Faience

Wall tiles are called faience in French. We chose really standard kitchen classic tiles - white 15 cm square, laid in a plain fully aligned pattern.

Patrick laying tiles.

Patrick did the work for us and they gave him a bit of trouble. The tiles are only 4 mm thick and rather prone to cracking if they needed cutting to shape. A number of times I heard 'Putain ! C'est pas possible !' which meant that a second attempt at cutting a tile to go around an electrical plug socket had cracked. He says they are fine once they are safely glued to the wall though.

The finished tiles in situ.

We used a white plastic edge strip to run along the top and cover the raw edges of the tiles. This seems to be how it is done these days, rather than use expensive bullnosed edge tiles.

Susan

Hurricane Joachim: For those of you who read Ken and Walt's blogs, you will have noticed they didn't post this morning. We phoned them at 9am and they said they and the houses around them at the top of the hill don't have power. If the electricity isn't restored by lunchtime we will go up with our generator for them. We've had a lot of wind and rain (more than any other rain episode this year) and lots of little brownouts. We lost the internet for a couple of hours yesterday morning. No damage here in town that I know of though, unlike Xynthia in February 2010 when the streets were littered with roofing materials. The weather today is beautiful.