#Rendering

A personal diary of a young English family's ambition to make the French dream a reality - renovating the home of their dreams and experiencing living the French rural lifestyle.

Join us on our journey and learn and share the actuality and reality of living and renovating in France. From concept to construction; documenting not only the progress of work and giving tips and advice from our experiences, but giving a real insight into exactly what is involved, decisions we have made, the emotional impact and how we are adapting as a family.

The blog was an idea I had after completing our first project, the gite. I am currently focusing on the here and now and the progress of our barn project. When I can, I will also be going back in time to document the process of the gite renovation.

I hope that by doing this blog, it will not only enable our friends and family to follow us, but other people who may have the same ideas may be able to use it as a resource and also something to relate to. I do not claim to know everything about the moving process and the rules and regulations - far from it, but am learning more and more every day and have been able to provide information and tips which we have learnt through first hand experience. If there was a website which had all the information I needed in one place when we first moved here and on numerous occasions after that, it would have saved us bags of time instead of constantly spending hours trawling through heaps and heaps of information in both languages, trying to piece it all together and find the right answer.

If thinking of making the move, but unsure for any reason - I hope that this may be a good source of information for you, but please know that France is a very big, diverse country, which has lots of different things to offer. You can live the buzzy city life in France, but being country bumpkins at heart, we chose rural France (very rural!), so our experiences will be relevant to that. Wherever it is you live, or whatever it is you choose to do, everyone's experience is totally different - this is just our personal story.

Please have a read of my feature stories. If you have any comments or would like to share your own stories, tips or advice with us, we would love to hear from you on our Facebook page on the link below. If you could give us a "like" while you are there, we would really appreciate it. Thank you. :o)

https://www.facebook.com/BuildingTheDreamInFrance

Happy reading! :o)

At Last! The Rendering Can Commence!

Whilst all the digging is going on, I can finally start with the wall rendering in the long room! Kev has brough his absolutely HUGE cement mixer over!! I could actually fit in it! Not perfect for the amount of mixes I need to use and takes a while to scrape it all out, but can't argue, we are using it for free, so that is great! I am using a lime "chaux" mix - 3 parts sand to 1.5 parts chaux and 0.5 parts cement blanc. The walls needed to be sponged down yesterday to get

Roof Leaks and Pointing

So, it is time for me to get on with chisseling away at the walls, gauging out the pointing to at least 1cm deep, getting rid of excess dust and wetting it all with a sponge ready for the re-pointing and rendering. I am a total novice, but have spoken to our friend, Kev, who is a builder and think I know what I am doing! Time can only tell! Whilst I am inside preparing the walls, Scott is outside on the roof, where he has spent a lot of time since we have been here, moving