We’re currently facing several of challenges at Les Terraces.  All of them are equally pressing and require three vital ingredients: time, money and our being there.  None of which are readily available.  They were, in no order of importance,

• Do some upgrades to internal doors
• getting our car registered and
• obtaining quotes/planning permission for the next thing that we want to do to the house.

However, life has a way of prioritising things for you.  These French entry doors are tricky things to say the least.  It took me ages to learn how to use one (and boy do you feel stupid when you can’t unlock your own front door!!).  However, now that I have the knack down it appears that the mechanism itself is knackered!

Needless to say, we didn’t discover this problem ourselves.  Poor Sara did.  She and Pat were en-route to do something in Bordeaux and decided to stop in on the way through and check the house/mail etc for us.  Sara opened the door, checked the house and then couldn’t close the door.  She tried everything that she could to no avail and then rang us to give us a heads-up that there was a problem and to find out how we’d like her to handle it.  How terrible did I feel?? Awful. Sara and her mother were busy on their way to do something and there they were, stuck because the door couldn’t be locked.  I asked Sara to contact a locksmith for us (I recalled that there is one in Pineuilh and there is a yellow pages on the hall stand).    She promised to call me back and let me know how things went.  I worried, but got on with my day’s work.  After all, what could I possibly do from 4,100 miles away (as the crow flies) other than earn the money required to remedy this latest problem?

The day rolled on and we heard nothing.  I crossed my fingers and hoped that the old saw of “no news is good news” held true.  By the time that I’d left work for the day and still heard nothing I was ready to believe that we’d dodged another bullet.  Sara popped that balloon several days later (when I had really lulled myself into thinking that all was OK) when she emailed to say that the locksmith had been wonderful but that he had diagnosed the problem as an internal mechanism having been broken due to a poor original installation of the door.  He had effected a temporary repair but more serious work was required.

Worse still (from a guilt point of view) was that these problems cost Sara & Pat a 4-hour delay.  Sara would have called to update us that day, but her cell phone had died on her.  Dinner and a good bottle of wine are clearly the least that we can do to thank Sara for her help and to make up for whatever it was that she and Pat didn’t get to do in Bordeaux that day.  Since they live a 45 minute drive from us maybe lunch will be a better invitation!