On not counting your chickens

It's been a while since I was here. Well okay, it's been a Very Long Time. And it's a funny thing: the longer it is since I last blogged, the more difficult it is to blog - it's a bit like standing on top of the diving platform waiting to summon up what it takes to dive: the longer it takes, the harder it gets (and I should know - one Saturday when I was ten I spent no less than 6 hours hovering on the edge of the high board at my local baths ....).

It may of course also have something to do with the fact that I so do not want to write what I have to write, and I've been hanging on and hanging on to see if I could get away with not writing it. (Come on Kalba - stop being enigmatic and just ... jump ...). 

Okay. Here goes. In spite of everything I've said before, in spite of working seven long days a week for the last two years, in spite of the promises that we'd be ready by summer 2011 ..... I still can't give you a definite date for opening our guest accommodation at Grillou. I can't believe it, I'm really really sorry, and it's appalling.

We were doing okay. After my "Too many things to redo" rant, things started to come together remarkably quickly. We tiled and grouted showers and floors, finished plastering and painting, made and installed a set of oak steps, glazed doors and windows, restored various bits of old furniture and finished lots of other small but time consuming jobs. Out of the blue, a friend offered to make some curtains. By chance, we stumbled upon a newly set up artisan who could take on the remaining joinery work and start reasonably quickly; as a result I was able to take on some work elsewhere for three weeks while John pressed on with the jobs list. Things were looking good.

And then the plot was lost. The just-set-up joiner left the country just days before he was due to start his contracted work with us. At the same time the artisan who installed the water and waste systems pulled out of coming back to finish the work of testing it and doing the final connections. Splat!! That was the sound of a finishing date cracking into a thousand pieces on the floor .....

So there we were. Are. It's almost 1 April, the magical date when I'm supposed to be taking bookings. (Ah ... maybe that was the problem :-)). I've been away from Grillou for three weeks. We have a kitchen and two bathrooms with no water; we have a mega cupboard to build and a 5 metre long windowsill with highly irregular measurements to make and install; we have a plumber-electrician to find who doesn't object to signing off and commissioning someone else's work and can do so before 2012 (and no, that's not a joke). To say I'm unbelievably, insanely, homicidally mad might be a teensy weensy bit of an overstatement. To say I'm pissed off and disappointed, however, is most definitely an understatement.

Splash.

Deadlines

I love deadlines.
I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Douglas Adams, but clearly written especially for Grillou, February 2011.

Comfort me with shopping

All good things must come to an end. (Or so I'm told. Personally I don't see why they should. Sounds a bit like a Puritan conspiracy to me. However.)

For a start, summer seems to have left us, suddenly and definitively. One day I'm outside wearing - well, not much, and sweltering; the next I'm reluctantly pulling on long sleeves. And today even I, the anti-clothes queen of Ariège, found myself putting on jeans - and, heaven forfend, a denim jacket - for the first time since the spring. I know of course that it's (probably) not all over bar the shouting - we can, and often do, get a wonderful Indian summer. And then there's l'été de la Saint Martin, around 11 November, which is often (more often than you might expect by chance ) an unusually mild and sunny period, after the first frosts but before the first snows - and almost exactly six months apart from the Saints de Glace. But all this aside, today I felt chilly, and I'm not good at that.

And then there's the diminishing of the light. Whereas just a couple of weeks ago we were happily eating outside at 9pm, now it's dark by 8.30, and by the time you've put all the outside lights and something warm on, to be honest the whole thing kind of loses the plot and so on the whole we've retreated indoors. I think we must be becoming French, or something. Mind you, to a sunlight freak like me there's something terribly depressing about the daily loss of daylight we have to endure for six months of the year, especially as it starts in June when summer hasn't even got going: the summer solstice may well be the beginning of summer, but it's also the beginning of the darkness. (Now the winter solstice ... that really is cause for celebration ....)

As if that weren't all enough, we're going through our own, slightly belated, rentrée: after our fantastic Ariège holiday week we're back at work with a vengeance ... and The Perfectionist is back for a final (well final-ish) fling. Much as I love my builder, however, I don't love the lime and plaster dust and mackerel tins that he has a habit of trawling along with him ... The good news though is that the new dining room is now lime plastered, has a door, and almost looks like a room and not the goat shed that it was (you do still have to leap a metre down to get to it as there are no steps yet, but I'm told that will change by  ... December. Sigh.); the good-and-bad news is that the next couple of weeks will see us borrowing some scaffolding from a friend and lime washing the entire room, the walls of which are - gulp - 5 metres high.

