The French home of Terry & Sharon Blom

and their two dogs; Teddy and Freddie.

Hi there, this is the online diary for our extended holiday in sunny France.

The house is shown here just before Christmas while Marg, Brian and Kath were staying.

Our latest visit to the house started in early November. The house in England is rented out for six months so we are here for a while!

Visitors since then have been Mike and Carol Higgins, Marg and Brian Holson, Auntie Kath, Paul Barnett, Sophie and Ben. Matt, Abby and Jake Blom are due to arrive on February 3rd. It's Matt's bithday on Feb 5th and Abby's on the 8th.

It has been a non-stop, hectic time as we have a never ending list of jobs to do. I am even multi-tasking! One of the main jobs was to lay foundations for a large shed to house a sit-on tractor mower. We needed the mower so that we could dispense with the services of Andrews Paysage, nice man that Andrew is, he was becoming very expensive. We have started on the foundations but stopped because of the weather. Just at that time Sharon spotted an advert for a mower, which we bought (photo to follow) it even has headlights! Because the shed for the mower is not built we had to clear out the barn - many, many trips to the dechetterie later, the barn is spick and span and is now home to the mower.

Today ( Jan 19th) we have been working on the ceiling in the salon. Late last summer, Justin plasterboarded the ceiling. It now needs the joints taping, filling and painting. I have just finished the taping and first coat of the enduit filler.

Tonight we are going to our first French classes in a town called Quibou (pronounced Kiboo), about 5k from here. We met the teacher (Sally) on Tuesday night in the Salle de Fêtes in Notre Dame de Cenilly where there was the first meeting for the summer pagent - "Le soir où les loups brûlèrent le diable" which will be a masive four day event showing the history of Normandy. Sally is an English lady, been in France for 13 years and works at the same school as Yves and Véronique (our neighbours) teaching English.

I will let you know how we got on in the next episode.