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Showing posts from June, 2012

A visit to Guernsey of the Channel Islands

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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

Use what you have decorating

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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 find two turquoise pillows (3 E

Attic renovation complete

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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 to eat br