And so maybe all this goes some way towards explaining why a quick trip to Saint Girons market to buy broccoli plants this morning got waylaid into coffee with friends, and then into a bit of food shopping, and then into the buying of a half price barbecue, and then into a fully fledged shop-till-you-drop session for new clothes. Both of us have dropped two full sizes since we moved here and now that the trouser-wearing season has returned we've both tended to look, as my mother used to say, like sacks of potatoes, which is not good for the ego (and hoisting your Andy Pandy trousers up 127 times an hour gets pretty boring too). Although I'm not generally a fan of shopping, do you know what? It was fun. And two hours, five shops and several carrier bags later, we're fit to be seen in public again.

One man and his hole

Yesterday, 8.30am:

Yesterday, 6.30pm:

Today, 12.30pm:

Today, 6.30pm:

It might not be apparent from the photos, but this is a solid stone wall, well over half a metre thick; it was once an outside wall, and some of the stones are as wide as I am - too heavy to lift, and so have to be cut up with an angle grinder ...

It might (does!) feel like sheer madness right now, but we've all been waiting for this moment since the start of the work: this is where we finally connect the two parts of the house that up to now have been separate, with the only access from one to the other through a circuitous route that takes you via the cellar. The last two days have been a truly superhuman effort on the part of The Perfectionist, who's working largely on his own while we clear rubble, fetch, carry, make coffee, admire, and generally sympathise. (True, we do have him shut into the room behind the acro props, thus forcing him to hack his way out, but he doesn't mind. No, really, he doesn't ...).

It's a bit of a strange voyage of discovery: today, for instance, we started to uncover a whole load of stones and filling that were distinctly burnt. Was there a chimney? No other evidence of one. Was there once a fire? Was the room once a forge, maybe? Unlikely - we've been told by two elderly sisters who grew up in the house that it was always an animal shed - goats, in fact. Was it used to smoke charcuterie, perhaps? We may never know for sure. And yesterday afternoon The P (who is not given to hysteria, even when shut into an old goat shed) reported seeing, out of the corner of his eye, a series of vague, shadowy figures passing in front of the hole ... and, well, let me put it this way - it was neither John nor me, and there was nobody else here ...

Just when you think it's all over ...

... and there'll be no more channelling out for wiring or pipes, or moving of radiators, or lime rendering, or plastering, or removal of ceilings, or general builders' mess making ...

Just when you think you might just be on the home strait because you've got four rooms looking pretty damned good ...

Just when you've cleared up more dust than you thought could possibly exist in the entire world and at last you can walk about without leaving white footprints ...

... and when you've finally cleared all the rubble and lime dust and rotting plaster and old tiles and carried away tonnes and tonnes of stone ...

Just when you think all that might be over ...

... your builder comes along and does this ...

... and this ...

... and this ...

Dontcha just love 'em?

Ticking clock ...

Yesterday was a momentous day. I went out. As in: left the premises. And not to go to the builders' merchants (well, okay, I did go there. But only in passing ...), but to meet a friend for lunch, catch-up and general mooch.

It's ridiculous, but since January 1st I had (until yesterday) left Grillou just twice - on both occasions to gather building supplies and throw in a bit of food shopping at the same time. Friends didn't believe me when I told them. I don't blame them. I can barely believe it myself. But it's true. During the same period, sleep has been something of a rare commodity too. As, of course, has blogging.

The bottom line is that we've been working to a looming deadline. With the bulk of the building work in the guest accommodation finished, we've had a builder-free period of three months to get to grips with the finishing and decoration of the whole area - nearly 200 square metres - and that meant lots of making good of walls and woodwork, painting, colourwashing, limewashing, tadelakting, tiling, building shelving, sanding, staining and waxing the floors in two rooms, laying new floors in several other rooms, putting in skirting boards, fitting new lights .... It was a looming deadline, because The Perfectionist was due back last week to start major work in the last room - the dining-room-to-be, full from floor to (5m high) ceiling with assorted furniture, boxes of books, bedding, towels, a shower door and copious amounts of general toot of the why-on-earth-did-we-bring-this-to-France variety. All of which had to be Removed, so that The P - now without Pink Van Man, who has taken his pink van to pastures new - could make the sort of mess that only builders can. (Yes, I know, I'll pay heavily for that remark ...).

