when we redo the bathroom we will just have to move the bath and redo the plumbing.
I must admit with all the things Pat and I have had to do over the past 6 weeks of living in our new house, it has perhaps been good that we haven’t had paid work (well not much) – however we will have to get back into the swing of sitting at a computer and working soon (along with looking for new clients).
To relax in the evenings I’m reading books (French TV is not that great). Currently I’m reading a couple of books, both very different, but interesting none the less. I’m re-reading the Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff and while I don’t agree with all of it, it is still an interesting book to read, especially about taking a much gentler stance with the world and life. The other book I’m reading is The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J Stanley and William D Danko. While a lot of the information is common sense, I really wish I had understood money (and the saving and spending of money) better when I was younger. However, I can’t change the past and I now understand the “living within ones means” idea – lol.
On that note, I’ll leave you all with a quote this week (thanks to Becky’s Facebook page) – Happiness is an inside job – William Arthur Ward
Completed Unit 1
Completed unit 2
My challenge this week