Finished, finished, finished. The plasterboarding upstairs is finished. What a relief.

Thats 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, a couple of corridors/landings, stairs and of course ceilings for each room. It's taken over 130 sheets of plasterboard, 400 m². It seems to have taken forever, and I'm in no hurry to start again downstairs. The good news is all the doors and windows for each room are fitted, the first fit electrics are finished and it's now time to start plumbing in the bathrooms.

A few things I've learnt from plasterboarding :-

1. Square and level – Pay extra attention to getting floors, walls, ceiling, door frames etc. at 90^o and parallel and level. Big rectangular plasterboards fit much better into 'square holes'.
2. Good quality screws – Cheap plasterboard screws are a false economy. They don't pierce the metal studding easily and tend to tear the paper surface of the plasterboard making filling more time-consuming. Use the supplied screwdriver bit in the box of screws and chuck it away at then end of the box. Use a new one in the next box, suprisingly they do 'wear' and can cause the screw to wobble as it's driven it.
3. Buy a Surform – It's invaluable for shaving off very small amounts or removing the bumpy broken edge to give a clean sharp cut edge to the board. I've never had much joy with a Surform on wood, it's intended use, but for plasterboard it's excellent.
4. Don't be too exact – especially when working on your own. Cutting to the nearest centimeter is fine and allows a little room for maneuvor if the floor or ceiling is not quite level.
5. Chamfered edges – Keep the tapered edges of the board together and on external corners, keep the cut edges for the floor and internal corners. Filling the joints is easier.
6. Planning – Take into account the size of the plasterboard. Avoid walls just slightly longer than the width of a board, or a door positioned the width of a board plus a few centimeters from an edge so as to prevent very thin in-fill. The same for ceiling height, make it the length of a board + 1cm to allow for irregularities. Any gap will be covered by skirting board.

I've been on half-time this week, mainly because of school half-term and partly due to half-energy levels. A few days recuperation is most welcome. Most of my extra free time has been filled either with playing with the children or shopping for building supplies.

After bashing up the concrete ramp in front of the gites last week I've taken advantage of the better weather and concreted in a load of flower bed border edging pieces between the two gites. Caroline and I have bought some fencing which is going to divide the flower bed and give each gite a degree of privacy. Next major landscaping job is to edge the terrace area in front of each gite with granite sets and in-fill with paving or block pavers. Not sure yet.

Before the main influx of guests in April I would like to get the outside of the building finished. The sooner the better, as it then gives us some time to plant up new beds and window boxes etc.

It's been a few good days in the office this week. My office being the two gites across the courtyard.

Still putting up plasterboard, but we are getting a bit faster now. Most of the walls are new ones and so are straight and true which makes it much easier. I think we are going to run out of green placo – moisture resistant board – for the bathrooms. The shortage is because it's twice as heavy and twice the price of normal placo so I was very conservative in my estimates. Hopefully I should know when I finish the last en-suite next week.

By Tuesday afternoon, Ian and I found ourselves gazing out of our renovation cell looking at the sunny weather outside. It looked absolutely glorious. After lunch we decided that we needed some fresh air. Pick-axes and sledge hammers at the ready we attacked with gusto the old concrete ramp that lead up to the original barn entrance in the middle of the two gites. As part of the hard landscaping plan we wanted a large flower bed between the patios of each gite to give each a little privacy. Flowers don't grow in concrete, so whack, bash and break to smash up the ramp. It's very deceiving quite how much concrete is in a ramp. A tiring, but satisfying job done. Tick.

Wednesday followed a similar pattern, placo upstairs, sun shining outside. After lunch we needed another task we could complete and tick off the list. The placo just seems to go on and on at the moment. A little more hard landscaping allowed us to fit the patio door to the side of one of the gites. The two front doors are still on order. There was quite a bit of fiddling and angle grinding to get the concrete door sill level for the door. It's the first door we've fitted so we had to offer the door up 5 times before the final fix. It got heavier and heavier everytime we moved it. At last, 3 tubes of silicon around the frame to stick it in with a number of angle bracked screwed into the granite for belt and braces fixing. Stuck.