We made it. Just. As he was unloading his van, we were moving boxes into one bit or other of the new guest accommodation. It's good to have him back (did I really say that?), but the deadlines continue: restoring furniture, yet more bathroom work, stripping and laying more floors, restoring staircases, decorating and finishing the chambre d'hôte hallway and landing, making curtains and throws, trying to restore order into the grounds, redesigning and rewriting our websites in two languages ...

I'm feeling pretty tired, to be honest. (And just possibly a bit grumpy. But you'd have to ask Them about that ...). I know, because I'm fantasising about beaches, and saunas, and hot tubs, and cold beers. But. I went out. The sun shone. And here's the proof: a photo I took from the end of our track.

I'd forgotten, quite how lovely it is.

The good news and the bad news

The good news: it's getting warmer. There's a slow trickle of water dripping from the metre long icicles hanging off the roof, and the trees have gone back to being brown instead of white. A gloriously sunny but bitingly cold day on Sunday turned the areas where we and the snow plough had previously cleared the snow into a lethal ice rink - beautiful it may have been, but crampons, ice axe and ropes were needed to make the descent from the front door to the workshop ...

On Monday night we hit minus 15 degrees, the kind of cold that sucks the breath out of you - but then the temperatures gradually began to rise, until they hit positive values for the first time in nearly a week last night, leading to ...

The bad news: we woke this morning to discover several centimetres of water swishing around L'Atelier's ground floor: a burst in the water pipe to the outside tap. The water had unfortunately decided that rather than spurting harmlessly onto the grass, it would be much more fun to do a double somersault and flow backwards into the kitchen wall, underneath the plasterboard and out onto the floor. Yes, that would be the same kitchen wall that I recently spent half my lifetime colourwashing ... so when John came leaping upstairs yelling "Burst! Burst! Kitchen! Water! Phone! Wall! Broom! Sweep! Mop! Now!" in his typically morning incoherent way I was not, as you might imagine, best pleased. It's amazing just how many damage limitation scenarios you can play through your brain while you're putting your socks on ...

But the good news: we hadn't yet laid the wooden floor. Truth be told, we haven't even bought it. Right now, it's an empty room. And miraculously, the walls seem to have escaped serious damage. And just as we were finishing the Broom! Sweep! Mop! routine, our lovely Perfectionist came haring down the track, blue lights metaphorically flashing, with the wherewithal to repair the pipe, a tool to make holes at the bottom of the plasterboard to help the insulation dry out, a dehumidifier, and his trademark bag of boulangerie goodies. 

Every home should have one.

Stock taking

Just recently I've started to get emails of the 'when do you think you might be ready to open' variety. I suspect what they really mean is 'come on - you can't still be renovating after all this time'. Well, er, yes, we are. But just to prove to you sceptics out there that we are actually doing something, here's a bit of a taste of where we've got to.

L'Atelier's bedroom started like this: bare stone walls, sound but tired oak beams, no window sills, no lighting to speak of and sockets fed by surface cable.

The room was rewired, then the hemp and lime went on. This was the first stage:

I took these pictures a few days ago: the hemp and lime is thoroughly dry, all the beams have been cleaned, treated and oiled, and we have beautiful chestnut window sills and skirting boards. All that's left to do here is to strip, stain and oil the floor.

The bathroom was just a grenier, albeit with good windows and a wooden floor. Work quickly started to convert it:

It's by no means finished - I still have to finish tiling the shower and part of the floor, strip, stain and oil the rest of the floor, and fix a glass shower screen. But it's on the way:

The hallway of La Petite Maison was encumbered by the smallest shower room in the world, suitable only for those with waif like figures. So we knocked it down.

Now it looks like this, which is what it should have looked like to begin with ...

I know I said I wouldn't do this but ... see that wall with the radiator on? I plastered that.

Each floor had two bedrooms which were actually too small to photograph properly. Or do much else in. We've knocked each pair into one bigger room; the downstairs room will be the salon, while the double height room upstairs is the bedroom, shown in these two pictures. Here you can still see the join ...

