Clearing the drive

Our drive is about 600m long and has trees along it and grass down the middle as well as a drainage ditch down the side. There is therefore quite a lot of work keeping it under control. The tree branches have been encroaching more and more through spring and in to summer as they grow and as the leaves weigh them down more. We have had a task outstanding to cut the branches back from several months now. We finally got round to it because we have ordered a new fridge and we didn't think the Darty delivery lorry would make it up in the current condition.

At some places Doug had to stand on the top step of the later to reach to cut of the right bid. I didn't get photos unfortunately as I was doing something else while he was actually standing on the top (if I had been there I would probably have stopped him so just as well as now the branches are cut!) and I was steadying the ladder in other places.

This is the first of perhaps six barrow loads (yes there is a barrow under there honest) that had to be wheeled all the way up the drive and round behind the barn. Where they were chipped with the Destroi and some put on the compost and a few on to the path in the potager (veg garden) to test whether they will make good path covering to keep weeds down.

Poppy enjoyed the whole thing immensely and 'helped' a lot pulling branches around and going mad trying to catch the ones hanging off the barrow. Aww cute :)

Tour of the house (as is now)

We are about to start thinking about in some more detail what we want the final layout of the house to be. We have lived here a little while now to get some idea of what we need.

Before we start here is a quick tour through what is currently here.
A the moment only the downstairs is habitable, it was probably originally two rooms, one either side of the front door. Now one room is a multi purpose living/dining/kitchen and the other has been divided in to two bedrooms and a bathroom.

Living room/Dining room/Kitchen

The room is divided in to two parts with the kitchen area being separate.
The living/dining area (fire on left, kitchen on right). Bit cluttered with boxes. Outside the window you can see the hill rising behind the house. 

Looking towards back of house

Kitchen is to the right in this picture, this window is out the front of the house and has a lovely view (although currently a lot blocked by big hedge).  The fireplace to the right here needs the chimney breast removing as it is falling down behind the plasterboard cladding.

Looking towards front of house

This is the kitchen area (dining/living area is to left). Pantry is through door at back right. Cooker uses bottled gas and the oven is RUBBISH. Hot water boiler on wall to back left. Also runs on bottled gas and is VERY old.

Looking towards back of house

There isn't really any worksurface, I use a chopping board on the cooker for most things, good as it means you have to tidy up as you go along, but bad because not possible to make things like pasta or pastry that need somewhere to roll them out (table surface not good as would get scratched when cutting)

Pantry

The pantry is behind the stairs on the cool north side of the house. It is quite grotty at the moment. We want to have some similar unheated area for keeping jams/preserves etc in the future.

There is an interesting stone sink in there which we would like to move somewhere more prominant, perhaps the outdoors kitchen. Should be nice when cleaned up.

Hallway

There is currently quite a wide hallway leading to the two bedrooms and bathroom. Full of boxes at the moment. Has a nice window which should eventually be in the living room.

Bathroom

Looking towards front of house

Bedroom

The bedroom is at the back of the house. Originally it was a single room with the bathroom, spare room and hallway. The original window at the back is where the wall between the two bedrooms in and has been filled in in a rubbish way with breeze block and the two new windows punched through in an ugly crappy way. We are not quite sure what to do about it as we want to return this to being a single room (living room)

Looking towards back of house

Looking towards front of house

Spare room

The spare room is next to the bedroom and has a lot of boxes in it at the moment as well as a spare bed and whatever beer is brewing. I think the plasterboarding was done 12 or more years ago before the person who sold it to us bought it. There is a big fireplace in here similar to the one in the living room but less fally downy so hopefully it can stay as is in the new living room.

Looking towards back of house

Stairs

The stairs are a bit cronky but have a nice banister and side bit. We might want them in a bit of a different place to allow room for a bootroom inside the front door. It seems a shame in some ways as some bits are nice, but probabl we would need to redo them anyway as the floors will be at different heights than they are now once we have new floors, under floor heating etc

Upstairs (right room)

This is probably going to be a bedroom. A big huge bedroom which we can use for yoga and other things when there are no guests. You can see the chimney breast that needs to come down in the middle of the picture. Somewhere there will be a bathroom too. Where depends what is possible for the plumbing. Like all the upstairs it needs insulating as that is the underside of the slate tiles you can see.

Looking towards the outdoor kitchen

Looking towards front of house

Upstairs (left room)

Here we will need to have a corridor at the back so we can get in to the 'bee room', which will be our bedroo, through the door in the photo.There will also be a bedroom, smaller than the one on the other side of the stairs and probably sharing a bathroom with it.

