Festival time

We've just returned from England and we have had a few complaints, all justified, that the blog has not been updated in a while.



A lot of this is due to the fact that Saints have been so bad this year that I can't type and listen to the commentary at the same time, or if I did it might read something like this "Tina and I have just finished GET SOMEONE ON THE NEAR POST FOR F SAKE" .



Anyway, I will start with an account of our Summer Holiday this year.



We have both been fans of Radiohead for a while, but had never had the chance to see them live as tickets in the UK were almost impossible to get hold of, given the anorak wearing reputation of their fans. With the new album out, we new that they would be touring, and kept an anxious eye on the web to see if they would come to France. We hoped that they might come to Angouleme, as it was a fairly Eco friendly Festival, but the closest that they came to us was Arras, up near the Belgian border. We looked into hotels near the site, no tents for us, and found that special trains had been laid on from Lille for only €5 return. My brother and Tina's sister were also able to come over for the weekend, on a ridiculously cheap Eurostar deal.



As Lille was such a long way from our house, we stopped for a night in the Champagne area to break the journey. We had a nice hotel, in a small village outside Epernay, but is must have been the only village in the region without it's own Champagne house, so we couldn't nip out for a tasting, although they did have a good choice of Champagnes in the hotel bar.



The next day we took the scenic route through the spectacular hills and vineyards of the Champagne, some of which were so steep that they would be mountains in the UK.

We arrived in Lille around lunchtime, parked up at a Park and Ride at the edge of the city and caught the metro into the centre, none of that city driving for us country folk. We had a good hotel, in the historic centre of Lille, close to lots of bars, shops and restaurants. Tina and I had a couple of hours to find our way around before Terry and Helen arrived, and we found one quiet street that was full of all sorts of bistro's and restaurants.

That evening, the four of us went for a few drinks before we headed of for something to eat. The quiet street had changed completely. The pavements were now covered in tables, and there were tow trucks hauling cars away so that more tables could be set up in the road. The bistro that we had our eye was overflowing by 7:30 but we managed to get into another one for some typical Flemish cuisine, beouf carbonade etc. The food was great, not expensive and that atmosphere in the street was so busy. I can't think of many countries where they shut down a road every evening just to eat.



The next morning, we had time for a bit of sight seeing, before getting the train to Arras. Lille is very Flemish in it's architecture, as you can see in the picture above, with cobbled streets and grand squares and is definitely worth a weekend trip.

The 'Main Square Festival' as the name suggests is in the main square of Arras. It is good spot for an urban festival, as the square is long and slopping, so that you can see the stage from anywhere. All around the square were galleried walkways with bars and cafes that had set up counter serving food and drink. The only beer on offer was Heineken ( much better than Carling in the UK) but we couldn't see any wine for sale anywhere. In the end I asked at one of the bars, and they went inside and got Tina a nice glass of rose for €2.50. As the evening wore on, the measures got bigger and she was getting a full half pint! We could see lots of people thinking, where did she get that from, which just goes to show, if you don't ask you don't get.

Anyone that lived on the square seemed to have have security bracelets on, so that they could sit in their windows and watch the bands for free. Not so good the night before when Mika was the headline act.

On the minus side, there weren't nearly enough loos, and no hedges for us blokes. Also, all the alleyways around were guarded by bouncers, so you couldn't nip off for a wee. In the end, all of the men were weeing on the walls of the toilet block leaving a river of wee flowing past the portaloos. Added to that, everyone seemed to get hungry at the same time, and so we ended up in a long panicky queue for burgers for about an hour, only to find out that our favorite bar was still serving merguez baguettes late into the night.

Onto the music.

The first band up were New York indie kids Vampire Weekend followed by Wombats, from Liverpool, as you can probably tell from the lead singers perm.



Wombats were very lively, and the drummer had taken the effort to learn some French so that he could engage the crowd, only to run out of steam mid sentence "Bonjour, nous sommes Wombats et nous sommes de Liverpool. Le prochaine, er , ah .... oh bollocks". Tina and I enjoyed both bands, but I think they found a Radiohead audience hard to warm up.

