The New Wall !

We bought our house in France in 2005 and the photo below is what the front of the house looked like at that stage.

In 2006, we stripped the walls of the house of the old moth-eaten plaster, as you can see below, to expose the beautiful stone. In a bygone age, people had applied plaster to the stone walls of their houses to demonstrate to their neighbours  their newfound wealth. We did the opposite!!

The shutters had received one coat of paint at the time of the photo below but you can clearly see what we thought was a solid gate and fence.

By 2010, solid it was not; strong winter winds and rain, together with too-short hinges and poorly seasoned supermarket timber used by the (now bankrupt) builder, had caused the gates to drop in the centre, so they didn't open properly. We had them replaced with new purpose made oak framed units, filled in with sequoia panels.  These should last a bit longer, we hope! See HERE

By early 2011, we had got fed up with trying to patch the fence, which the wind had blown over a couple of times in the intervening years.  The posts were rotten!

While Nigel was here in July, we removed the whole fence, and deposited the remains at the dump, which by this time was where it belonged!

At the end of July, we employed a local builder  who dug the trench

and put in the foundations.

At the beginning of August, the wall was started

and by the afternoon it was at full height, only one man doing all the work!

Almost there, only tidying up still to do.

Now compare this photo with the first one, what an improvement :-)

I apologise for the strange tint in the last picture, but the camera obviously couldn't cope with the  odd colour sky and a slight drizzle when I took this.

Nigel has not seen the wall in 'real life' yet, but I hope he will be as happy as I am when he gets here.

Don't forget the giveaway, see HERE to be drawn on the 24th August

Finished at last.

I am not sure where this last month has gone, what with gate painting, making jam, pickles, bottling and general running around.  This is what the gates looked like at the beginning of September, when each gate was at a different stage!

Thankfully at last they are now finished.  I had some mad idea at the beginning that I was going to paint all the bolt heads black.  This idea has now flown out of the window as everything took so long, and as you can see, the front of the gates are now plain green; not a black bolt head in sight!

Nevertheless, I have painted the locks and hinges black to match the shutters on the house.

Here are the shutters on our bedroom window and also our cute little door that is only 1,65m high (5ft 5ins); we both have to duck and Nigel much further than me!!

The days are getting shorter and the sun is now setting in a different place. This means our sunsets are just not quite as good as they are during mid summer. This was our sky last night.

New gates at last

At the beginning of June, I mentioned that our old entrance gates were falling apart and that we hoped to have new ones in mid July see HERE .

Well things did not go quite as planned, but just before Nigel returned to the UK at the end of July, our artisan ébéniste (craftsman cabinet maker), suddenly arrived to measure up the area and discuss exactly what we wanted. We thought another two weeks and the gates would be in. I should know better than to expect things to arrive on time, but I finally received a phone call last week saying work would commence on Monday 23 August and it did!!. The frames are made of local oak, and the panels are made from locally grown sequoia. There is a sequoia forest that was planted 40 years ago nearby and they are just starting to cut the trees now.  Because of the weight of the timber, only the frames  were made  in his workshop and the rest of the work was done on site.

Work finished for the day, with the gates incomplete, but I was assured that all would be completed the next day - Tuesday. I received a phone call at 17h00 on that day saying "sorry he had not made it" but it would be finished on Wednesday morning instead! Temperamental artists maybe! Here is the almost completed result, which I am very pleased with. The workmanship is excellent. There was a problem with the fitting of one handle, which is to be sorted out today!! All I have to do now is paint them!!

Meanwhile, I took on the task of getting the laurel hedge back into shape.  I should have taken a photo first but I only thought about that when it was too late!  Enough to say it was about one and a half foot higher that it is in this finished photograph.  I might add this is only part of it, this is probably a third of the length of the full hedge.

You can see how brown our grass is, due to lack of rain.  I use just enough water the keep the flowers and the vegetable garden alive.