At the beginning of December we finally started some work on the barn!! We had all the earth dug away from the back of the barn to bring the ground level with the front. We can now leave the back wall to dry out and we can also put in drainage. As you can see from these before and after photos a lot of earth was moved. We used all the topsoil by putting on the garden to level it. At the moment it’s left us with a mud bath but in the spring we’ll get it ploughed and then seed it again.

It’s a shame that you can’t make it out clearly but this is actually Simon having a go with Gille’s (The man who did our earthworks) 20 ton digger. He frowned a lot whilst he was concentrating hard, but when he’d finished you should have seen the grin on his face!!

Well from one extreme to another. After our relaxing break in the autumn sunshine of Spain to the opposite the heaviest snowfall that either Simon or I can ever remember (except skiing holidays of course). This is a photo of Archie just to show how deep the snow was by the fact that you can’t see his welly’s at all!!

This is our garden from near our house. We felt it was particularly pretty this year as the snow stayed on the branches for all four days making it seem like a real winter wonderland.

This is Conor whizzing down the road near our friends’ house. We (somewhat stupidly) decided on the first morning of heavy snow that walking to our friends’ house was a good idea. With hindsight…walking in deep snow pulling two young boys in their sledges for two miles probably was a little bit too much like Scott of the Antarctics' expedition!! After a warming pot of tea and cake we ventured out again with our friends Kevin and Steve for a quick sledging session and then left them in their warm sitting room with log burning stove for the long slog home!. Well, we certainly burnt off any excess pounds we’d put on over Christmas!

This is our beautiful view from the top of the hill (300yards) that we took on one of our walks. We’re kind of in line with the clump of trees on the right hand side.And of course most recently we’ve celebrated Conor’s 6th birthday on New Years Eve and Archie’ 4th birthday is just around the corner, on the 18th of this month. I’m sure I said this last year but…I just can’t believe where the time has gone!!

Anyway, we wish everyone a happy, healthy and preposterous…only kidding PROSPEROUS 2006

With all our love

Sabina, Simon, Conor and Archie

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New Year 2006

Hi all,

A very Happy New Year to everyone from all of us. ‘Hope everyone had a great Christmas.

We had a very brief business trip to London in September so I took the boys on the London Eye. Mind you I think they enjoyed these ice-creams as much as the views! I thought it was fascinating to have a bird’s eye view of all those famous buildings. Maybe they’re a bit young. Oh well… the ice-cream was delicious and they caught several trains and boats all in 24hours!

During the half-term holidays we enjoyed a thoroughly relaxing break at my Dad and Pamela’s new house in Spain, despite our car trying to set fire to itself because water flooded into the electrics via the air vents due to a split something or other! And…it’s still in the garage two months later!! Anyway that’s another story….

This is the huge 5 x 5 metre square shaped hole that we also had dug out of the bank. It was Simon’s idea to create an underground wine cellar and beer making room. We’ll need to get on with having the reinforced walls/roof built soon as after the first rainfall we suffered a small landslide from the tops of these edges. Anthony our French friend who’s just started creating an extension of Simon’s workshop into (what we call) the tractor shed will be doing the cellar after that. Fortunately for us we discovered he’s a mason soon after we became friends and coincidentally has already carried out a fair amount of work here at our property for the previous owners.

For four days we had snow that was about 10 inches deep!!! We were literally snowed in for four days! Only a couple of tractors managed to pass by in that time. I have to admit I was pleased with myself (even if I do say so myself!) as I’d searched high and low for sledges for the boys Christmas presents and bought them snowsuits as birthday presents (which they were given early for obvious reasons!) We had a really great Christmas with our friends Guy and Yvonne who came over for a week, but unfortunately as they were staying at our friends gite we only saw them a few times as they spent most of their holiday snowed in over there!! Guy and Yvonne had one really treacherous journey on the first day that it started snowing heavily…after a leisurely walk with us and the boys they realised the snow was becoming heavy and that they ought to head off back to their gite. Unfortunately what should have been a 15 minute journey eventually took them two hours as they tried several impassable routes, got stuck and in the end abandoned their car about a mile and half from the gite and walked the rest of the way! It was really great as the tractors compacted the snow on the roads and turned them into fantastic sledge runs. The sledges were big enough for Simon and me to join in with one of the boys each racing.

 

This is a view up the hill from us at the side of the road into our neighbour’s field.

I’ve put this one in to show you all the fencing around the chicken run. We were amazed to find the chain-link fencing looking like a solid wall of snow! Last year the chickens were happy out in the snow. This time they were having none of it. I opened the do each morning and they enthusiastically flew down off their perches and then stopped dead at the doorway bent down looked at the snow and then just turned around and walked away!!