What a glorious day!

And I'm not just talking about the weather either, although that was certainly superb. This morning was an early start and that found me in Montaigut with Terry and Rob where we spent a pleasant 90 minutes visiting a semi-derelict building in the town. We have big plans for this - well, actually we don't, but the whole purpose of being there this morning was to measure it up and then draw up big plans for it - never mind a cunning plan, we will have several for this place.

While Terry and Rob went off to chat amongst themselves I went off to the mairie to have a chat with the mayor of Montaigut about what our intentions are. Surprisingly (or maybe not, because times are changing in France when there is a question of foreign money being invested in these small semi-abandoned rural towns) she was quite co-operative and gave me loads of help, even introducing me to her deputy who was the kind of person who would really take an interest in this kind of project.

Back home, I started to turf out of the lean-to all of the accumulated breeze blocks, large stones and so on that I won't be using again up there so that there would be plenty of space for me to move around. But then the weather intervened - in the sense that by 13:00 the batteries were fully-charged and the water was heating up. With all of this surplus energy around, out came the big drill and YESSSSSSSSSSS I finally pushed the core drill right through the wall and into the house. I've even managed to feed the plastic pipe through the wall and so now, next time that it's too wet to work, I'll be running three sets of cables through the tube - a 230-volt power line, a 12-volt power line and a 12-volt light line, and then starting to wire everything up.

This afternoon I was round at Liz and Terry's doing the rear brakes on her car. Pretty straightforward of course but I was having issues with fitting the springs what with a lime burn on my thumb - how I managed that on Monday after all this time without one is another one of those total mysteries.

So tomorrow I'll be fitting the woodwork for the windows and painting it all, and then sorting out some wood to make a fascia panel across the exposed ends of the roof chevrons to keep the weather out of the ends of the chevrons and also to attach the guttering. That wood will be painted too. I'll measure up for the glass and the guttering that I need and then on Saturday I'll go into Commentry to buy it all.