Although the most important room for us in a house is always the kitchen, next in line has to be the bathrooms.  When we moved into our Maison in Chalabre, the bathrooms were very old-fashioned and forty years out of date.  Madame was living on the ground floor and used the loo and bath next to her bedroom, and the rest of the house remained unchanged from the 1970s.

We decided where we wanted the new bathrooms to be and which of the old bathrooms we would get rid of.  Christian the plumber, helped us choose the new fittings.  We worked out a plan for when he could do the work, bearing in mind we were having a huge house party in the Autumn with all our friends coming out from the UK.  He took it all on board and promised to have it done in time.

We needed to have a few walls knocked down in order to make the bathrooms bigger.  Abi’s room had a fireplace in the corner and an old kitchen next door which all had to come out before we could start the plumbing work.  We were due to go on holiday along the Canal du Midi the following week, (see our story on this in a future blog – including the Bassett walking the plank!) so we decided to hire some local workmen to take the walls down.  Not our best idea!  They knocked down the walls, plus one extra wall that shouldn’t have come down. They killed off Abi’s goldfish and managed to cover the whole house in a thick white dust.  We were not happy and called Christian to come over and see the damage.  He arrived, took one look and shrugged – “Bon, ca va, on y va!  Ok, well that’s it, on we go”. He corrected the errors they had made and built a new wall ready for the bathrooms to be plumbed in the following week.

Christian worked hard and had most of the fittings in place within a couple of weeks.  They looked good and now we had just the tiling and a few other jobs to finish.  Christian arranged for someone to do this work, plus another person to fit the flooring and at the same time, close all the openings for the pipe work.  Our friends were due out on the Friday and on the Thursday, I spent the day shopping for food and supplies.  I arrived back home late that afternoon and started to unpack the shopping.  As I was putting away the provisions, I could hear people singing.  No, actually I could hear men singing.  I walked to the bottom of the stairs and started to go up.  As I got nearer to the first floor I could hear the tune.  It was “C’est si Bon” and all of them were joining in. Christian was leading this spontaneous choir of workmen.  They all knew the words and were singing along whilst they worked – one of the funniest things I have ever seen as I walked into the bathroom and there they were – all dressed in overalls – tiling, plumbing, cutting, nailing and painting.  All singing along and tapping  their tools as instruments to accompany the song.

True to his word, Christian finished the work in time for our house party.  Our friends arrived and were impressed with the work that had been done and a good time was enjoyed by us all. (See previous blog  SPAIN AND SEAFOOD  on the food served at this party)

We had a great weekend with our friends and after they had all left we sat down for a while and started making plans for the next part of the house to be renovated.  The sitting room.   I took out the sketch pad and started drawing.