I made a foolish claim at the end of my last blog, written 2 weeks ago, when I said that I would write the following week. You will have noticed that I didn’t!
It wasn’t that I hadn’t managed to achieve anything, it was more we were socialising in the evening and I hadn’t managed to write anything before I left!
Our closest restaurant, Au Lac, which has a beautiful location behind the Commana beach on Lac du Drennec, is owned and run by our friend Mercedes. Her restaurant has always only been seasonal and this year she is closing a couple of weeks earlier as she is traveling to a wedding. After her final service last Sunday lunchtime, she kindly invited us and a number of her friends to a post-season party to help eat up some of the stock rather than let it go to waste. We were only too happy to assist!
It was a great evening and our thanks to Mercedes for her generosity. We’re looking forward to her opening again next year in time for Easter.
Also at the end of the last blog I said that it appeared that a piece of the pool equipment had failed and it could prove difficult to get it resolved.
Thankfully, it didn’t turn out as complex as we’d hoped. The reason we were concerned was that the man who had built our pool, and who we had relied on for supplies, guidance and information, has stopped trading as a pool-man and hadn’t responded to our many attempts to contact him over the last 6 months.
As the pool is just a year old, we were keen to have a technician who was a representative of the brand (Everblue) which was used by our builder in case of problems in the future that meant we would need to make any sort of claim. Being a year old we also thought it would be a good opportunity to have an annual service by a pool professional.
Unfortunately, the only other Everblue concession in Finistère are based south of Quimper and so about an hour’s drive away. We feared they wouldn’t be interested in coming to look at a problem here as there are closer pool stores just not ones associated with Everblue. With the good weather we’ve been enjoying the pool was continuing to get good use.
Thankfully, they were happy to send one of their team who came in the week and was extremely useful. What it highlighted was how little I understood our equipment or how to maintain it. The handover from our pool builder was pretty perfunctory and evidently I didn’t ask the correct questions. I now feel much more confident about how to use and maintain the kit but we also have a decent contact we can call on in case of an emergency.
The other outside assistance we were waiting for in my last blog, was someone who was going to come and laser clean the slate in our own fireplace in preparation for having our wood burner replaced.
Finding someone who would do such a small job was difficult enough. There are a couple of large businesses in the area but who do much larger industrial tasks. Through a larger company, we found someone who was about to set up on their own as a laser cleaner who was prepared to do the job and he came on Friday.
Unfortunately, it became obvious quite quickly that he wasn’t very experienced at cleaning slate walls – although perhaps not as quickly as it should have done to the cleaner!
Having done quite a lot of research, I had anticipated that the laser would remove the soot staining built up over the many years it was an open fire, leaving a lighter, natural slate colour. After some experimentation with power levels and various settings we had to leave the room to let him get on with it as protection from the laser.
His initial assessment was that it should take about 5 hours to do the job but, after about 6 hours of work he acknowledged it would take a bit longer! When he showed us what he had done (principally in the yellow square here which looks better than it does in reality) we mutually agreed not to continue any further. Then he acknowledged that it hadn’t done what he had anticipated and that it had exposed a gap in his knowledge – a bit like me and the pool!
Thankfully he didn’t charge us anything for his time but, while we haven’t gone backwards, we haven’t made progress!
As the laser wasn’t able to clean the slate, we have decided that I am not going to hire a sandblaster because we don’t think it will be any more effective. I am going to attempt some sort of abrading in the week, certainly on the most heavily marked to see if it makes any difference before I begin the re-pointing. If I can’t effectively clean the stones, we hope that the refreshed, lighter pointing will make a big difference.
We have continued to be spoiled with warm later summer weather in the last couple of weeks which not only meant we could still BBQ (although needed to light the chiminea just to take the chill off the early evening air) but allowed me to progress the cladding behind the pool house and I have completed the rear wall. Tomorrow I hope to finish the roof of the storage space before moving onto another wall.
We have had a reasonably productive time in the garden and focussed on a couple of things that have been neglected for a while! I haven’t mown the orchard lawn for weeks. Initially because it was parched in the drought, then, when it started to grow furiously having had some rain, I couldn’t do it until we had cleared all the windfall apples from the sole remaining apple tree.
David spent a few hours apple collecting before I was able to run the mower over it a couple of times and now you’d hardly notice that it had been neglected for so long!
As David was collecting apples, I was weeding Hayloft’s terrace and the side path that I also hadn’t given a lot of attention to and was extremely overgrown. I didn’t take a ‘before’ picture, but the path was extremely weedy and impassable with one of the cotoneasters was suffering with a lack of light and being strangled by bindweed.
It looks so much better now and the cotoneaster that wasn’t battling bindweed is covered in berries and looks great. While the weather has remained warm, autumn has definitely arrived and the liquidambar trees as planted a few years ago are starting to show their amazing autumn colour with the holly next to it also heavily berried, although not as easy to see in the picture.
I am hoping next week will continue to be productive but I am not going to do anything as rash as making a promise that I will blog about it next Sunday!!
Kenavo.