After 3 and half years of hard work, we are finally ready to open The Growing Green House. We made the choice to only reference the house on Airbnb. Future will tell if we were right or not.

The last weeks have been completely crazy. The beams have been sanded and whitewashed, walls and ceilings painted. I don’t think I want to see a paint roller again for a little while ! My whole right arm is sour…

But we were ready on time for this dead line. That is all what matters now. It is again one of these moments when time sits still and realization comes.

It was blood, sweet and tears, but there it stands, our first stone wall freshly repointed with lime mortar… And it does not look too bad for a first one !!

It still has to dry a few weeks for the color to match all over, but it does not stand in our way anymore.

We quickly learnt that you have to wear thick gloves and glasses while working with lime -my hands are still hurting- and that it gets everywhere, no matter how prepared you are !!!

It took us a while, but there it is, the structure of our first partition walls. It has been a lot of headaches to start with, as none of the existing walls were straight nor square. But we are starting to master the art of making walls look straight when they aren’t !

Digging has started again. The problem with it that you never know when it’s going to end !!! On the good side of things, we are blessed with the weather. No mud !

Graham is documenting the whole setting to avoid future issues, in the case we decide to dig again here…

It has been a long way to be here. And they have taken a big chunk of our building budget, but when we look at the doors and windows, we feel that they are worth all the efforts and headaches…

It reminds me of a sentence of my little brother, now our house have “eyes”…

Things are moving fast since the Christmas break. The windows are making such a difference and we can finally work inside without being frozen on the spot ! The first floor of the grange is being built and we can imagine the space so much better now.

It took such a long time to get there, but here we are !!! We now have a concrete slab in the grange and hopefully it will be a breathable one. We used lime concrete instead of traditional concrete, as we did not want the humidity from the ground to rise into the grange old stone walls…

It took 4 people and over 2 weeks to get rid of that old pressoir. There was so much metal reinforcement in the concrete that even the strongest marteau-piqueur we had could not break it easily…

After a week of heavy noise, the concrete floor is finally gone and the digging has started.
The room seems so much bigger, now that the ceiling is not so low anymore.

I started removing the cement plaster with a hammer and chisel with our German friend Bianca. It took us over an hour to reveal the stones over an area measuring 30 cm by 10 cm. We were so happy with the result at the time...