Where does the time go nowadays.  Doesn’t seem 5 minutes since we were celebrating last Christmas and here it comes again!

We’ve managed to get loads done this year on the house – mainly due to lack of other paid work, and by June all the hallway and landing had been finished. It’s so nice to walk in to a lovely finished hallway and not a building site! I’ve been busy painting etc and during the summer we concentrated on some remedial work on the terrace to hopefully fixed the leak above our bed when it rains. So far so good but not had a lot of rain yet (November and still in the low 20’s during the daytime!).  All the terraces and patio have been painted this year and we took the last small roof off which was at the side of the metal stairs leading up to our terrace –  to make use of the space we’ve created a new store area (nicknamed El Shed) with a small sloping roof – this gives us some more outside storage up there. We also took out the old chimney which passed through the office down to what will be the 2^nd guest bedroom. This has created more space in the office and we redecorated that after the work was finished. We’ve also had to rebuild the pillars on our terrace and replace the decorative brickwork with some nice new iron railings – made by hubby of course. I think it looks better now as it seems to open up the views from the terrace down into the valley below. Now we’re into Autumn the next job is the 2^nd guest bedroom/bathroom. Hubbys just spent the last week removing the old flaky paint off the ceilings in there and knocking some more walls out. Fingers crossed by May 2014 it will be ready for our friends & family that will be visiting us.

I thought last year we might have the new central heating system (fired by the special log burner in the hallway) up and running by now but alas no – think that will be next winter – we’ll get there in the end. This will get done when we start the last job of reforming the 3^rd floor area at the front of the house which leads out on to the guest terrace – this will give us the final 3^rd bedroom. Finally, when this has been done we can more or less say we are finished and hopefully start the B&B – if we have any money or energy left.