Washing and sanding and french school holidays…

Realised that there has been a bit of a gap between posts over the start of the long french summer holiday, so thought I’d better do a little update.

Things are slowly starting to progress with the house. Most of the flaky paint has now been persuaded from the internal walls, with just a couple remaining, no further marvellous stonework has revealed itself so those will be pretty much ready for plaster boarding before too long. There’s been much clearing out of old rubbish too, old grain sacks, bottles, rotten chairs and broken bits of old farm machinery, along with a lot of pine martin poop…

To break up the tedium of paint scraping, I decided to start to clean up the great flagstone floor in what will be the kitchen. Everything looked grey and dull with over 60 years of grime trodden into the stone floor, so with no idea of what would be underneath but with fingers crossed for something lovely I attacked it with the pressure washer, and joy of joys have discovered a rather lovely random mixture of honey-hued mottled flagstones. They are going to take a fair bit of work yet to get the really ingrained dirt off but the difference that it has made to the room already is amazing. All of these will need to be numbered and plotted before they are lifted for the proper floor base and services to be run and they’ll have another good clean before they are relaid, but I think it’s going to look beautiful and we’re so pleased to be able to resuse them.

Here are some before and so far pictures of the floor

We’ve also reclaimed a load of old cast iron radiators which were being taken out of a private property being converted to business use. They’re stripped of the old paint but need to be smoothed down ready for priming and then finishing with our paint. There is a real range of sizes so we have something for all the rooms including an enormous beast of a radiator that is going in the dining room at the front of the house as it waaaay to heavy to manhandle any further past the front door!

Radiators waiting for some love and attention

Finally on the house front we’ve made an exploratory start on the staircase to see what was beneath its layers of grime, again in the hope that it will be salvageable. The signs so far are promising, it will need a lot of sanding to get it back to lovely but the wood looks good and solid, and again the difference that the lifting of the grey dirt to reveal the pale wood already makes to feel of the back hall is startling.

Well thats a little catch up on tasks, I’ll post some more detailed blogs on specific projects over the next weeks and also some images from trips out we’ve taken to explore this beautiful region during the fabulously long school holidays.