It got very cold very quickly this weekend. The mist started rising in all the fields.

They have smoothed the edges of the windows and embedded the hinges for the shutters.

The have managed to finish the window in the kitchen.

View of the barn. The windows and doors man is coming this week to measure up. They will take about 3 weeks to make the doors/windows and shutters, so we are still on target for having the place water tight before Chrismas

We will be keeping the pumps for the geothermal heating in the pig sheds. Once the barn is finished and we can find some more money, we may convert the pig sheds into a self contained appartment, with patio doors on the end wall (where the gap under the roof is now)

pig sheds are rendered.

We need to replace the right hand beam on the doorway and the parallel beam on the right of the doorway.

More piping - this is for all of the electrics and water that need to go round the building.

Pipes - no idea what they are for.

The salon is looking HUGE. (wall on the left should be straightened up by the end of the week...)

Standing in the salon, looking at where the divider between the dining room and salon will go. We are thinking to create an archway between the two. The walls of the barn are very thin, so we will have to create an inner wall and insulate between the two.

The door to the third bedroom (at the far end of this room) needs to be raised as it is getting smaller and smaller due to the increased floor height. It's being raised another foot or so.

The main electric cables made it into the floor.

This is one of the scariest things I have heard so far - this week the builders will be acro-propping the new roof up above this slanting wall, knocking out it's supporting bricks and straigtening it up by pulling the entire thing from the bottom with a tractor so that it is vertical. I do not want to be there when they do this.....

The wheelbarrows used to lay the entire floor. Glad I didn't have to do that...

The back wall of the master bedroom. This wall is very thin so we are going to box it in (we think)

looking up at the roof in the master bedroom. The beams will be kept and left in place. Boards will be put over the beams and then insulated on top.

Standing in the master bedroom looking towards the en-suites. The doorway on the left will be converted to be a window in the bathroom.

Standing on the back wall of the master bedroom, looking over the en-suites towards the corridor, which will run alongside the columnbage in the background.

looking over where the en-suites for the master bedroom and bedroom2 will be towards the back wall of the master bedroom.

We are back in France. All of the concrete sub-floor is now down. Another layer of concrete will go down next (40mm) which will contain all of the electrics so we don't have to completely wreck the walls. Once that is down and dry, the underfloor heating pipes will go down and then finally the tiles.

The concrete is down!!!

bedroom 2 now has a floor!

The concrete has been poured in the kitchen area! looking good.

big concrete making machine arrives for the floors.

pipes for the bathrooms.

The waste and water pipes in the en-suite bathrooms for the master bedroom & bedroom2. i can't quite fathom why the two on the left are there. One is for the bath....

Floor ready to be concreted in bedroom 2. you can see the waste/water pipes for the en-suite off bedroom 3 in the background.

The builders have re-instated the door from the garage out to the pool area.

The new patio will be concreted in the next couple of days...

Comet investigates the new patio area

The waterproof membrane has gone down in the barn, the main waste pipes are in and the steel is down. next step concrete!

These are the tiles we are really thinking about for the barn floor throughout the house - we are having geothermal heating (still can't figure out how it works) so are limited to having engineered wooden floors only. These are really expensive and I don't like them compared to real wood. Tiles it is!

These tiles are really nice too! I found somewhere in London that can import them to France direct from Morocco called Habibi Interiors (www.habibi-interiors.com)

We loved the tiles at our hotel and are considering flooring the house in these rather than in wood as we first thought. We were supposed to be relaxing though so cancelled our trip to the tile makers in Marrakech.

Just for good luck we bought one of these - not exactly sure what they are called, but it will create a good divider between somewhere and somewhere else in the house.

We bought 4 of these chairs, well I hope we bought the chairs, and not just pictures of chairs. who knows. Allegedly all of this stuff will be delivered directly to our friend Beverley in France. who knows. That IS what Barclaycard is for though!

oh, we bought a ceramic inlaid table too - not this one but similar. Kitchen for this I think.

yet more mirror frames, these one are larger than the others. I am sure we'll find somewhere to put them.

More mirror frames - not sure where these will go yet - bedrooms are likely candidates at the mo.

wrought iron mirror frames - 6 of these - for the hallway

uplighters - 10 of these - they will go into the bedrooms.

so we went to Morocco, back to Marrakech. We just happened to stumble into the souks (honestly) and bought a pile of stuff for the barn. Some laterns for the outside of the doors. We bought 8 of these