Sunday 17 November – Raining champions

My last blog, 2 weeks ago, said that I was officially bored with the weather.  Unfortunately that boredom has become a deep despondency as we have had no let up since – hence no blog last week and no photos this week.

While we haven’t had Fishlake levels of ground water, and we feel deeply sympathetic to those people who have actually suffered losses in the floods, there has not been a single day in the last 2 weeks when it hasn’t rained at some point.  We know this is Brittany, and so heavily impacted by the Atlantic lows, but there comes a point when you have to hope for a break.  The last week has been so damp that even our tree surgeon hasn’t been back.

As a result these weeks have been amongst the least productive since we arrived here and the outside jobs which I want to do remain undone!

We are achieving a number of smaller jobs that are useful to get done, or are reacting to problems that come up!  For example I spent most of this morning dismantling a dishwasher that had decided to stop working to try and persuade it to function.  Fingers crossed I have fixed it.  We have added a few things to the decoration in Priory and done a lot of planning and preparation for the spring work.

One significant thing we have achieved is choosing (easy) and buying (painful) the new kitchen that we will have installed.  We decided to use the same kitchen that we installed in Granary and Hayloft in our first few months as we like its style and it has proved to be fairly resilient.

We visited the shop where we bought it in February 2015, which has kept the display that Dave posed in 4½ years ago ever since, to see that the range is going to be discontinued in 2 weeks!  It must have been fate.  So we have now bought all the new units and the work is starting to feel very real – and very exciting.  We will of course update in my blogs each week as we do it.

Dave has continued to do a lot of good work on our website so you may have seen lots of change there – including, hopefully, in the speed that it loads onto your tablets and phones.  And he continues to make Christmas treats and chutneys which makes the house smell good too.

There does, finally, appear to be a break in the daily rainfall next week (depending on which of the myriad of weather websites we obsessively look at is to be believed) which may mean we can actually get things done outside – including possibly cutting the jungle which our lawns have become.  We’ll let you know!

Salut.