1After a comfortable night’s sleep I woke to a breezy but sunny day. A cup of coffee followed by a game of fetch the ball with Banjo preceded a walk around the house and garden looking and considering what jobs were to be done this year.
The roof on the barn had bowed slightly and it was felt that 4 support pillars would not go amiss.
Some cosmetic work in the garden with a possible ‘feature’ in one corner was an instruction left by Genya.
The tiling of the new wood store was a must before the winter.
Further grouting around the pool that had not been completed from my visit last year.
Re-roofing the extension to the house.

After a further coffee and then a salad lunch, priorities were set. The house roof (despite my reticence) was to be the big project. David has helped with the roofing of the barns and felt that we were up to it (we shall see). The rest of the hour was spent brainstorming materials and procedures and I got out the pen and paper and listed it all down. An ‘un-focussed’ David in the past has disliked me doing this but this time ‘a more-focussed’ David seemed sold on the idea and contributed greatly to its input.

Later that afternoon, armed with our ‘to-do’ list we drove, with Banjo perched on my knee into the builder’s merchant in Dryanovo. We stopped off in one of the villages for David to arrange with a Bulgarian he had employed in the past to help us with the roof. At the merchants we looked, discussed, looked again and then purchased the materials needed.

On return to Ritya we again went over our plans and then considered the issue of rain and exposed roof. It was decided to use the pool cover if needed (hopefully not). A trip next door to see Mark and look at his roof then took place with a further visit to Milen’s to be polite and say hello. He was busy collecting walnuts with his 70+ year old father.

Returning to the house I made a pasta bake with tuna and sweetcorn. I made so much that we only consumed half of it and placed the rest in the fridge for the following day. That evening we watched a film and opened a bottle of beer. Banjo had decided that my room was preferable for sleeping in and parked himself on the bottom of the bed and remained there until roughly 5am, when I let him out to do his ‘business’. I returned to sleep and rose at 7am to find that he had also returned to his spot at the bottom.

After coffee under the new wood store roof David and I added to the list of materials needed and then drove into Dryanovo to count out 40 good straight joists that we hadn’t the time to do on our previous visit to the builder’s merchant. We added more lats to the consignment and also sand and cement to the lorry load that was to be delivered that afternoon. We picked up a new saw and two pairs of gloves in the town on our return journey.

It was lunch time so we finished off the past from the night before. We set about clearing a path through the overgrown garden of next door to the side of David’s house as this was to be our route to working on the roof. A couple of hours later, sweaty and tired we had chopped out all the trees and bushes growing in our way and were satisfied that it had been flattened as much as it could be. Around 4pm the lorry arrived. Milen helped us unload first the wood and then the tiles. The wood was deposited outside David’s barn and the tiles in next doors garden. We broke around 6 of the 900 tiles, which I thought was good going.

To celebrate a successful unloading Milen and his father brought around some dried meat, David opened a bottle of beer and we chatted under the wood store roof.

That evening pizzas and oven chips went into the oven and another film viewing planned.