Nah, it's fine.

Or rather, 'beh . . . ça va aller' which is what our roofer said when he came round to examine a few rather manky beams in our outbuilding's (future gite) roof structure. I suppose I was expecting a bit of tut-tutting and sucking in of teeth, and had been preparing myself for some fearful quote but as most French builders or certainly in this region seem to react, it was nothing to get heated about. Great! brush some vile anti-everything product on it, maybe shove a bit of stone or oak under the most dishevelled bits and Jean-Michel's yer uncle.

So I did, standing on an overly long ladder, stones and in hand, and stone mason tools at the ready to rebuild that part of the wall which had mostly crumbled away after a leak at some point before the roof was redone in the late 80s.

I like doing this. After Ezra's stone maison (tailler de pierres) friend came to stay for a week to work with us we gained a fair bit of knowledge, and lost the fear of pulling rocks and mortar apart to redo damaged sections of the gite's walls. It's incredibly satisfying to scrape away the loose mud and mortar and figure out which stones should go where. I now have a vague idea of how the dry stone walls of Derbyshire and Yorkshire were constructed.

The irregular stones are all done, just all the upstairs more regular rectangular 'tuffeau' blocks to clean, and redo the joints - pointing, I think, in English. Then a massive sweep and clear up of rock dust, sand and bird droppings from our lodger sparrows who congregate each evening to roost in the rafters. Not for too much longer. We may have to build them a separate bird house... 

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