Chateau de Firbeix

All the trees directly in front of the chateau are terribly overgrown, as is much of the garden and outside areas. While working on renovating the upstairs bathroom in Les Arbres when it wasn't raining, I started pollarding the 7 willow trees. The jury is still out if these are actually willow trees, my brother Mark thinks they're Lime trees. They are to be found throughout France.  In case you are not familiar with the term "pollard", it just means pruning branches to encourage growth. Before One done! All done! Now the pollarded tree have leaves again, I'm adding a pic in case anyone can help identify them. Several mentions of a Lime tree.

One of my first projects, before my brother and son arrived, is to remodel the upstairs bathroom in the gîte we'll be living in to begin with, Les Arbres.  I started this in early December and thought it would be a quick job but I quickly found out tile, cabinets, showers must be ordered and this can take 4-6 weeks, even when the world is working normally! Gutting the old bathroom was not too bad except the tiles around the old pedestal sink would not come off the plaster board without damaging it so I opted to remove that section of board and replace it with new. I added 2 additional metal studs to the outer edges of the hole so the new plaster board would fit seamlessly with the old. The wooden studs you can see are for the pedestal sink which was screwed into these for additional support. The shower base they had in stock so I bought this and quickly realised the wall where the shower was going was about 3cm out of square so I had to add batons and new plast...