End of 2014 overnight trip

A quick trip up to Millau - home of the amazing viaduct and where beautiful leather gloves are made.  First stop Couvertoirade, on the Grand Causses. It's a beautiful fortified village, run by the Knights Templars from the 12th century. Today it is the home of many crafts people, artists and cafe's. 

Onto Millau, for a late lunch and a stroll round the glove factories/stores. Amazing selection of beautiful gloves - some are made for the Paris fashion houses; Chanel, Hermes, Louis Vuitton etc. However, the ones we bought were a cheaper style - but still lovely!

The 'other ' major attraction at Millau is the viaduct which is hard to miss. A fantastic structure; functional as well as a thing of beauty.

On the return journey we took a longer route via Roquefort to look at the cheese caves - and buy some of the renowned cheese. Then up into the Haut-Languedoc where there was snow at the top - the temperature never rose above 2C all day. A lovely drive, on a cold but sunny day. A nice way to end the year with some time out in our 'backyard'. 2015 we'll be back into renovating ...

Kitchen Wall

Work on making our new kitchen has started. We've already had the wood burner put into the main lounge and decided to expose the stone wall which was behind the fire. Have taken off the plaster covering it - resulting in a LOT of rubble and dust. We took buckets of rubble out the window and bagged it up in the garden, which saved some of the dust from getting in the rest of the house, although despite our best efforts there's still a lot of dust around. We also discovered the back of an old oven in the wall and are still deciding exactly how we are going to use this feature.

Next we had to remove the old grout around the stones which is very fine and also very dusty! So far we think we've taken around 20 bags of rubble and grit to the tip. Now we've started on the repointing.  Another new skill! It's going well and we're pleased with the result. It will be a great feature in the kitchen - eventually.

The first stage of removing the plaster - and discovering the old oven.

Half-way through the repointing: