The missing room and the tree in our lounge

Underneath our lounge, and between our cave and the boiler room is a mysterious missing space...

It's possible this space is just filled in or was never really there, but (at least in my head) it's equally possible that it contains a chamber of secrets, a treasure room, or anything really (a crypt? a Doctor Who void-space?).

There's no obvious way into this treasure room (we shall call it). The only clear possibility until now has been the large 'water feature' in the middle of our lounge that contains a few plants and a small tree. The estate agent searched fruitlessly for a water connection for some minutes when we looked round the house first (there isn't one), but there is a lot of concrete and lots of bark chip under the plants, potentially hiding something.

So it was with some excitement that we cleared away the bark chips, leaves and old cat poo, and revealed....

...absolutely nothing at all, except a concrete floor. Perhaps there was a trapdoor there which has now been covered.

Anyway, needless to say, this is a great disappointment. There is an old freezer in the basement that backs onto the missing space with an alcove (or door) behind it that we can't quite see.

I shall have to work on moving that to see if we can get to the bottom of our missing room.

The House

Our house in France

In April 2010 we bought a house in France.

It's one half of a old hotel that's been partially renovated, and so much bigger than we need.  Some people may have been put off by the fact that both the basement and roof leak in the rain, and that half of it has neither electricity nor heating, but we kind of like it.

A lot of the main structural work to transform it to a family home has been done already, and the ground floor has been done up to an acceptable standard, but there remains a lot of work for us to do on both the inside and outside.

Due to our hectic life (we have three small kids and have just acquired two kittens to befriend our grumpy cat), this blog has arrived a little late - but rest assured, aside from moving in, setting up the essentials and replacing the numerous electrical items that packed up weeks after being moved, we haven't done anything yet!  With some major works scheduled for the imminent future, we've started blogging just in time to share some of our adventures in renovation with you.  And if we run out of stuff to tell you, Gav can happily share his collection of assorted power tools with you...for hours and hours...