They came one weekend in June, tumbling out of a white van late into the night, stretching and yawning after a long journey, bringing with them their oldest clothes and the sort of enthusiasm and determination that we hadn’t felt for months. Five of them, leaving behind wives and children, giving up their free time for a long weekend to help us move the renovations forward.
They flopped onto mattresses on the floor, curled up in sleeping bags, dossing down anywhere without complaint and woke up the next morning raring to go. We filled them with croissants and fresh baguettes and good strong coffee, eating in the early morning sunshine, sitting on the granite steps at the back of the house, soaking up the heat from the old stones, where the gendarme beetles and lizards like to bask.
We explained why we needed their help. The Honey Suite was almost finished, we had a booking for our very first guests in the diary for the end of August, but the hallways, the stairs, the landing and the salon were still just shells. We could close off the doors to every other bedroom, hide the unfinished rooms and hope that the slightly wild gardens, flower meadows and flaky shutters would be just the romantic side of unfinished. But our guests needed somewhere to eat breakfast and have dinner, they needed to get to their bedroom without climbing over paint cans and bits of ceiling.
We had been stripping old wallpaper, filling holes and prepping walls for what felt like months, working long hours day and night, but it all seemed to be taking forever. In the salon there were areas of the original wooden panelling that had rotted away and needed replacing. We needed them to sand and to paint, to fill more holes and to unearth carpentry skills to help us move forward.
And suddenly there were people everywhere. Rob and Adam painting ceilings and hall walls, Ross and Bernie sanding and filling holes in the salon, covered head-to-toe in dust. Mick and Tim creating new panelling for the salon using old doors from the attics, with mouldings that happened to match, and scraps of wood unearthed from the back of Tim’s workshop. Dale and I flitting everywhere in between, finding rollers, tins of paint, more sand paper, more filler, curbing the enthusiasm when coats of paint needed longer to dry.
It was hot that summer, there had been no rain for weeks, the grass was parched, the breeze when it came was hot, rustling through the meadow grasses, rattling wild flower seed heads and the making the oxeye daisies dance. The huge old dining table that we’d inherited with the house had sat on the terrace at the front of the house for months. We had no garden furniture so we had to make do. It was rather grand, with its ornately carved legs and huge proportions, but seemed somehow fitting for the makeshift life we were living. Camping in a château, glamorous and extravagant but wildly inconvenient all at once.
Each lunch time I would fill the table with cheese and fresh bread, whirling fresh heads of lettuce in the salad spinner, shaking up jars of dressing with Dijon mustard, honey, cider vinegar and olive oil, slicing up big, sweet tomatoes and sprinkling them with salt and oregano. We feasted in the shade of the house as the sun rose high in the sky behind it, hiding from the heat of the midday sun, resisting the urge to nap after a glass of rosé.
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