Sales brightened at DIY retailer Kingfisher (LON:KGF) as people bought garden goods and other outdoor merchandise as summer began.
Kingfisher, which owns B&Q in the UK and Castorama and Brico Dépôt in France, said total sales rose 4.8% or 3.5% on a like-for-like basis in the 10 weeks to July 11.
UK & Ireland like-for-like (LFL) sales increased 5.5% and French sales gained 1.3%.
French shoppers made the most of the good weather, with seasonal product sales rising 8.3% at Castorama and non-seasonal goods broadly flat.
But UK consumers still appeared to be focusing on DIY, with like-for-like sales of outdoor seasonal products lifting 1.3% but sales of indoor products gaining 5.1%.
Kingfisher said its other French business, Brico Dépôt, continued to be hit by a soft house-building market.
Its Screwfix trade counter business in the UK was on track to open 11 new outlets during the second quarter, taking the total to 412.
Poland LFL sales of seasonal products up 16.5% with LFL sales of non-seasonal products up 2.9%.
Sales in Russia reflected "more normalised" consumer spending, after a strong first quarter with like-for-like sales up 31.3% in an uncertain market.
The group has returned £138mln to shareholders via a share buyback since the end of the year.
Chief executive Véronique Laury said: "We have delivered a solid second quarter sales performance to date across all our major businesses, albeit against softer comparatives than in the first quarter."
Kingfisher has been streamlining its business into a single structure rather than running it on a country-by-country basis.
Shares in Kingfisher rose 7.9p to 374.9p in early London trading.
Broker Hargreaves Lansdown said the fact that each of the like-for-like numbers were up could be an early vindication of the strategy.
Hargreaves's head of equities Richard Hunter said: "The shares have staged something of a recovery more recently, now having risen 9% over the last year, as compared to a 2% dip for the wider FTSE100.
"If this level of progress can be maintained in the following quarters, the long standing market consensus of the shares as a weak hold may need to be positively revised."