Sunday 01 September – Already Autumn

I can’t believe that it is already September and so we have begun meteorological autumn today.  Thankfully during our time in France, September seems to bring warm and dry weather, at least during the days, and the longer it takes for the evenings and nights to cool off the better.

Having made it to September, I have succeeded in putting the garage clearance off for as long as I could – although this wasn’t a deliberate or conscious decision.  This week however I have, finally, been clearing out the bays and moving wood into the, recently recovered, serre or my, recently completed, chimenea wood store.

Last week I promised some images of the new wood store, and you may recall from an earlier blog that we are trying to create a Moroccan / Arabic style to our terrace as we had attempted to do when we lived in London.  In our minds, and as a sort of homage to Majorelle gardens in Marrakech, this means bold colours especially blues and yellows which has led to our store looking quite striking now that it is complete!

We wanted a wood shed on the terrace as a ready-use store for our chimenea, which, I may have mentioned before, I really love!!  With all the wood we have around the place at present some is old and rotten so wouldn’t be any real use in the wood burning stoves to heat the houses, and some we wouldn’t want to risk keeping inside because of the wood and possible insects.

With the large blue pots we bought a couple of weeks ago now planted with some lovely bright plants to lighten things, our terrace is starting (4½ years after moving in) to look a little like how we want it!  We have lots of other ideas and thoughts for additional things but they can wait for now – plenty of other things to do first.

The major thing is the garage.  You may recall that we had erected our serre a few weeks back but the cover was nearly blown off in a storm.  Thankfully we were able to recover it and re-secured it with additional bungees and straps and now we are able to start filling it.  You can see in the picture how well the grass has started to grow on the new smaller slope alongside Stréat al Louarn – so much that I gave it a first mow this week.

The principal idea is to log the wood currently piled in the old veg patch and store it in the serre to dry and season.  However, it also gives us additional space to store the large amount of wood currently in the garage bays.  Much of this are off cuts from the garage and man shed builds which, rather than move into the serre whole, I am splitting into kindling prior to storing. We have many months’ worth and it is taking longer than I’d hoped but I think worth doing this way.

In the short term, as ever, there will be an element of shuffling things between spaces but, when I take a number of things to the déchèterie next week that will further help clear the bays although it may take a few weeks yet.

We have recently said goodbye to some lovely guests who have been kind enough to leave us glowing reviews on Trip Advisor that I thought I’d share with you as we’re quite pleased with them.

My Dad and his wife arrived with us yesterday for a few days stay although it shouldn’t prevent me progressing the work … You’ll see next week!

À bientôt.