Tristan's new bed

Premiere nuit dans le nouveau "grand" lit.

Il est la dessous ....
Et la nouvelle porte de notre chambre, montée Vendredi

Tristan turns 2!

Yes in amongst the chaos Tristan decided to have a birthday!

We couldn't just let the occasion slip by, so we decided to throw a small party. Given the mess and temperature we split the difference with Guy Fawkes and did a firework and bonfire theme (also to help with wood disposal and heating!)

With the mess everywhere we could be a bit more creative painting the walls and floors (this is the kitchen!)

I did a firework cake (very difficult as I didn't have a rollingpin or icing sugar)!

Tristan dancing - please not the large amount of jumpers and coats very derigour at our house(not a pretty frock in sight!)

The bonfire was great not keast because Manu put petrol on it and got a fire ball in his face which had a very epilatory effect (think no hair on one arm, eye brows and lashes about 1mm long and hairline having receded a lot!).

Tristan using a sparkler. He enjoyed the fireworks (also when we took him to a display the week before).No this is one of his girfriends coats it was too cold to be fussy!

This is Tristan on his actual brithday. He also sang happy birthday to himself for about 5 days, and is still a bit miffed when its anyone elses turn for ;his' song or to unwrap presents.

Kitchen part 1

So this is the future kitchen.

A wall needed to be knocked down (this is looking from the erm 'kitchen' into the 'diner') which gave us lots of 'may pole' type opportunities and also the removal people the chance to say because of health and safety they wouldn't go in any of the back 3 rooms. Cowards!

This is the wall gone and the heating pipes (roll on 3rd of December when we will have heating!)

Please note that there was a boarded up hole - just to add to the general draftiness of the house. Also that the whole floor has had to be dug-up as there wasn't any damp-proof lining. Tristan loved it though as he's keen on digging and we'd just send him to play in the foundations! I wonder what future generations will make of his sweets and toys that are hidden there!

The ceiling also fell down (Manu has learnt not to tug on bits of wallpaper now. It all needed to be re-plasterboarded (thta's 3 ceilings out of 4!).

This is the kitchen with cement on the floor - unfortunately it didn't work the first time so we had twice as long of pretending to be pirates and walking across planks inorder to access our makeshift kitchen at the back!

These are the tiles just gone down (note that there is now a window instead of the boards

This is the kitchen as of today (apparently there's about another week to go on it - yep I'm tempting fate!).

Scary sights

Ok, where do we begin.. the 6 week absence from the blog (when lets face it, there's a lot we could be saying!) gives you some idea about the state of the electricity!

What this is about though is the more visible stuff - wall destruction here from our first 3 weeks.

This was a wall at the top of the stairs:

Our downstairs loo which had been leaking for so many years the joists and floorboards needed to be replaced (the rooms still looks like this):

Widening the door into our bedroom

Cutting a new door into Tristan's bedroom

We were breathing red dust for weeks (its like living on mars in so many ways!) Anyway, there's much more scary stuff to follow!