The new stairway going up to the mezzanine:

We're all taking a few days breathing space this week, then we've got a couple of builder-less months to get on with kitchen fitting, flooring, painting, lime washing, tiling and all the rest before they come back and we all attack the new dining room. But as The Perfectionist said today, it's not half bad for a builder, two counsellors and a guy who drives a pink van.

Desert tiling discs

My memories of particular times or events tend to be linked to two things: food, and music. Much to John's bemusement, I can recall salivatingly accurate details of what I ate on a particular holiday or cooked for friends - admittedly perhaps not entirely predictable behaviour from one who sometimes can't remember her own name. In the same way, hearing a particular piece of music transports me emotionally back to a time when it was important for whatever reason: for instance, every time I hear Barbra Streisand singing Run Wild, I'm straight back to 1981, the Civil Service College, and my first encounter group, where we played it incessantly for two weeks in the early hours of the morning ...

Over the last few weeks we've all taken to working to music for much of the day. Tentatively at first: Is this all right? Not too much? And then, as we began to discover that we enjoyed much of the same music, in what-the-hell-let's-turn-the-volume-up mode. More and more of our CD collection migrated down to the work space; The Perfectionist brought in his iPod dock (and - oh joy - left it here every night; what he doesn't know- yet! - is that come 7 o'clock I took it down to the huge and so far blissfully unfurnished gite space, kicked off my shoes, turned up the volume again, and danced ...).

Inevitably some bits of music 'stick' more than others: they're the ones that stop me in mid-tile, and it's those - mostly mine, a couple of The P's - that I guess will come to characterise this era of my life in years to come. And so here, with apologies to the BBC*, are my desert tiling discs ....

1. Funkadelic - Maggot Brain. Best guitar solo ever?

2. Gary Moore - Parisienne Walkways. Heart stopping, that moment when he holds the guitar note for ever ...

3. India.Arie - Ready for Love. Soul with soul.

4. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - God is in the House. Listen to the lyrics ...

5. Susheela Raman - Song to the Siren. Simply beautiful.

6. Schiller - Das Glockenspiel Schill Out Mix / System F - Insolation. End of day chillout trance.

7. Archie Shepp, Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) - Moniebah. Sensitive, intense, mellow sax and piano.

8. Geoffrey Oryema - Makambo. Close your eyes, play it loud.

and because I just can't leave this one out I'm awarding myself a bonus track:

9. Richard Wagner - Liebestod, Tristan und Isolde. As someone once wrote, listening to Tristan und Isolde without being grabbed by the throat and driven at least to the borders of insanity just ain't possible ...

* Desert Island Discs as been broadcast on the UK's BBC Radio 4 since 1942; guests are invited to choose eight pieces of music they would take with them to a desert island. The apalling pun is mine :-)

Sticking plaster

There's a lot of it about. Plaster, that is. It's

in every room.

on the floors.

on the stairs.

in the cupboards.

on the furniture.

wafting out of the windows.

on me.

on the grass.

in the car.

in the bed.

on my laptop.

in my wardrobe.

in my dinner.

and (fortunately) on the walls.

And there's nothing to be done about it. Zilch. You clean it up; it comes back. You clean it up again; it comes back again. (Where does it go in between times?). So there's only one thing to do. You shrug your shoulders, and let it be. Eventually (and you may have to take my word for this) you just laugh.

The Perfectionist was as good as his word and did teach me to plaster. On Day One, my brief was to plaster three walls of a former loo, now cupboard, clearly so that my hap-handed efforts would only ever be seen by me. No, I know you didn't say that, dear Perfectionist. You wouldn't. Dare. It was a true bastard of a job: not enough room to swing an edible dormouse, let alone manipulate a hawk and trowel in a meaningful fashion. But, in spite of my best efforts, the plaster went onto the walls, and actually it's not half bad. As in smooth and strokeable, with not too many dings or rough bits. On Day Two, I graduated to the hallway of La Petite Maison, and, well, let me just say that in England I once paid good money for worse work than that ...

