Merry Xmas

Seasons greetings and best wishes to friends and readers.

The Client, full of imagination at the challenge of taking up the interior decoration, decided on a thematic Christmas tree.

Santa has left an enormous R2D2 lookalike industrial vacuum cleaner for The Architect. I think that's called a hint.

We're in

The topping out seems like a lifetime ago, the sardines grilling in the garden, the vinho verde chilling in a bucket, the roof a skeleton of timber silhouetted against a blue sky. Here we are now, in deepest darkest winter, at long last moving in.
The interior is still very much a building site despite several weekends of painting and decorating. Slowly but surely, familiar domestic objects emerge, awakened prematurely from their 15 month bubble wrap and cardboard cocooned hibernation.

First real meal, first night in the Maison Camy. The Architect, The Client and The Skater are now in residence. Amidst dust, boxes, pipes and sawdust, the garden table was laid out for soup and pasta. Despite The Architects worst fears the house immediately felt like home. The warmth of domestic bliss slowly pushed back the cold fear of disorder and chaos initiating a genuine genus loci.


However, the morning shower, in stark contrast, was a rather bracing shock - especially for The Client who doesn't benefit from any English blood. The boiler is still supplying sporadic bursts of hot water - or should that be sporadic bursts of cold water?

The works continue.

Störung

If the plumber has managed to sort out the little problem of producing hot running water from our sophisticated German condensing boiler we might be in the Maison Camy tomorrow. The boiler has a very complicated control panel, lots of buttons symbols and lights and gauges. We’re told, in a rather chauvinistic manner by The Plumber, that its liquid crystal display screen will only speak German to us. Inferring that we would have been much wiser choosing a French boiler. Luckily it has a very limited vocabulary. For the last three weeks it’s been flashing the word Störung at us. No need for The Architect to go back to the Institut Goethe, a phone call confirms the obvious, the boiler is out of order.