24/03/2013

Day 365 since the shipwreck. The daily ritual of scanning the horizon for a passing ship had the same result; emptiness was again the norm. Sighing, I wandered back up the beach to my crude bamboo shelter, and passed the time by sorting my fish scale collection according to size and colour.

Oops, wrong scene… I think the French countryside is getting to me.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been here a year today. I looked again at my “To Do” list, feeling certain that we hadn’t done that much over the past year. But it’s been reassuring to see that there are a lot of entries with lines scratched through them.

Here are just a few:
Make house less damp by installing gutters – check.
Install a rainwater recovery system for watering the garden in summer – check.
Build a wood shed to store all our firewood – check.
Have a borehole installed – check.
Install a cold water supply to the house to replace the rusty water from the well – check.
Build a thermal store – check.
Install new double-glazed doors and windows to help with keeping the house warm in winter – check.
Upgrade the outdated electricity wiring – well, the kitchen is done. And the lounge. Haven’t started on the bedroom yet, but at least all the antique fuses have been replaced with proper circuit breakers and a proper earth system with lightning protection has been installed. So I think that qualifies as a check.
Cure the problem we experienced with mould – check.
Stop the pond from encroaching into the garden by repairing the erosion at the edges – nearly complete. Unfortunately with all the rain we’ve had, the pond is now full, so it will need to wait until it dries out a bit before I can finalise this job. I did however manage to dig a trench from the pond to one of the property’s drainage ditches so that an overflow pipe could be installed.
Start a website about the project – check.

Of course, like all lists, ours just keeps growing, no matter how many items are crossed out! So it looks like year 2 will be just as busy. Hopefully I can talk LSS into adding a couple of gardening pages to the main site.

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