Renovation Project - Who's garden is it anyway?

Renovation Project - Who's garden is it anyway?

Well its back to the bathroom today which means more insulation and plaster board, but for some reason we keep getting distracted at the moment, first is an e-mail from a friend who is selling a bed, this is new, beautiful and is a king-size, I’m gutted that it is out of our price range. We have to keep a tight rein on our budget, we only have a limited amount of money, but it’s a king-size and I want it so much.

We give our friend a call and say no but ask if she can call the wood delivery and arrange for a delivery as soon as possible.  She calls back and says they will be here in the next half an hour (or so, this is France and time frames are very different here) the wood turns up about an hour later.

We go out to look for the log delivery every so often and find a trailer full of garden rubbish, we have no idea who this belongs to or where it has come from, we also look at the sheds at the bottom of the garden and wonder who these belong too, we notice one has a door number and we are not sure if this was actually a house at some point. One thing to bear in mind with French properties is that the gardens do not always belong to the house next to them, so anybody could own this shed and some of the garden!

We have markers for our garden, and we own half of the land behind the house, next door owns the other half (or so we believe) the gardens span 3 houses, but the third house has no garden. This was something we came across when looking for a house, we always stated that we wanted a good size garden and all of the houses had good sized gardens, but sometimes the gardens were down the road and around the corner! If you are buying a house here always make sure the garden is attached to the house, and if you see a garden attached to the house make sure that it is yours and not a neighbours!

At some point we will find out who owns them so that we can either buy them and knock them down or at least paint them

It is a massive trailer load again and john has the fun of wheel barrowing it across the garden and I have the fun of carrying a tonne of logs down a flight of stone steps and then piling it up again in the barn, we have about 8 barrow loads left as the sky changes colour, the heat is on, will we do it before the heavens open? We do, the last few bits are brought in as the deluge comes down.

I am dying now, my arms feel like lead, but we do have some fantastic logs for the fire!

We continue with a bit of work on the middle floor, I am clearing all of the spare wood from the room and john continues with some more plaster board but at one point he feels a twinge, the twinge begins to hurt, we do not need this, John with a bad back is not good, with this much work to do.

He tries a bath to see if it eases, but he is not sure if it is a back ache or whether he is just unwell. Keep your fingers crossed that he is just poorly (I am sympathetic really!)