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.
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.
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