I'm going to be moaning about money in this article, so for your info £1.00 is currently about €1,10, although all too often it's almost £1.00 to €1,00 these days, so you can see how horrified I am by the prices I am quoting.

Weather has been a bit lousy of late, so we've started redecorating inside one of the gites. It started off as a lick of paint here and there to brighten it up, progressed to whole new colour scheme (which took enough deliberation in itself), to changing a couple of kitchen cupboards, to putting in a whole new kitchen, moving the fridge, adding new cupboards in it's place, new worktop, new sink (cooker is only a year or so old, so that's staying. Mind you the sink's the same age.) And so the money adds up.

The cost of paint doesn't help. We spent the better part of an afternoon traipsing around town trying to find a decent colour paint, at a decent price, in a decent size tin. 0 out of 3 for that one. No tester pots, so you have to assume that the colour on the lid is the colour in the tin. (It's not, it's several shades darker. The jury's still out on this one, we've decided to finish off the rest of the gite and then see if we have to change it. Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely colour, just a somewhat darker than expected). Could only get the paint in 0.5L tins, it's expensive enough in 2.5L tins (average €52,00).

Went to another town today for other reasons and happened to pop into one of those shops which sells a bit of everything really. They had brand named paint on sale for €9,99 for 2.5L (dented tin - I can live with that) and their own make for €16,99!!! It might not be great quality, but then neither is a lot of the expensive paint over here (get the white stuff and you think you're painting with milk).

Anyway, for the most part, we're painting the horrible stone interior walls in the gite this year (white) to help lighten and brighten the place up. We'd eventually like to plasterboard over them, but we just can't afford that at the moment (obscene amounts of money for that!). Two of the walls I've been painting in exterior paint from the uk (£28.00 for 10L) and it's been a pleasure to work with, lovely consistency, doesn't drip, brush washes in water, dries quick, looks good. The third wall I did the second coat on after Adrian did the first. He was using up some of the French exterior paint we had (€89,00 for 10L). I carried on with the french paint. It was like painting with syrup. It was so thick and sticky, a nightmare to get on the walls, but with an amazing ability to drip at will between the tin and the surface I was trying to paint, onto any other surface not meant to be painted. After quarter of an hour of this, messing about with a damp cloth, trying to clean up the drips, but really just smudging paint all over the place, I eventually did the right thing and put a dust sheet down. I wear those plastic gloves when I paint as I have a natural ability to get paint all over me; the paint was so sticky the gloves stuck to the paint brush and then I couldn't let go of the brush. I've done about two-thirds of that wall now, hopefully finish the rest tomorrow, it's the top bit, so I've been waiting for the step-ladders. At least if I think I'm about to fall off the ladders, so long as I've got enough paint over my hands/gloves, all I'll have to do is hold tight and I'll stick to them.