Now and Then: the Staircase

 Above, this is what the staircase in our house looked like when we bought the place in 2006. 

Below, what it looks like now.

The photos are taken from the same spot on the first floor landing, but the staircases are in fact different. The original staircase was too far gone with water damage and had to be demolished. We commissioned a new staircase from our local joiners. The old one was made of oak and stained almost black, the new one is made of a hardwood from a managed forest in Ghana. Earlier this year Simon sanded and varnished the staircase so that its natural red colour is beautifully enhanced and protected.

To follow the history of our staircase adventures click here, for all the past posts about this part of our house renovations.

The reason the photos are posted is because Simon has recently been sorting the photos we have taken with our various digital cameras - all 60,815 of them. He was struck by how much work we have done: as he said "you sort of forget how far we have come". more than 10% (6,817) of the photos are of our house and the work we have done on it.

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A la cuisine hier: Méndiants are a chocolate studded with fruit and nuts treat that appear on French chocolatiers shelves at Christmas. I usually make them myself, and this year I used a non-standard recipe from Clotilde Dusoulier. This had the added bonus of giving me a batch of homemade granola as well.

For dinner I combined some cooked salmon with some mixed root vegetable mash and made a sort of savoury cake. It was a bit stodgy, but perfectly edible.

I charred some red peppers over the gas, slow roasted some anaemic supermarket tomatoes and set some duck legs to curing for confit. I also chopped and froze the remaining chillies we got from Colin and Elizabeth. A batch of chicken stock burbled away on the wood stove.