It is time to wind down now and have a bit of a break.

I suspect we are not alone and the rest of you are thinking, if not doing the same?

Our time here in France continues to be adventurous and we are on the cusp of another milestone by completing the 'farmhouse' kitchen.

I do not know where the year has gone - it was over a year ago that we started to renovate the barn and initially the target was to be in by June. However, the radical changes to the plan meant that this objective changed somewhat (as regulars will no doubt remember).

Anyway, the second target became, unofficially, Christmas, and we will miss this by a whisker.

I have been making a few changes to our blog in the last week or so. The aim is to have the site revamped and ready to go for the new holiday season.

With this in mind, and collating feedback from guests who stayed with us over the summer, we are going to make the site more of an information site for potential guests who are looking for a holiday.

Don't worry, for all of you who like to take a peek at all of the cock ups I make, the blog will still be running in the background with all of the historical information about our build and the trials and tribulations about living in France.

You will either have to bookmark the site so that you land directly on the blog or use the sidebar navigation which will be labelled 'Blog' (funny enough).

A women's work is never done they say. Last week, Donna had a week long business trip to the UK so it was left to me to keep the team on track. Well, I failed miserably! We missed the bus three times out of the five days.

My only excuse was the amount of work I had to put into jointing the floor. It took three and a half solid days to joint and clean the floor and one evening, and I do not jest, I was out in the barn/kitchen at 11.45pm washing tiles off.

All that is now history and the last of the really major jobs is complete. Today, I plastered the steps which will eventually lead into the living room and dining room proper.

For now they just lead into the barn which will still be useful because the freezer is just outside that door.

I do love to ramble on a bit and I have always wanted to write. But, I think I had attention deficit disorder at school, my Dad called it the fidgets, and I could not concentrate for long enough. I do not claim to be Shakespeare but I am learning a lot of things that I need to from a blogging perspective. Craig McGinty, who I was introduced to soon after we arrived in France, is such an inspiration and fantastic help. In fact, Craig has been instrumental in my blogging from the day I switched from an expensive website, which was run by a company who were screwing me for as much as they could, to Blogger and then Typepad.

I am really really sorry for the lack of updates - and I do not mean that to sound self important - I know from my daily stats that we have at least 50 hits from new and returning visitors on the blog.

The floor is finally finally finished! In fact it took just one hour on Tuesday morning to cut the last few in. I didn't do any last week because of a visit from my Brother Dan and my sister-in-law Donna although Dan did help me with gluing the doors which was quite a tricky job.