It's all in the teaching, of course :-). But I also found that once the initial omigodimgoingtof*^!thisup terror was past, it was something I really enjoyed doing. While tiling is more of an intellectual exercise - a bit like a builders' sudoko - plastering is actually a very tactile, sensual experience. You can't plaster with your head. You need to feel the movement of the trowel across the wall; it's your body that knows when you've got it just right, and as with all such bodily experiences, when it flows it's a great sensation. And I discovered that, in the same way as cutting in when painting, trowelling the plaster on the out breath rather than the in breath is a Good Thing and much more likely to succeed.

And the best thing? Having to put all the plates down for two days. Now where did I put them?

Above all don't wobble

What do you do when there's not enough of you to go round?

project manager accountant cook therapist designer tiler gardener marketing manager sander personal shopper quantity surveyor budget bod decorator webmaster furniture restorer purchaser cleaner upper special effects coordinator networker hacker outer (infrequent) blogger .....

I'm plate spinning. And the last few weeks have been a bit difficult, to be honest. As usual at this kind of point in this kind of project, everything needs doing/buying/deciding at once: x can't be done until I've done y, y can't be done until I've sourced w, w can't be sourced until p has been done. And so on, ad infinitum. Each day begins, and ends, with a juggling of priorities, in a vain attempt to fit in with the needs of The Perfectionist's work, my work, and the bigger long term needs of the project itself. It's a bit like trying to cut a path with a machete through a jungle of competing demands; inevitably compromises have to be made, and nobody gets everything they want. At the same time, Life has to go on: eating, sleeping, washing clothes, dealing with potager gluts, maintaining something of a clear space to live in. Emails and blogs get written at midnight, other work gets fitted in somewhere between midnight and morning. Time with friends, out walking, in the garden ... mañana.

But.

Real progress is being made, day after day. What was just a twinkle in my eye (and on my plans) has been given shape, and life, and it works. A new timetable has been thrashed out with The Perfectionist for the last stage of the project, which gives us a bit more space - two whole months, in fact - to finish our work in the guest accommodation before he starts knocking a big hole in the library to connect it, finally, to the main house hallway.

We've started the finitions in L'Atelier d'Artiste: I'm ankle deep in tadelakt, paint, natural pigments, linseed oil, lime wash, tiles. Colours are appearing; the place is becoming a home.

I'm beginning to dare to believe that we might make our target of being ready to open by late spring next year.

Three peoples' shared hysteria about toomanythingstodoandnotenoughtime is often hysterically funny.

The potager seems to have thrived on the neglect we've thrown at it this year and has thrown more food at us than we've had any right to expect: there are kilos and kilos of sugo di tomate in the freezer and still 11 aubergines on the plants, we could open a shop to sell all the chilli peppers that we're getting, we're already eating parsnips and cavalo nero, we have 24 potimarron stored away for the winter and the same number of beetroot in the ground. Plus there's my pasteque - water melon; my first ever. I've grown it to make jam, a speciality of southern France. But I'm so attached to its round perfection that it hasn't so far graduated beyond its role as table decoration. (You think that's weird? When I was a girl, I could never, ever bring myself to eat chocolate rabbits, or bears, or ducks. Still can't, since you ask ...).

And then there's the weather. Summer here is just going on and on this year; today was hot (29 in the shade) and immaculate, with awesome clear golden light. Tonight we've eaten outside, in tee shirts.

And at the end of this week The Perfectionist is going to teach me to plaster. Can life really get any better?

You know you've got an attack of bricoitis when ...

The two of you pounce on the newly arrived Brico Depot catalogue and fight over who's going to read it with their cornflakes.

You can recite the names, dimensions, characteristics, qualities and prices of 276 shower trays, 198 taps, 17 sink wastes, 94 door handles, 8 shower doors (the only ones in the whole of France that (a) fit and (b) you like), 53 radiators, 148 floor boards and 7439 bathroom lights. From memory.

You read Maison et Travaux in bed. In fact it's all you do in bed.

Your calendar hasn't been turned over since March.

Your hands are multi coloured, multi textured, and covered in scars.

Your morning meditation consists of half an hour removing splinters.

You can discuss R values and U values as easily as once you talked about food, and you know by heart the cubic metreage of all your rooms, but you can't remember your phone number.

You no longer need to file your nails. The sandpaper does it for you.

You go out wearing your building clothes.

You never go out without a tape measure.

You seriously think about buying a white van.

You suddenly realise that it's nearly October and you haven't had a day off since the end of June.

