Dordogne Retreat - a farmhouse tale

Caught these two 'at it' in the garden........

Snakes in Dordogne - 28 June 2010 from Mark Johnson on Vimeo.

The snakes have been confirmed as being Western Whip snakes. Found a very useful website here.

The first few days of the trip it rained most of the time, this visually reminded me that while the underground pipes had been installed for a surface drain (to stop the stream that runs down the side of the house during heavy rain) we had not installed it. After a trip to the brico an afternoon was spent installing the drain, complete with a re-enforced concrete footing!

Of course we have no idea if it works correctly as not a drop of rain fell after installation!

The area around the pond was becoming overshadowed by a large sycamore tree and the smaller trees were suffering due to a lack of light once leaves were on the trees. So 'Mr Stihl' was brought out and a few minutes later the problem had been dealt with. Tree felling is in two distinct halves - the pleasure and skill in felling the tree quickly and efficiently where you want it, followed by the time consuming tidying up of area afterwards! However this was all done in an hour or so.....

The old barn walls have been covered with ivy and other climbing, clinging, destructive weeds (plants is far too kind) since we bought the house. The smaller of the two remaining walls was uncovered and capped with a temporary concrete top a year or two ago. Not sure of what to do first on this trip I thought that the reward of clearly seeing what I had achieved would be motivational and worth the effort.

Before:

Two hours later:

Two more hours:

Three more hours:

So all that is needed now is a little concrete on the top to stop further damage and a big pointing job. Need the extended crew for that!

The pleasure of arriving on this trip was slightly reduced when I spotted a hole in the roof of one of the outbuildings. A quick investigation showed that the timber battons had slipped as the nails holding them in place had rusted through. 

Of course once I got up on the scaffold tower to have a closer look we had to strip back quite a large area...

This was however one of those jobs that went to plan and only a couple of hours later new battons had been nailed in place (you just have to love Paslode nail guns!) and the tiles replaced. I was worried that my tiles would not be straight, they are, it's just thr rest of the roof that isn't.

The pond was extremely low but this did give us the opportunity to wade in and clean out a lot of vegetation and muck. It was another very dry summer so we hope this was the cause and not a problem with source.

 The chainsaw was used to clear some of the trees around the pond enabling us to build up a wood suply for the fire in a couple of years once it has dried out.

 The two breeze blocks on end show the width of the proposed 3 bay garage! This is more of a dream than a plan at the moment but you do have to think about what could be done.