Travels around the world.

Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands or as they are called in French Les Isles Anglo-Normands , in not, according to Wikipedia, part of the U.K. It is a crown dependency and a Bailiwick. I knew very little about the Channel Islands of Europe, except that they had cows, before I read the novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society , by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Ever since reading that book several years ago, I have wanted to visit Guernsey. I hadn’t been able to make the trip in our many visits to Normandy before this, so I decided I was going to go this year in June, whether Jim went with me or not. He decided to go, so that made it easier and more fun for me. It takes about 5 hours to get to Guernsey from here. It would be easier to get to Jersey, but there were a couple reasons I wanted to go to Guernsey. It’s a drive of 1 hr 50 min. to get to St. Malo; the ferry takes about 1 hr 50 mins as well, and then there is the time in between. We arrived in Saint Pe...

This should be the last attic post.  I’ll try to get more travel pictures in the next few posts. We are leaving tomorrow for Le Havre, Etretat, Honfleur, Houlgate, Dives sur Mer, etc. We’ll be back Tuesday or Wednesday. It’s a short trip. But yesterday we bought a few things for this room , so I did a little arranging today.  This room was a blank slate.  I figured I could do whatever I wanted here, but really didn’t want to spend much money on it and wanted to use the furniture we had.  That consisted of three items that were black metal—a bed, a futon bench and a clothes organizer.  So we started by moving those three items into the room. After much scanning images on the internet, I decided I wanted a brown and turquoise color scheme. I wanted a brown futon with turquoise accent pillows and lamps. We came home with a black futon, because brown wasn’t available.  I also couldn’t find any turquoise lamp shades for the little lamps we have, but I did fi...

I cleaned up the beams, stained them and Jim helped me with the priming and painting this week. We cleaned up today and took some pictures. So here’s what you see when you enter the room. The laminate floor will be really easy to maintain. The new window and lower part of the beams.  If you compare to how they looked in the previous post you’ll see the result of the cleaning I did.  Though, getting the plaster off was easy. The hard part was that they were very dirty too. Another view of the beams, stained. The builder put that new bit on the floor to hide the part of the iron rod that came above the floor level. Last shot, looking up. And in case attic renovation isn’t your thing: We went to a flea market in the next town on Monday (Pentecost) and picked up these items for 10 Euros. On Wednesday, I decided to try to figure out how to recreate a Tarte Tatin we had had in St. Ceneri. It came out pretty well. This morning it was nice enough ...

We are told they will be done today. They are making a lot of noise up there today, installing the floor.  This is the first time we’ve heard hammering and banging. They brought in more wall board yesterday, which baffled us.  Maybe they will use it to level the floor?  They also brought in pressed board, which I assume is for the subflooring. Here are some pictures. The wall board is all finished now. We are going to paint it ourselves. The new window. How the window looks from outside.  I had kind of liked the old brown window, which I asked them to leave for us, but it was in pretty rough condition, especially on the outside. And it was pretty drafty. I have some plans for it.  Stay tuned.  [ link to picture of window project ] I asked Jim to stand in the dormer space to show how tall it is. Now for the floor and to answer anyone who might ask why didn’t we just use the floor that was there.  First of all it didn’t cover the entire sp...

Day 3 progress pictures. It appears they are squaring things up.  We may have some right angles up here, which we don’t have below. And we are losing some space. They use these metal studs instead of wood.  They take up less space and are easier to carry up the narrow stairway as they stack together. Close-up of the western wall. Looking down at the floor on the eastern wall. The ceiling.   Most of the wall board is up now. They just have this east wall to finish. They insulated this wall as well, though on the other side is the neighbor’s house, not the outdoors. So that’s how the project stood for the long weekend. Here are the new pictures from yesterday. One guy was here doing the taping and mudding. He also added more drywall on the front wall.  We won’t be able to see the original walls, but they weren’t great looking. I guess he ran out before he could finish the last corner.  He brought in one more half sheet tod...

This small village is said to be one of the most beautiful villages of France.  It’s about an hour from here, so we decided to go see it for ourselves. It had been rainy in the morning, but as we pulled into Saint Céneri we saw people putting down their umbrellas. The weather stayed dry while we were there. This village was visited in 1855 by artist Jean-Baptiste Corot, who is said to have fallen in love with it. More artists followed him and the village has attracted artists ever since. As can be seen from the banner above the street this month will see another meeting of artists here. This view of the stone bridge over the Sarthe is a popular one with artists and photographers. Here is the church in the village. On the wall at the back of the church we found this plaque. Roughly translated it says: “In 898 Charles III, (the Simple) sent his army to resist the Normans who protested against his reign. The soldiers, based not far from St. Céneri, conducted th...