Renovation Project - A cheval steak anybody????

Renovation Project - A cheval steak anybody????

The car is full of rubbish so we decide to go to the dechetterie on the way to Quimper, unfortunately we didn’t check the time as we left, it is just after 12 noon, which means its lunch time, the dechetterie is shut!

This means that we have the choice of driving with a car full of rubbish or going home and unloading, by which time the dechetterie will be ready to reopen! We decide to just take one of the still assembled cupboards out of the car, when we are driving back we pass the local workers restaurant and there are no cars or lorries there, we suddenly panic about whether there is another bank holiday, I call friends to check and no, this time it is closed because it is August!

In France (well rural France) August is the main summer holiday and many places will close down for a few weeks, August is not a good time to arrange for deliveries, work or pretty much anything really.

We head off to Quimper again and the weather is lovely, once there we realise August is also the time for tourists and cannot find anywhere to park, by the time we park and find a nice restaurant, I really don’t feel very relaxed, John moaning about why we are going to a tourist hotspot on a busy afternoon, really did not improve things.

We find a lovely restaurant and sit down, we look at the menu and see cheval, this is cheaper than the steak or even the burgers, so John decides to try it, it comes looking like 2 burgers and to be honest it tastes very similar to beef. We have to take a picture of our first cheval dinner (well not mine I had a French version of a tuna melt!).

But at least we know that cheval (and I’m sure you have guessed what cheval is by now!) is quite nice and we can order it at any restaurant, I’m counting in my head now how many of my horsey friends are going to be very upset when they read this, but as the saying goes “when in Rome...”

We finish lunch and head over to the shop for the tiles, I manage to ask for what we want, but they do not have enough, we find another but it is end of line and just as we are about to give up, find another one, this they have in stock.

We were looking for a general colour, but price was most important, what we did realise was that the tiles are not arranged in price brackets so you can have 10 euro tiles mixed in with 50 euro tiles, this means that you have to look through every one, not just in a certain area.

The guy working was extremely helpful, and again his English was much better than my French, and for some reason today I could not say the number 16, I had to keep asking for dix et six, not good but it got us what we wanted.

We buy all of our adhesive and grout and we are ready to go, we just have to pile it all on top of the rubbish in the car (we never found a dechetterie between home and Quimper)