The kids are on vacation from school right now...but holiday atmosphere is thin on the ground.

We're WORKING over here, people!
Srsly

After talking about it for years, we've finally taken on the project of enlarging the twins' bedroom. Their room is rather small and it always seemed to me that the hallway and balcony right next to their room would be much more useful as part it.
All it would involve would be ripping down a thin brick wall and building a short new wall closer to the door to their room.
(Please note that the word all in the above phrase should have been enclosed in quotation marks or some other ironic device. )
These things always turn out to be more complicated (and time consuming and expensive!) than they first seem, don't they ?

Here is the hallway and the door to the balcony. The door to the girls' room is to the left. The door on the right leads to Sev's room.

The wall came down pretty well...it was messy work, though.
Luckily, we have help- we've a new Romanian friend! As any regular reader of my blog knows, we can't get anything done around here without at least one Romanian in the house.
With a bit of help from Sev, the wall was history with a few hours.....

Then the next step could be taken... the horrible wooden ceiling had to come down.

Go Sev!

The plaster underneath was so damaged that Paul (our New and Improved Romanian Handyman) insisted that it ALL come down, so that he would put in an all-new ceiling.

And when the plaster and lathes came down, we found this:

And so it was that the Mystery of the Extremely Scary Hornet Invasion was finally solved.
They hadn't only been attacking from the kitchen chimney and the garage and the front wall of the house, they'd actually been in a gigantic nest located right over Alexa's bed.

But it's gone now and, with counseling, Alexa should eventually be fine....

So- finally, the demolition-type work was all done...
We are ready to start building something!

School started last week and all four of my kids had different reactions: Mallory was thrilled, Valentine pleased, Severin zen and Alexa completely distraught.


The twins just started "collège" this year- it's the equivalent of the US junior high, but goes from age 11 to 14.
As indicated by the student-generated poster above, our local collège is known for its ski and snowboard team. (I'm not sure what's up with the cow. It's not, as far as I know, a bovine-oriented school)
Anyway- Mallory, luckily, is finding her new school delightful. She's excited to be like the older kids- eating in a cafeteria, taking the bus, changing classrooms every hour, etc...

Alexa, however, is feeling stressed out over the big change. I hope that she starts perking up soon. It probably doesn't help that she's not sleeping that well.
Why is my darling not resting peacefully, you may well ask ?

Well, that would be because she and Mallory have been sleeping in the living room for the past week due to the fact that their bedroom has been invaded by wasps.

It turns out that the crack in the front of our house goes all the way in and ends up in the ceiling of the twins' bedroom. and pumping poison into it from the outside gave the wasps only one place to go...

Over the past week, I've cleared a couple hundred wasps out of their room. They're slow, sleepy, half-dead wasps and I've only been stung once...but still.

It was last Tuesday that a strange little man with two gold teeth in front came to "get rid of" the wasp/hornet problem around here. But I'm hoping the problem is finally nearly at an end. Today, I've only found about a dozen, so things are definitely slowing down.

Never a dull moment...

Also- Many thanks to all the people expressing an interest in Papiers du Sahel! The orders for products and the kind words of encouragement mean a lot to the women of the project.