DIRTY LEEDS

Things were getting very twitchy in the Fuhrer Bunker this weekend, listening to 'Dirty' Leeds hold out with 10 men for 85 minutes, until BWP found the onion bag. Now Saints still have an outside chance of going up and now Leeds look odds on for the drop. I try not to put football references in the blog, but I just can't stand Leeds, ever since the 70's and outraged my brother by cheering on Munich to win the European cup against them!

On the building front, things are starting to take shape, and I got to use a new power tool! When the windows were replaced, a couple of tiles had to be removed by the front door, so I finally got to use my new electric tile saw. It's a small table saw, with a disk cutter and a water tray to cool it down. It can even be set at an angle for mitre cuts. When I think of the hours I've spent doing this in the past with a handsaw. This did two tiles in two minutes.

Once I'd finished playing with my new toy, it was back to the plasterboard, finishing off the back wall. This required lots and lots of cutting, to get round the roof joists, and a lot of battening out at the top of the walls, as there was a deep recess where the stonework finished. Tina came up with a top idea for this, to use the steel rails that you would use to make a partition wall, instead of wood, and this was a lot quicker than trying to put wood up there.

The wall is now boarded up from end to end, cutting it out as much as possible around the stone features on the windows, and the old beam on top of the french windows ( or doors as they are known over here. I have even done a little bit of stone masonry, cutting and fitting some limestone on the ends of the window sill to fill in a gap.

It's not easy trying to keep some of the original features, but hopefully we will be able to mix the new insulated walls with some of the old , to retain a bit of character.

I've also done a succesful continuity test on the earth for the sockets in this room, using my training at last.

Sandblast-it!

We had a delivery from E-Bay this week, our long awaited Sandblaster. It is a small pistol with a plastic tank that you put the sand in. You then have to put it in the end of an air-compressor, to push the sand out. That's where the fun started.

Not knowing a lot about compressors, we had a look on-line and asked around to try and see what we needed. The box with the compressor said it needed 90-115 PSI (pounds per square inch) and 3 horsepower, but the French people we spoke to spoke a lot about the number of litres of air that it put through each hour and that it must have a 100 litre tank.

We made up our mind that a 200 Euro 3CV compressor in Castorama would be OK for us, although it only had a 50 litre tank. However , when we got there they had an offer on a 2CV compressor (that could produce the right pressure) that was on offer for 84 Euros, so we to a chance, and bought the bargain. We also picked up some safety gear, a face mask and a respirator, along with a connecting hose, we picked up a sack of sand and we thought that we were ready to go.

When we got home, I put the compressor together, but couldn't work out where to connect the hose. I went to the local builders merchants with the instructions to get some help. I managed to get an adaptor for the end of the hose, but not before getting the piss ripped out of me by the lad in the shop, for buying a crappy castorama compressor in the first place.

Armed with the new adaptor, I put on my safety gear and started work. It started of OK, and cleaned up some of the stones, but soon seemed to struggle. As it was getting dark, we decided to stop, and try again in daylight.

The next morning, I had another go and it soon became clear that the bloke in the builders merchant was right, the compressor wasn't up to the job. I rang up castorama to see if I we could swap the compressor for a bigger one, even though I had tested it. They said yes, so I took it apart, cleaned it up, put it back in it's box, and headed off back to Limoges.

This time, I took the advice of the the bloke in the shop who pointed out that the only compressor that was up to it was 500 Euros, way out of our price range. Armed with a refund, I was now off to the local hire shop, to try one out for the day.

At the hire shop, the owner showed me how to operate the compressor and helped me load it into the car. When I was writing out the deposit cheque, I asked the owner the date. 'Vendredi 13eme, le meme en Angleterre ? ' . I told him that it was the same in England. I also thought that maybe it was not the best day to use some industrial kit for the first time.

So, I got the compressor home, connected it all up, and turned it on. After two seconds it stopped. I checked the fuses, and found that it had blown a 10 amp one. Next I connected it up to a socket on a 16 Amp fuse, but it wouldn't go. I checked the socket and extension lead out. Everything was OK bar the compressor so , in desperation I phoned the shop. The owner said that he would come out and have a look, and luckily, I didn't get him lost with my French directions.

He played around with it for five minutes, but it did nothing. He had a look at the blurb which he had brought with him, but it held no clues. All the time, I'm thinking 'Friday 13th'. Finally, he fiddled around with the machine, and found a tiny black button, on a black background, which turned out to be the reset button. Success!

Sand came out for a while, but then stopped. We had some more fun and games, while he drained the water that had built up in the bottom of the tank, but when he left, it all seemed to work OK. He had a look at the area that I wanted to clean that day, wished me 'bon courage' and left me to it.

The sand flow was a bit intermittent, but it did work most of the time, once I had blown any remaining air out of the compressor tank, but it the effect wasn't quite as good as we had hoped.

We had hoped it would be like a pressure washer, cleaning the moss of of a patio, but it proved a lot harder to clean the stones, as you had to hold the pistol a few inches away from the stones. It didn't come up like Salisbury Cathedral, but it did clean out all of the joints around the stones, so we are almost ready to start re-pointing.

As for next time, a proper sized sandblaster costs £1,500 and then needs a compressor the size of the ones that BT uses to did up roads, so we will see.

THE VAN FROM HELL

It's been a busy week. We started with a trip to a new builders merchants on Monday, as they had a lot of special offers on, and we've ordered the slabs for the poolside, as they were half price. It will be a few months before I can use them, as the pool isn't due until June, but they were a bargain. It just means the garden will even look more like a building site for a while.





In the barn, we needed some more plasterboard, so it was time to borrow the scary van again from the local 3MMM.









It doesn't look that big in the picture, but to me it feels like driving a bus. The last time I hired it, I nearly took out half the warehouse, trying to corner. The gearbox seems upside down, (although they have now got a sticker on the dashboard with where the gears are, rather than it being scrawled in marker pen) and the gear lever is now stuck on with gaffer tape. It scares the hell out of me, driving it, but it only costs 9 Euros to hire, so needs must.

Before we could start hanging the boards, we had to bind the walls to give the boards something to grip. In England, you would water down some PVA and paint the walls with it. Over here you use a fixateur which is like PVA, but two or three times more expensive. Might be a business opportunity there, setting up a PVA website?

Hanging the boards has proved a lot more difficult than on the breeze block walls. Even though we had bound the walls with the fixateur, the first piece of plasterboard had trouble sticking to the mortar on the walls, and added to that the stone walls are very uneven. I had to take the first piece down again, and add a lot more plaster dabs to the wall before it would stick. I have also had to cut round the window, as it had some nice stonework that we wanted to keep, and cut round the roofing joists at the top as well. On top of that, we could barely get a sheet up the scaffold between us, so we had to take it down and cut it in half before I could hang it, as there was no way that I would have been able to dangle over the edge of the scaffold with it.

You can probably see in the picture that the joints are a bit uneven, due to the wall behind them being all over the place, so we think that we will have to use my agricultural skimming to finish the wall off, rather than dry lining it, but that is probably more in keeping with the rest of the room anyway.

We have also fitted six replacement windows as well. An impressive weeks work you might say. Not really though. It was Monseur Chatillon. All we did was make him cups of chocolate chaud as he doesn't drink coffee or alcohol (not typically French) .

The doors look good, but now we have to wait for him to replace the shutters, as they look crap by comparison.