Monday 8 October 2007

8th October

Toria and Marcus were staying with me last week, with my granddaughter Molly, who is 5 months. She's lovely - very smiley and bright. Here she is with her dad at Montrol-Senard, a little village where a film was made a few years ago that entailed refurbishing several of the houses and businesses and now they are open for you to look round.

... and here she is after a tiring day...



They went back to England yesterday, so it seems rather quiet without them.

I rather thought the builder would be back today to start work on the house again, but no sign of him. I need to talk to him about the plywood floor upstairs which was put down by an English carpenter when I first arrived. He seemed as if he knew what he was doing, but now it appears obvious he did not and has made rather a poor job of it. Apparently the accepted method for old houses like mine is to try and make the floor roughly level by screwing in pieces of wood along the beams (which are decidedly NOT level) and then screwing the plywood across those pieces. However, they are supposed to mostly rest on the beams, and only on the wood pieces where the beams dip, but my plywood floor hardly touches the beams anywhere! That means the entire floor (all the flooring, furniture, walls, bathroom fitments etc) would be actually held up by the plywood, which in turn is held up by 1cm-thick pieces of cheap pine, instead of the 6 inch square oak beams! Silly, isn't it? You can see the gap in this photo:

The pice of knotty pine is supposed to be evening up the beam and screwed into the side of it to support the floor; as you see, it is way above the beam and not attached at all.

So I'll have to get it fixed, even if it means the whole thing has to come up. Otherwise I'll never feel it's safe.

Not all bad news today though - my yarn arrived from Susan's Spinning Bunny in the USA. Lovely, lovely yarn.
















It is a Merino and Tencel 50/50 blend and is incredibly soft. I was very impressed with it. I have had lots of hand-dyed yarns lately, from France, UK and USA and this is definitely the best. No colour came off on my hands (a big bonus, that), the yarn was impeccably tied, and not one bit tangled, as you get all too often in hanks. None of those white marks when I untied the yarn to go on the wool winder - I guess Susan dyes it without making her ties so tight that some of the basic yarn doesn't take the dye, and then re-hanks it before selling, to avoid tangles. I will certainly buy from her again.


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