Looking towards the 'bee room'

Looking towards front of house

Looking back towards the stairs

Upstairs (bee room)

The previous owner kept many hives of bees in this room because they need feeding less over the winter if they are kept warmer. It means this room has a peculiar smell at the moment. Something we will be starting on soon is ripping out the cladding in this room so we can have vents put in the whole roof before insulation goes in.
We are planning on this being our bedroom with an ensuite. This room is above the garage (which is going to be the boiler and freezer room) so we need to insulate the floor also for heat and sound.

Looking towards front of house

Through to door on to the balcony

Along the balcony

View from the balcony (currently with chickens)

Looking back up in to the other part of the house

 Garage/boiler room to be

This is below the 'bee room' and the plan is to have the central heating system in here which will be a big very well insulated hot water tank fed by a wood burning stove (not a 'pretty' one but a big industrial very efficeint one) and solar hot water panels on the roof as well as having an emersion heater for emergencies. The water will be heated pretty hot (90C) and then be used via heat exchange to heat the hot water and under floor heating (downstairs) and radiators (upstairs). This is the current plan anyway but we need to talk to the plumber in more detail. We also plan on having a number of big chest freezers in here to store meat and veg as well as bikes, tools etc. It is a big space but we think the heating system will take up a lot so we will have to work out what there is room for.

The outdoors kitchen and bread oven

 The plan is to have an outdoor kitchen here. Currently we have the table and chairs and have had quite a few BBQs here. We will concrete the floor and probably put in a sink and move the cooker from the kitchen out here when we have done the indoors kitchen and have a new cooker.
The little room through the door has a bread oven at the back of it, not exactly sure how it is meant to work but the chimney is outside the bread oven above the little room. We believe we should be able to restore the bread oven - after we finish the house of course. We will concrete through in to here and use it for storing pig/cat/chicken etc food. At the moment it is choka block with rubbish and lengths of naily wood.

Outdoors kitchen

 At the moment there is a pillar in the middle of the area holding up (kind of) the various beams that hold the roof up. We are planning on reroofing this with slate the same as the house roof. As this will include a new beam we won't need the support in the middle of the room any more.

Shonky support and roof beam

The bread oven door is in the middle of the picture

Looking in to bread oven room

Phew! That is the end of the very long tour.

Catching a sheep

Coll (the smaller of the two rams) has a rather shaggy coat. When we were feeding them a bit of barley (done to try to tame them a bit) we happened to have a chance to catch him as we were in a narrow bit of field with one of us either side of him. So Doug did a flying leap and managed to grab him. As he is quite small we managed to flip him upside down even though he is quite strong and not totally in to the idea. Once upside down he stopped struggling as they are meant to. The horns are quite useful handles.

He has GIANT bollocks and a tiny willy. He also seems to have nipples on his bollocks, hopefully that is normal for sheep.
We managed to pull of the loose bits of wool, I suspect it is rather too full of bits of plant to be much use for spinning.

The poor guy still looks rather funny with a skinny back end and big wooly shoulders.

First all grain beer

We started of making kit beers which come as a tin of gloop which you mix with water and add yeast then ferment and bottle. We then progressed on to beers made from malt extract and hops, for this you get a similar tin of gloop, but you need to boil it up with hops before proceeding to ferment and bottle. Then more recently we progressed to mini mash beers which are as for the malt extract but some grain is boiled with the mixture to refine the flavour.
We made our first all grain brew the other day. For this you start with malted grain (malting is a process where the grains are sprouted before being dried out) and crack it then heat it up with water to get the wort (which is what we got in the previous methods by diluting the malt extract). This method gives one a lot more control over the flavour of the beer as heating at different temperatures extracts different things from the grain. There is a lot of complex theory and science behind it which we are still learning (and may never learn fully as one has to be VERY spoddy about it and precise with temperature, PH of water, timings etc).

As a further step we can go on and buy unmalted barley and perform the malting and roasting ourselves and even further we could grow our own barley (there are a lot of different varieties and the weather and growing conditions further affects the taste)

As a simple starting place we bought some all grain kits which come with the malt, hops and yeast. This one is an Alt beer.