You know all the staff at all the local brico outlets by name.

You buy fromage frais to make paint with, not to eat.

Your builder asks you to buy a buchon brut femelle, and you know what it is.

That old chestnut ...

When we arrived at Grillou two years ago, like most house buyers here we inherited a lot of Stuff, in our case mostly wood of one sort or another (oh, and a pony). Mounds of it, here, there and everywhere: wood for burning, wood for making steps and structures in the garden, old beams, old oak floorboards stashed away in the porcherie, bits of cut down trees, slices of oak tree 6 centimetres thick ... and then there was the chestnut.

The chestnut was obviously Important. It had a mention on the inventory that came attached to our buying contract, and was valued at 400 euros. It had been used by our predecessors as volige in the part of the barn roof that had already been relaid, and we assumed that we'd use the rest of it to finish the job. The Perfectionist, however, had other ideas: "Merde alors, you can't use it for that!" he spluttered. Or words to that effect. And set out to find a hundred and one other places where it could be mis en valeur, as they say here - a wonderful expression which translates roughly to showing it off to its best advantage.

Reader, he was right. It pains me to say so, but he (nearly) always is. Don't you just hate people who are right (nearly) as often as you are? Anyway, moving swiftly on ... what looked like a fairly unpromising, if large, pile has so far metamorphosed into, amongst other things, window sills, cladding for walls and cupboards, and skirting boards.

Part of the original pile. Not exactly promising, huh?

And Pink Van Man has revealed himself to be a bit of a woodworker, on the quiet. Well, not so quiet, actually, given that Grillou has been echoing with the sound of circular saws, planers and sanders of all description over the last fortnight or so. But he has a real feel for wood, and loves working with it. I do too, and for the last few days we've had a bit of a wood conveyor belt going on: he's been cutting, scribing and machine sanding the skirting boards, then passing them to me in my makeshift atelier (the garage) where I've been hand finishing and then oiling them with linseed oil - six coats so far and counting ...

In the atelier ...

Do you remember those magic colouring books that were all the rage hundreds of years ago, when I was nobbut a kid? You 'painted' the page with water, and a picture in different colours appeared, by magic. Well, oiling chestnut that's been really well weathered and then sanded is a bit like that; as soon as you wipe the oil onto the wood, the most amazing grain patterns appear, as if from nowhere. And it's the most beautiful, rich wood, too ...

Amazing grain

After oiling, and before

Now that sure as hell beats digging out hard core ...

Halfway house

We're builder-less. Having reached the halfway point in the main project, they've bogged off for the summer, bless their little cotton socks, leaving Grillou unaccustomedly quiet. I can honestly say that it's the first time in my life that I've actually missed my builders. And having four - or more - of us here every day for the last two months has just confirmed my feeling that this house really loves to have people in and around it. As, in fact, do I. Well, most of the time, anyway.

So in the absence of good company and exciting events like walls coming down there's nothing for it but to get on with the grafting. And this is where, much as I hate everybody else's smug, look-what-I've-done-aren't-I-clever blogs, I'm going to inflict a bit of one on you now. Just a tiny bit, I promise. If this offends you, look away now. But I've just done something I've never done before, and it's worked. I've laid a terrace, out of random stone.

Originally, John was going to take charge of all the outside work to create terraces and steps and paths and things while I acted as his labourer. But, well, you know how it is. Being anybody's labourer is not my strong point. I much prefer to be out there, leading from the front. John, meanwhile, is much more easy going and is quite happy to do things my way ... which is probably why he's tolerated living with me for longer than anyone else has, or would :-). So he's been overcoming a surprise phobia about mortar by manning the cement mixer, while I get to clamber around on my hands and knees laying screeds and trying to piece strangely shaped bits of stone together in such a way as they look as though they've always been there.

Here's the man himself, working hard over the cement mixer ...



The terrace, in progress ...



... and finished (well almost; I still have the jointing to do):



Not bad, eh?

There are unforeseen advantages to spending four days with your nose against the ground. One early morning (it was so hot that we had to start work at 6.30 to avoid the mortar going off before I could work with it) I encountered these two striped shield bugs in a compromising position on some parsley stalks:



And I made a surprising discovery about butterflies. They love cement. Every afternoon, as the temperature hit the late thirties, the pools of waste mortar on the ground would swarm with dabs of flying colour, including marbled whites, silver washed fritillaries, white admirals, clouded yellows, various coppers, blues, ringlets, and this gorgeous purple emperor:



Apparently, it's the minerals and salts in the cement that attract them. Bizarre but true. So if you want to attract butterflies to your garden, forget the buddleia. Just get the cement mixer out.

