About five weeks ago we emailed to our local builder in our village in France and told him that we had decided to employ him to get the renovations done on the presbytery in France.
I don’t know exactly what we expected but it was not the deafening silence we got.
OK, we know he is a busy man but he has previously replied to emails, or at least his wife has, pretty quickly.
We let two weeks go by, still no reply.
We emailed him again.
Again no reply.

This was looking pretty depressing.
We started to search out plans B and C.

He was obviously extremely busy, but when was he going to be able to do it?
We sat down and decided that he had to be able to start the job by September and have it all completed by Christmas or we were going to have to start the whole process of finding a builder again from scratch, a truly depressing prospect.
So we girded our loins, at least Sile did her French loins and we decided to phone the man and demand an answer.
He answered the phone himself, knew who Sile was straight away, and then dropped his bombshell.
He wanted to start the work in March, in a few weeks time!

That he hadn’t bothered to tell us this before didn’t seem to phase him in the least and, we , once we had gotten over the shock, we cannot be but delighted.
It now would seem that, all going well (which we know it won’t) he might be out of the house by the summer giving us a full year to tweak, primp and paint before opening our doors to the public, as a Chambre d’Hôte in June 2009.
We are going out for Easter, mid March , so hopefully we will be able to start him off on the right foot then.
We are starting to live in exciting times!
Consider this the first, and most optimistic , forecast of work completed.
We will keep you informed.