New year photo update 2 - barn/gîte

First photo is a catch-up on the shower room in the first upstairs bedroom we finished earlier last year. Can't picture all in one but you can just see the edge of the shower to the left of the picture.
OK - this is the room over the shop, just before we cleared the decks and started to lay the pine-plank floor. As you can see, we have finished insulating the roof - makes it possible to work in there in the winter, and even add a bit of heat from time to time.
The pink stuff, foreground, picture below, is extruded polystyrene which we have used to insulate the old doorway - there isn't enough thickness to use glass wool. The heap of wood is the flooring, yet to be laid. These pictures were taken on new years day 2008.
The next two pictures are where we are up to now. The floor is laid and sealed, the partition wall studding for the bedroom and shower room is up, with the doors in place. We have dry-lined the end wall with "doublage" ie plasterboard backed with 40mm polystyrene. Next job is to finish the plumbing and electric cabling before we plasterboard the walls and tongue-and-groove the ceiling
You can see the bookshelves in the picture above. These will be set into the wall of the living area, ie built-in. In the picture below you can just see the two tiny windows that used to be for the pigeons in the end wall (over the shop door). They are now glazed on the inside, between the wall and the doublage. I will add a second sheet of glass to the outside end of the holes when the weather gets a bit warmer.
Thats all for now - Too busy to post too often!

New years photo update (part 1 - garden)

Here are some before and after pictures - the befores are all 2003.

First the front of the house in 2003 and then yesterday. The garden needs cutting down, but the blue tits love the verbena seedheads, so I'm leaving them till spring, if the wind doesn't knock them down completely first (good excuse).

To the left side, the hangar had just been demolished (you can see the beams being loaded).The side barn is now a habitable space, with a small window in front and a decent door. The big stones in the 2003 photo were used for the corners of the beds in the front garden.

Down the side of the house, where the hangar used to be. We had the end half of the concrete dug up and that is now flowerbeds. We have filled-in the drainage channels, and covered the right-hand part with slate chippings with a flowerbed edge (theres a ditch to the right of the bed). The other side will be a boules court one day - when we don't need it for sand/compost/rubble storage!

Here is Pixel carefully picking his way over what looks like a bomb site. Poor cat, probably wondering what we had brought him to! Note the little apple tree in centre of picture. Todays picture shows the courtyard garden that has replaced the pile of wood on the right in the first picture. The apple tree is considerably bigger now, seen here without leaves. The concrete hardstanding in the forground of the 'now' picture is for the porch we have yet to get around to building (see blog 'More plans for the future'; Oct 22 2006).

The back lawn (just grass really). It did look terrible after the septic tank had been installed. the 2003 summer was so dry that nothing grew for months. The stony surface explains why the grass here doesn't grow too well at the best of times even now, although it is a bit shaggy now as I haven't cut it for quite a while. The recent picture shows the new chicken-proof (?) 'dead hedge' nearing completion - there will be smart gates in the gaps soon!

Finally, for now, some ariel views. The first was taken when we fitted the chimney pot a bit later in summer 2003. The last two are from an upstairs window of the gîte and show the back and front gardens. Things have tidied-up a bit and also grown somewhat. It cheers me up considerably to look back and see how much better it all looks now!