A little bit of a May, June & July round up!

As I’ve been a little bit slack with my posts I’ve figured the best way to get up to speed is with a few monthly round ups... Here goes nothin!

OK, so let's start with May….

This month went by so fast! The first couple of weeks back we were fully immersed in trying to move inside (see previous post). We were then off to Francia for a wedding of one of my oldest friends. It was so lovely being able to drive over the border so easily, we packed the car up, popped the dog in the back and headed straight to Biarritz. The journey took us around 4 hours in the end and was another reminder to one of the many perks of being situated along one of our favourite coastlines, we do however need to brush up on our French as ours is how you say? Petit basic... After an incredible weekend of partying and catching up with old friends, we spent a couple more days exploring Mimizan with a stop off in St Jean de luz on our way home before heading back to the build.

Once home we jumped straight into brick laying. Although most of the walls were complete when we purchased the house there were a couple up in the loft that needed finishing, along with a gap on the ground floor that had been left for access between the two properties and for a down pipe to be fitted. We decided to start with the ground floor, assuming this would be a quick job (ha!) quickly realising, once again, assumptions are for fools and no surprise it, of course, was not a straight forward job, with a random part needing to be ordered that took two weeks to arrive, we moved our attention up into the loft…

Working in the dark ain't so smart...

This takes us into June, the loft job was a very good example of how to make life harder for yourself than it needs to be… It started off pretty strong, some good music on and a good positive attitude from the both of us, after watching a couple of YouTube videos we were all set to get the job done! Very fortunately for us all these walls had already been started so keeping them straight wasn’t too tricky, our first job was a pretty straightforward task of completing the last third of a well-built wall up to the ceiling and we managed fairly well, granted we maybe dropped a tad more cement on the floor than we would have liked but it was still a success in our eyes... not to mention the fallen cement could all be swept up anyway, so no-one really needed to know. We then moved on to the next two walls, these are in the back side of the loft - ie the ones without much sunlight... it was also hot, like really really hot. Put a couple of people up in a hot dark loft trying to learn new skills and turns out it can be quite explosive…who knew?! After one too many blow ups at each other we eventually took a breather, realised we didn’t have to struggle through in the dark and on day three bought a light upstairs with us, surprisingly once we could actually see what we were doing the majority of the rage cleared, after a week from hell we finished the final wall and took ourselves on a nice trip to the bathroom store to cheer us up!

Oh my god, how terrible are bathroom stores?! There’s no prices on anything, you’re trying to differentiate between three identical toilets and supposed to have an opinion on which you prefer, whilst also being blinded by the brightest lights known to man. This was not as fun as I had imagined it would be, turns out picking a bathroom is nothing like liking a load of pictures on instagram of bathroom inspo. Our first visit was pretty much a total disaster, I thought I knew what I wanted but actually did not have single clue, Brett was trying his very best to translate what “vibe” I was going for but I think it all got lost in translation and we ended up leaving pretty overwhelmed and with a couple of brochures of things we couldn’t afford. Second trip we went with a much more specific goal in mind and by the third maybe fourth trip we finally made our minds up and ordered the lot!

So these tasks, along with plumbing in the down-pipe and bricking up the access between the two properties were the main house bits we got finished in June - they ended up taking us nearly the whole month and after one particularly stressful morning of work we decided to pack up our things early and head down to the beach with Goose to blow off some steam…On our drive home we spotted a farmer walking in the middle of the road on a blind corner, we thought this was odd so pulled over and asked if he was ok, although he smiled and said he was absolutely fine, we quickly realised he had a huge gash on the side of his head and stunk of diesel…turns out his tractor had overturned and he had somehow cut his head. Immediately we got him into the car and asked him where he lived, he mentioned a village that Brett knew from some of our bike rides and we drove him home. This was one of those surreal moments where you don’t quite realise what’s happening until the moments passed. We drove for about 20 minutes up a steep hill to get him back, bearing in mind he was initially planning to walk this distance… a pretty terrifying thought… once reaching his house we had let ourselves get caught up in his laid back attitude and after he assured us he was fine and he’d have someone to help him out, he waved us goodbye gifting us with a handful of his homegrown produce that he wouldn’t let us leave without taking. On our way back we spotted a lady in the closest village and asked her if she knew of the gentleman and wether she’d mind popping in to make sure he was ok, she said she knew who we were talking about and would head over right away. Only once we got home and decompressed did we start to realise that we were crazy, in what world do you pick someone up with a clear head injury and just drop them off at home and take their cauliflower?! We had been so convinced by his lack of urgency and probably were a little delusional ourselves from a hard weeks work that it took us a second to find our common sense, just as I was about to suggest to Brett to drive back, he already had the car keys in his hand. As Brett arrived the lady we had spoken to earlier was just leaving, apparently she had battled with him to get him to the local a&e where he had 7 stitches put in his head! Albert (the man himself) was so grateful to Brett and couldn’t believe we had stopped for him - convinced others would have driven on - he had no memory of the actual accident but had full recollection of our car journey and conversation, arriving at our doorstep a week later with some more fresh veg for us (the tastiest onions we’ve ever had) and a whole lot of gratitude. In a funnier turn of events, whilst catching up outside - two of our neighbours come out to find out how their buddy Albert knows the two newbie English couple! They had known him since childhood and had both heard of the incident but had no idea we’d been the ones to pick him up from the side of the road. News travels fast in Asturias!

So that was June… I didn’t realise I had so much to say so I think I’ll save the July and garden update for next week’s post, spoiler alert but Brett’s got a part time job now, so I’m going to try to be more consistent with the website, even if it’s just me reading them back, I know I’ll appreciate them one day to remember what we got up too!

Catch ya next time, Ellie x