A French ,The Do's, were next up, and they were OK, better than most stuff on French radio, then it was on to the main acts.

We hadn't really heard of Sigur Ros before we booked the tickets. They're from Iceland, and are a bit unique musically, a four piece but with a string and brass section as well. You might know the music from BBC's Blue Planet series. They started their set of quietly but then, like a lot of their songs, the sound builds up into a crescendo. We were all just stood there with our mouths open, what an incredible sound/row.

We couldn't understand a word of it, as it was all in Icelandic, and some of it was in a language the lead singer has made up, but it was brilliant.

The link has a recording on someones phone, that gives you a bit of an idea, but it is much better with your own ears.


http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qCD4P8A7JS8

When Radiohead came onstage the crowd suddenly seemed to get taller, and we had to move further back to be able to see.






They had an amazing light show, with these long tubes full of little lights that seemed to move in time to the music. A few of those tubes would look great in our barn, if they have finished with them now.

They did a full 2 hour set, with the whole of In Rainbows and lots of old favorites, but not Creep (sorry Helen).

The link below has a high quality video of one of the songs, from the French TV.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=h0bhQaPU08U


At 12:00 it was a mad dash back to the train station to get the indie-kid special back to Lille and a well earned rest.

It was a long trip back home for all of us the next day, but we all agreed that it had been worth it, to see such a great chin rubbing double bill.

Dream Kitchen - Finishing touches

The kitchen is now finished, more or less. We found some tiles we liked after looking everywhere for green tiles, we found some nice grey ones in Leroy Merlin at Bordeaux ( as a bloke, I know nothing about colours, so it was down to Tina).

With all the tile factories of Spain and Italy so close across the border, we where a bit surprised when the ones we bought were by a British company. We think that they match the cooker and the units quite well.

The lights above the island unit where a bit of a pain to fit, as we had lost the instructions, but we managed to work it all out in the end. It took us all day, with the worst bit trying to fix the transformer to the ceiling and the wooden ceiling turning out not to be flat!.

The walk in larder is now all kitted out as well. Tina has been through all of the boxes in the barn and found all sorts of bits and pieces that no kitchen should be without ( although we did alright for two years while the stuff was in boxes) and we still have some space left in the new units.

The cooker cable is now well camouflaged in a false beam, conjured up by my friend Peter, who is very handy with wood. He knocked it all up in an hour, when it would have taken me a day at least.

The utility room has been tiled as well, so both rooms are now more or less finished.

We are still debating whether or not to try and hide to extractor fan duct under some wood, or to leave it as some sort of post modern industrial minimalist statement. Who knows ?

Dream Kitchen - Part Two

Now for the refit.

The first task was to put in the units around the source for the new cooker, so that Mr H could switch the gas supply over.

I managed to get all of the wall units, and the cooker hood up on the wall beforehand and so we soon had a bigger kitchen than we started with, although we didn't have a sink.

As the cooker was on an internal wall, we had to run a duct across the ceiling and through to the outside. This was a hell of a job, as the walls are over 2 foot thick, and there always seemed to be a large rock in the wrong place. It took me the best part of a day, and we ended up with 3 buckets full of stone and an enormous hole, compared to the size of the duct.

We did a test run of the extractor, and the exhaust parted your hair, but luckily I hadn't glued it on so we were able to switch it round.

Now it was full on to finish the units.

The sink was a bit tricky, as it is a bit nerve wracking cutting holes in an expensive worktop, and the island took a bit of construction. Ikea units ( other brands are available) are very good, and quite easy to put together. They have guide holes for fitting the legs and for fitting the cupboards from side to side, but nothing for building a back to back island unit. We had to drill lots of holes, and screw planks underneath to hold it together, but it hasn't imploded yet.

Dream Kitchen Part1

Hello again.

I know that the updates to the blog have been few and far between, but we have been very busy lately, working 7 days a week some times.

