One week to go! First rooms done.

We've all of a sudden moved from dreamland to reality. There's now only a week to go now until we move from one square to the next. Help!!!

We are, we think, on track to move into a livable apartment. It won't be finished, but we never really expected it to be. We may or may not have a kitchen, we definitely won't have our new beds, we may or may not have wardrobes up, none of the final lighting is in place, and the mezzanine floor needs its oak laminate flooring. What we will have is a clean and finished living area, a fridge, clothes washer, hot and cold water, shower and toilet, and some temporary lighting. And aircon for what that is worth, as we seem to be past the 30+ degree days for now. Our local friends tell us we have done amazingly well to get as far as we have.

We've been working 6 or 7-day weeks of 8 hours a day for 3 weeks now. We did at one point decide to have Sundays off, and half of Wednesdays, and did manage the first Sunday, knocked off at 5pm on the Wednesday (yes, that is earlier than normal - we've worked until 7:30pm some evenings), but have ignored our rules since. We had intended to go to the beach on Sunday afternoon, but we fell asleep after lunch, and it got too late! We did have 6 hours of Molière below us in the square - a 2-hour performance repeated twice.

We are stuffed, but the thrill of seeing it come to life is what is keeping us going. Each day brings something else that gives us pleasure, and we are absolutely doing what we want to be doing, where we want to be doing it. We still manage a coffee at Pablo most days, and have downed the odd demi de vin rouge there once in a while.

Monday saw the man from Free turn up to install our new phone line and hopefully get our internet back up and running - and wonder of wonders, after ¾ of an hour he came up and said it should  all be running, and so it was! Meanwhile we kept painting.

Tuesday was the delivery of our washing machine and dishwasher. They should have been delivered weeks ago, but it suited us fine not to have them cluttering up the site, so we had left it. Great crashings and banging downstairs, and finally one of the two guys came up and said they couldn't get the washing machine up. It is a large one (it is a washer/dryer) and heavy, and they reckoned it was too awkward to get round the stairs. We were not at all impressed, and were thinking of a contingency plan involving Antoine's Bobcat hoist and lifting it in through the windows. Thankfully, the dishwasher came up fine. A bit of a cop-out by the delivery people, as the previous ones had got a much larger fridge upstairs. Meanwhile we kept painting.

Apéro in the evening with the couple who bought below us in Place de l'Eglise. She's a social lawyer, he's an HR consultant. Lovely people and we get on very well. The conversation is 50/50 French and English. My French is way better now, there's almost nothing I can't get across. The funny thing is that there are still people I can barely understand at all, but others who I'm 90% with.

Wednesday was meant to be a red-letter-day with the planned delivery of our Ikea order (sofas, table and chairs, sofa-bed, bookcase on so on). However the first order of events was to see what we could do about the washer sitting down in our unsecured lobby. We arrived on site with a range of ropes and plenty of determination, and with the aid of rope loops hooked onto the feet, we managed to lift the machine up literally one step at a time to our bathroom where it now rests peacefully. We were pretty chuffed to be able to do it, though it was a real effort and took a long and draining time.

I had imagined Ikea would have their act together and there would be no issue with their delivery . We had to be on-site between 7 and 7, but only got told at 4:30pm that the order had gone to the wrong warehouse and they couldn't deliver it until Friday. You might have thought they would have realised that at the start of the day and could have told us earlier. Meanwhile we kept painting.

Thursday wasn't marked by anything special. We kept painting. Because the plasterer was still working on the bedrooms until last week, we had been working on all the rest of the house - mezzanine, living, bath, toilet and hall. They needed a light sand, some patch-up plastering (we are very fussy), sealer coat, then two coats of final finish. To make things awkward, we are painting the beams in terracotta colour, so that means some tricky cutting-in and masking, and the ceilings are white with vanilla walls - more cutting-in. All the living room ceiling and half the walls need the mobile scaffold. Not too bad being up there, but it does make things slower.We'd been aiming to have the painting all done by Friday, allowing us to do some cleaning up before the weekend. Thursday was a little disappointing, as we didn't get as far along as we expected.

Living room and mezzanine near completion, but plaster, dust, scaffold, protection etc.

On the other hand, Friday was exciting and a catch-up day. Our first rooms with all the painting finished, even though they were only the bathroom and toilet. The repeat Ikea delivery didn't turn up again - new delivery day is Tuesday. In fact that will be better as we will be totally ready for it. As a treat, and because we were too tired to make dinner, we went out to L'Imprévu where we had another pleasant meal.

Awesome day on Saturday. The remaining bits of the living room and hall took less time than expected, and Karen was able to start some cleaning up - mainly getting rid of the accumulated dust, plaster and paint spots on the tiles. Thankfully, this has proved easier than we expected. By the end of business on Saturday (7:15pm) everything bar the two bedrooms was final-coated, and the toilet and half the living room were actually clean and dust-free. Such a relief and a thrill.

After more cleaning, and dismantling the scaffold and reassembling it in the main bedroom, Sunday was spent doing more rewarding things like putting up towel rails and the two shower screens to separate off our flat-floor shower. We are delighted with the ways things are working out. The toilet and bathroom both feel large and spacious, yet they were the two rooms we thought we had compromised a little. They really couldn't be better.