Well, it's true that on the plan I put sockets each side of the bed and in each of the four corners. Plus a few extra for the kitchen work tops, plus some in the hall and landing for the hoover. Plus several in the lounge. But I wasn't expecting double sockets everywhere and even one triple.
And then we managed to misunderstand - a mixture of Polish and broken French doesn't help - and had to make four (or was it five) journeys to buy the right stuff.
And how did we manage not to notice that there's no overhead light sockets in the kitchen? Apparently in France and Poland it's "not usual" to have overhead lights in the kitchen. Mmmm.
And there's this crazy system in France where virtually every socket has its own connection back to a separate fuse in the fuse box. The wiring by the front door where the fuse box goes looks like macramé.
And there's the Polish obsession with hiding all the cable behind the wall or in the ceiling and plastering over it, so it's not a good idea to realise, late in the day, that there's no overhead lighting in the kitchen. It meant cutting channels across the concrete bedroom floor above and dropping the new cable through holes drilled through the kitchen beams.
EDF (our electricity company) inspected the wiring down to the cottage. Did I mention one of the builders put an axe through the main cable while it was live? (He was alright, if a little surprised.) Anyway, there was much sucking of teeth by the EDF man who said the power line to the cottage "stretched too far" and it would have to be re-routed underground. We want twelve kilowatts into the cottage (at the moment there's only three). There was more doubtful sucking in of teeth. We'll see when they come to reconnect at the end of the month what the line will support.
The electric under-floor heating is supposed to be installed next week. We hope that we will be able to use it at the same time as boiling a kettle.
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