A much shorter blog this week (perhaps you will be relieved to hear!)
As we have not been hosting guests this week we have been able to progress our garage project albeit slowly while we dodge in and out of the spring-like showers.
At the start of the week I had only managed to dig 2 trenches for the back wall – the longest of them all at just over 15 metres – and one side wall. Now, I have managed to dig trenches for all of the walls and it has become obvious just how large the building is going to be!
Our instructions to the architect was to have spaces for 4 cars and to build it with the ability to garage large SUV / people carrier type cars. The 2 outer bays will be fully enclosed and the inner 2 will be open with a couple of supporting posts in the centre.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog the digging has been tougher than I had anticipated which is why it has taken me much longer than I had anticipated but I was determined to do it myself rather than get a mini-digger in to assist.
During the digging one of our neighbours told us that there used to be a large garage / hangar type building exactly where we have planning permission to build ours! Which, while frustrating that it is not there now and we are replacing it, it does explain why so much of the area had such a compacted layer of gravel and granite chippings underneath the very thin layer of top soil which was mostly a tangled mass of roots.
Having managed to smash through that the base soil is a very heavy, and again very compacted, clay which needed my pick axe to break through as there was no way the spade would dig it intertwined with large roots from the trees we had felled last December and lots of lumps of (what I think was) quartz and slate making the job even harder.
Unfortunately what I have not done is take any photos to share with you. To be fair they are only trenches so are not especially photogenic, and, it has been difficult to get anything that shows the scale and extent of the earthworks. I will however bore you with many pictures as we come out of the ground which we are hoping to start later this month (is it really October already?!) or early November.
I also mentioned in last week’s blog, following the annual Couchon Grillé, that Saint Cadou is a hugely lively little village considering how rural and remote it is and this week has seen another festival take place.
As well as a very active comité de fêtes there is a small association called Assomniak which was set up 10 years ago by the (then) ‘youth’ of the village to run music concerts and festivals. In the past year they have raised funds to buy and convert an agricultural hangar to act as a base for cultural activities and classes etc. Last night they held their 1st anniversary party in the hangar.
What they have achieved is amazing considering the state of the building and ‘garden’ when they bought it and last night they ran a very professional festival which attracted hundreds of people from around Brittany and had 10 different bands playing in the garden. We understand this will become an annual event around the first weekend of October each year. Definitely one for those who want to experience real Breton culture during their visit.
Salut.