Home sweet home

We have in addition to unpacking all the boxes, put up our Christmas decorations - which look a bit lost in the room, but still very festive.




we are also currently in the process of washing and rehanging every curtain in the house (we have a LOT of windows) - but we are finished with the exception of a few minor jobs namely

hanging mirrors
hanging pictures
hiring a local carpenter to make bookshelves and a CD storage unit
finding toilet seats

the last job is seemingly easy, but we have evidence to the contrary. Long and winding story to follow.

We have 4 WCs in the house. They all have nasty cheap plastic seats which feel fragile, and the seats tend to drop when men are peeing. Not good, and the seat in the master suite had a crack in it, a) unhygienic and b) it occasionally would pinch. So last weekend we went in search of toilet seats, which are located in quinquilleries (french for hardware store) - there are numerous hardware stores throughout the city, often specialising slightly more in electrics, or plumbing or lighting, but you can't tell that from outside, so you have to go in to each one and see what they sell.
Many sell toilets and complete bathroom suites. Few sell toilet seats, and they are often only ever the cheap ones we already have. So we visited numerous shops trying to locate loo seats in mixture of french and english. We finally found a couple of high quality seats that seemed perfect until we got them home where it became apparent than none sell toilet seats to fit our rather pointy loos, as there was a huge gap between the seat and the porcelain. We managed to return these a few days later and get a refund when we proved that nothing they sold fit our loos (we have made a paper template now), and went in search again. Got talked into buying one which after much faffing around by Lon with fixings is OK, but still porcelain is protruding, so the search continues. But we have loos, which flush so happy days