Where have you heard that before.

I seem to be spending all my waking hours plasterboarding at the moment. I've taken a few photos but the rooms I've finished – bedroom, bathroom, dining room and lounge area in one gite – but they are just grey boxes. Grey walls and grey concrete floors. Not much to see.

Apart from screwing into my finger a couple of times not very interesting at the moment.

Such good progress has been made this week that Carolines has spent the last two days in the van shopping for supplies. Bits of pipe, wood, tiles, adhesive, etc. We used up all the plasterboard finishing the ceilings, so today she bought another 50 sheets for the exterior walls, with 40 more coming tomorrow to dry line the other gite. Plasterboard starts to get very heavy at the end of the day.

Caroline has laid the floor tiles for two of the bathrooms upstairs, my plumber friend is busy connecting up another bathroom and preparing for the first kitchen. In the process we did notice a minor problem with the electric water heater, chauffe-eau or ballon. It doesn't fit under the stairs in it's planned position. Everything is drawn to scale on the plan – and fits – but in 3D reality, things look different. Visualising 3D spaces from 2D plans, especially under the twisting, turning staircase is very difficult.
Our water heaters are about 150 litres in size and run on overnight cheap rate electricity, heures creuses, heating up the water for the day. I haven't bought it yet, but the planned ballon was too high, 1.8m, so we've had to make the downstairs toilet larger and put it in the corner. At least the toilet will stay warm.

With the deadline of the staircase arriving we have pulled our fingers out this week by finishing off the connections into the soil stack for the waste pipes upstairs and constructed three suspended ceilings; one of which has been plasterboarded and had the electrics installed for the lights. I'm very pleased with this weeks work.

The photo shows, quite literally, the suspended ceiling over the 3m by 3m open plan kitchen in the gite. The wooden joists, 200 by 32, running front to back support the metal rail system which the plasterboard is screwed to. The remainder of the downstairs is open plan with the full height of the ceiling exposing the old oak beams. You can just about see above the ceiling where I stopped cleaning the beams.

I getting the hang of loft hatches now I've finished the fifth one.