Remember, you read it here first.

Zen and the art of hemp and lime

Exciting things are happening right now in the huge first floor room that will become the bedroom/salon of L'Atelier, part of our guest accommodation. Nearly 50 square metres in size, with a ceiling height of over 5 metres and fantastic vast windows to two walls, set into the original barn openings, it was used by Grillou's previous owner as an artist's studio but was never completely finished: bare stone walls, basic wiring, halogen lighting, ventilation pipes from shower rooms and loos protruding into the room. It's a stunning space - it probably sold us the house - which needed something equally stunning doing to it. That something baffled me for quite some time.

Until, a year or so ago, I read an article in Maison et Travaux (my fave French doing-up-house magazine) about chanvre-chaux - hemp and lime plaster. I was hooked.

Hemp has a list of uses that would give most other plants an inferiority complex (did you know, for example, that the bodywork of the first Ford car was made from something called Hemp Plastic?), though it's in the arena of green building and renovation that it's really beginning to make its name. Mixed with lime, it creates a breathable, sculptable, warm, stone-wall-friendly, insulating plaster which is highly strokeable and has great character. As if all that weren't enough, research suggests that it's not just carbon neutral but negative: hemp absorbs a huge amount of CO2 as it's growing, and effectively sequestrates it in the walls: up to 50kg per square metre of hemp walling - much much more than the meagre CO2 emitted in the production of the lime.

Hemp has been used in building in France for many years, where it's widely grown (archaeologists have reputedly found a sixth century hemp-reinforced bridge), and is gathering quite a following now in Ireland too; sadly, I'd never really come across its use in England, where it would have so suited our cold, hard Norfolk flint walls. Sigh. French eco-builders have adopted hemp and lime in a big way; most often used in new-builds (where it can be used in almost every part of the construction, including foundations and floors, using a material known as 'hempcrete'), it's just beginning to be used in our kind of 'retro-fit' restoration.

Given all that, how could I even think about using anything else? A chance encounter with our charming and good looking Perfectionist (there - will that do? Just knock it off the bill ...), much research and many conversations later, and we were away. And last Wednesday, the process began. I don't know which of us is more excited by it .... Anyway, here goes the week, in pictures.

Our builders' merchant manages, somehow, to squeeze the tipper lorry into the tinest space to deliver over 6 tonnes of sand ...

... and uses an amazing amount of skill to drop two pallets of lime, and (narrowly, and fortunately) miss the telephone wire:

Phew. Just half an hour after the delivery, the long-awaited process begins. Our three guys are all going full pelt and flat out. One is The Mixer: his job is to keep two cement mixers going simultaneously, the contents of which are transferred into buckets ...

... then winched up to the first floor by The Wincher:

The first stage is to apply a coat of lime render to the bare stone walls, to prepare them for receiving the hemp plaster. Because of the sheer scale of this job, this (together with the initial coats of hemp plaster) is being sprayed, under pressure, onto the stone walls to make sure that all the gaps between the stones are completely filled. This is naturally the task of The Perfectionist, although The Wincher makes sure he gets a bit of a look in here too. A little non-human assistance is required as well, however ...

The final sprayed coat of hemp plaster is then 'scratched' in preparation to receive the finishing coats next week:

Someone described the application of hemp and lime as being a bit like trowelling tuna mayonnaise onto walls ... Hmm. Moving swiftly on ... look at these lovely rounded corners:

Two and a half days in, and two thirds of the walls are now 'scratched' and ready for their finishing coats. The sun shone relentlessly; the temperature hovered around 30 degrees in the shade. The guys worked from 8.15 to 6pm, with just a couple of breaks, while we also sweated digging out the dining terrace just outside and shifting hundreds of big stones. They'll no doubt think I've completely lost it for saying this, but there were moments - hours - when the task - hard, hot and dirty though it is - became a kind of dance; when the rhythm took over; when all three were lost in total awareness of what they were doing; when the process was all.

Zen moments.