The Longest Day ....

"It's not flowing very fast is it?"

In fact the driver of the mixer was on our step ladder with our spade trying to persuade a reluctant 7 cubic metres of chape (screed) to run out of the big mixing drum. What had arrived wasn't what either Kevin or we had expected (we thought we were getting a liquid screed like the subfloor that had been laid in 45 minutes back in November). We weren't set up for this chape traditionelle that had to be laid by hand and was clearly going to take a long time, worse it wasn't auto-nivellent (self-levelling) so it would have to be trowelled out to level.

Our not very liquid chape

Kevin and Adam set to to begin to lay the chape and Steve, our electrician arrived soon after to re-test the underfloor heating system - this needs to be done after the floor has been laid over the cables and I'd recklessly said to Steve that we should have finished by 10am. Steve kindly rolled his sleeves up and joined the team laying the chape, By lunchtime we had about half the floor done but the chape was going off rapidly so it was decided to cut our losses and abandon about a third of the chape unlaid and finish the work on another day.

L to R: Adam, Tim, Steve working on the Salon-Sejour floor

Kevin and Keith working on the cellier floor

Adam finishing the Salon-Sejour floor

After six hours of intense work Kevin must have been looking forward to something a bit easier - an afternoon of digging out a trench from the lean-to up to the road to carry our new underground electric supply. Unfortunately after 2 metres he found our water supply pipe with his bucket and the trench started to rapidly fill up with water. Our supply has a stopcock out in the road that only Veolia have a key to so we had to put in a call for them to turn off the supply. Cue a farcical sequence of events as one Veolia van arrived and, despite running up and down the verge several times with a metal detector, the technician failed to find our stopcock. He called out un mec who "knew the area" so quickly there were two Veolia vans on our drive.

The mec couldn't find the stopcock either despite increasingly frantic digging and hammering. Eventually they did succeed in turning off our neighbour Lucien's water supply, meanwhile Barbara was in the ditch pumping out the water:

Finally the stopcock was located and, after yet another delay when the key wouldn't fit, Noah's flood was finally averted and the leak repaired.

A difficult and stressful day - surely one of us must have walked under a ladder that morning .....