As I mentioned we first had to crack the grain. We bought a malt mill but we got stressed by the price of the high tech ones and bought a more reasonably priced ones. In the end it did the job although perhaps there was rather too much 'flour' in the mix. Apparently it can be good to end up with pieces of grainin varying sizes rather than everything neatly cracked in to equal size pieces.
It took some 'adjusting' with a hammer and extensive application of WD40 to make it cooporate though

Corona Malt Mill (wouldn't really recommend)

'Adjustments'

Further adjustments

Once it was fettled it didn't take too long to crack all the malt (something like 4.5kg)

We then went outside and heated it with water holding it at various different temperatures for lengths of time specified by the kit instructions. We had to put the malt in a pillowcase, we had a bag bought for the purpose but it turned out to be too small. The process didn't work perfectly as the very fine grains (flour) in the cracked malt clogged the material up so when we removed the pillowcase with the grain in (to leave behind the liquid with all the sugars and flavours boiled out of the grain) it was full of liquid. We ended up having to tip it out in to one of our fermenters with a tap and extract the liquid through the tap which again kept getting clogged. All not quite according to the instructions. We are planning on splashing out for a better brew kettle which will help us with this process of removing the liquid from the grain (called lautering)

Once the grain is removed the liquid is boiled up with the hops for a period of time. You can see the gas burnr and cylindar here. Not sure how much of the gas each brew is going to use up. Quite a bit I suppose as the beer is heated for something like 160 minutes.

It then has to be cooled quickly and tranfered to the fermentation vessel. We filled the bath with cold water and used that for cooling.

In the end the wort was a bit cloudier than we normally get because of our milling and lautering issues, but not too bad. It is busy fermenting away and the proof will be in the drinking.

Hay man

The farmer who had his cows on our fields arranged for someone to sell us some hay at a very good price (to keep the sheep through the winter). The arrangement was that we were meeting the guy outside the swimming pool in Bagnère, we through he would have the hay with him, but it turned out that it was so we could go and see the hay. So we went to his barn and knowledgably inspected and smelt the first and second cuttings. We then explained to him that we were city folk and didn't really know what we needed. He said he thought we should get the second cutting. We agreed we would take 10 bales.
He then decided he needed to come and inspect the access to our property so he could decide whether to bring his 5 bale or 10 bale tractor to deliver it.
We are quite exhausted now with so much French listening comprehension as he extensively inspected and commented on pretty much everything including

• We should scythe the weeds around the barn and in the fields
• We should cut down an ash tree outside the barn otherwise it is going to fall on to the spring source in a strong wind
• We should fix the barn up including the lean too
• It is good we have a new roof and it is a lovely one
• We should have bought Pyrenéen sheep not Ouessant
• We have a hazelnut tree growing in the hedge
• The car is super
• The hay won't all fit in the hay barn
• The chickens are très jolie
• The dog is going to kill the sheep when it gets bigger
• Plus various other things we failed to understand but smiled and nodded anyway.

He then took a pee behind the woodshed/outdoor kitchen (perhaps that is more polite than asking to use the toilet) and said he will deliver during the week - not sure whether he decided on the 5 or 10 bale trailer.

Galette Recipe

We started making these because there is a place in Valorcine (near Chamonix) called l'Arret Bougnette where we had amazing galettes for lunch. Traditionally they are bigger than we make and using a crepe pan/hotplate. Best with an egg on top.

Ingredients  
For the galettes
200g Buckwheat flour (blé sarricin in France)
1 egg
Approx 400ml water/milk mix

For the filling
Anything you like really but we tried 

1. Ham, cheese and egg 
2. Saucisson and cheese
3. Nutella and banana
4. Lemon and sugar (better on normal pancakes we thought as the lemon comes out the little holes in the galette and the flavour of the buckwheat is a bit strong and needs something 'meatier' with it)

Method
Mix the flour with the egg and enough of the water/milk mix to make a mixture with a similar consistency to double cream (probably slightly thicker if anything - better to start too thick and add a bit of water if the first one comes out too think and rubbery)
Leave for a few hours before using ideally.

Heat a non stick frying pan and then add a little butter, put in a ladle full of the mixture and swirl quickly to cover the pan. I found that the first one didn't get little holes in it like they should be subsequent ones did.
Flip the galette like you would a pancake (I use a spatula)
Depending on the filling you can add it now or when it is on the plate. If you are doing one with an egg crack it over the galette while still in that pan and spread the white out as much as you can so it cooks quicker, you can heat it in the pan until cooked but the top will always be uncooked unless you cook the yoke right through, so you can heat under the grill to cook the top of the egg (and melts the cheese nicely too)

The cows have gone

The cow farmer came and took his cows back to his place today. With his father and son.
He is coming back during the week sometime to cut some of a hedge for us (his father volunteered him last time he was here) and he has arranged for some hay to be delivered tomorrow to see the sheep through the winter.
The cows may be back next summer, not sure yet.
I was quite sad to see them go, we have got used to them being there despite occasional bust outs.