This is the front part of a bakery oven, without the door, which we found under sacking, dust and rubbish in the corner of the barn when we started.

We have decided to save it, clean it up with blacking and install it in to one of the kitchen walls to be a feature above the range cooker. We think it will help to add history and character to our home.

This is what the inside of the Barn looks like as we start this project.

And then we removed the ivy from the top of the front boundary wall. By the way the trees above produce cooking cherries - I can see charry cakes, cherry pies and cherry jam already!!

One of the first jobs wasd to cut off all the dead bits and pieces of ivy stalk that had probably been there for about one hundred and eighty years!!

Have just found these two pictures of the village of Naillat.
I expect I can take better ones, but these will do for now!!

Can't Gavin draw good pictures!! We started the plans for our home on the back of an envelope !! Have to admit, though, that the finished home will probably be slightly diffrent from this plan !! The longer the time between this plan and when we actually get started on the project the more little changes we come up with!!

Gavin is just showing off a few of the treasures we found at the Naillat market!

Can't help feeling that this is going to become a new hobby - trawling markets and fairs for bits and pieces!!

These stilt walking entertainers are following a tradition which goes back to medieval times. Quite a surprise, I can tell you !! We understand that they go from market/fair to market/fair all the time - fantastic !!

I will add general pictures of the village of Naillat when we are next there, but here are a couple of pictures showing the annual market, which is held on the first Sunday of August. What fun and what bargains !!

Is it surprising that our children think we could be 'new age hippies' !! And even 'new age IT experts' !!

We bought our van on e-bay on the internet and drove all the way from the north of Scotland to the south coast of England to pick it up!! It is a bit of an old heap, but we love it!! We bought the caravan in Fife from an advertisement in the local paper!!

And so we set off in August 2005 for our first long stay in the grounds of our Barn. And what a pretty place this was for an overnight stay.

This is the first view we saw of OUR Barn. I had lots more pictures taken when we first saw our property. But in February 2006 we had a burglary from our apartment in London and our computer was stolen and all the pictures on it were lost. We have been able to re-download most of our pictures to our new computer, but not all of them. We may be able to download more eventually when all our belongings are retrieved from the storage in due course.

For the time being I will be downloading (or is that up-loading!!) to this Blog from the pictures we have at the moment. I wanted to start this diary while I have time. By the time we get to Naillat on a permanent basis we will probably be much too busy house building, garden planning, and generally settling into our new life to have much time to keep this up to date as I would like to. So this will be a start . . . .

In September 2003 we had a fabulous holiday in central France. We made all the arrangements for this holiday and property buying trip while Gavin was living and working Jakarta, Indonesia and I was living and working in Aberfeldy, Scotland. This is when you realise what great developments the world wide web, internet, e-mail and msn messenger truly are!!

We spent the first ten days of our holiday touring different parts of Limousin (our chosen area of central France). In fact, we drove about three thousand kilometres visiting and inspecting barns for conversion, houses for modernising as well as taking time to be tourists and getting to know the area better. As each day passed we liked the area more and more and decided that if we found somewhere we really liked this would be the perfect area to settle in over the coming years for our home together and for our retirement.

We had talked to Laura on e-mail and on the phone for a number of weeks and it was good to finally meet her and to visit the northern part of Creuse with her. When all of a sudden we rounded the corner on the outskirts of Naillat (between La Souterrraine and Gueret) and there was OUR barn!!