We have been fitting our new kitchen and, as you can imagine, life without a kitchen is pretty tricky, hence all the unpaid overtime.

Anyway, before we could start, we had to redecorate the old living room and move the table and dresser out of the kitchen, to turn it into a breakfast room.







This only took us a couple of days, as opposed to the 9 months it took to build the living room.

Now it was the turn of the kitchen.

First we ripped out the sink and worktops and stripped all the old tiles off the walls.







This left us with an emergency kitchen like this, no worktop and no sink.






Now I had to re-arrange all of the electrics to fit the new kitchen units. This meant cutting lots of holes in the walls, and running cables all over the place. We had an added complication when I checked out Tina's new cooker, and found that it was so powerful that it would blow the cable for the existing cooker socket, so I had to run a thick 6mm cable through the back of the house to the new consumer unit I put in last year.

We built a stud wall under the stairs, where the cooker used to be, to turn it into a larder, and then came the fun job of filling in all of the holes that I had just cut for the wiring, and plastering the walls where the tiles used to be. (step one, skim the walls , step two sand them down again, step three try another skim ......)



Finally, Tina was able to paint the wall, and we were ready to start fitting the kitchen.

The in between bit

The wasteland between our new living room and the rest of the house is finally taking shape.

After the loo was knocked out and the pipes removed, it looked like this.




With a lot of hard graft, it has now been transformed to a working utility room and a cellar ( OK, I know it's not under ground, but it has no windows and a wine rack, so we call it the cellar).



The floor is Vietnamese marble, which was a nice price, and looks right for the age of the house, but it was a sod to grout, as little tiles means lots of joints. Tina was well 'grouted out' by the end of it.

We were uming and ahing about what door to put on the cellar. A hand built one by Mr Chattilon would run to about €600, so we looked at getting a shop built pine door, which would have cost about €100. Mr H, our builder friend, persuaded me that I could build one myself, so I gave it a go. It was tricky to rebate the door frame, and the gaps where the boards meet are a bit more visible than on Mr Chatilons doors, but then he has been making them for 40 years. For a first attempt, we were very pleased.



The only other problem was getting door furniture, as my timber yard could only supply boards that were 22mm thick, and most doors are 30mm, so no locks would fit, but we got one in the end. When I make the doors for the rest of the house I will have to get hold of some thicker timber so they look the same as the others.

The units all went together OK with no bits missing, which is good for IKEA, but we will have to see how lucky we are with the kitchen. I had a bit of fun with the plumbing, as one of the flexible pipes that they use to connect the taps was nice and waterproof when it was straight, but not so good when you tried to do the flexible bit.



We've also got the washing machine installed now, with no leaks (touch wood) although there was some fun in the bathroom, where I cut down the old waste pipe for the washing machine, but decided to have a shave before I went to get the plastic cap to block it off. When I emptied the sink, a fountain of stubbly water shot out of the old pipe. Never interrupt plumbing for personal hygiene!

What we've been up to while we haven't updated the blog

Once again it has been a long time since we updated this, as we have been working hard and not got round to typing.

We've extended the patio around both sides of the pool now, which make it look even bigger. Mum and dad helped to prepare the ground work while they were over, and Tina and I did all the concreting and slabbing. This time I tried laying the slabs directly onto concrete, rather than concrete with a mortar layer on top.






This radical new method is popular in Italy, where they will lay tiles directly onto a wet concrete floor, but that wasn't why I chose this method, I just bought the wrong type of sand at the builders merchants ( problems in translation).



It proved to be a bit faster, in some ways, as you only have to mix one layer, but it is also more difficult to get level, due to the big bits of gravel in the concrete mix. I think next year, when we do the bottom end of the pool, I will go back to the traditional way, and leave the new method to the Italians.








It looks like it's finished in this picture, but you can't see the mud at the other end. We will have to wait until next year until it settles down, so that it is stable enough to build on. Last week, as it has been so dry over here this month, we had big cracks appear along all of the trenches that we had filled in, a bit like a 1970's Charlton Heston movie. No other seismic activity to report.

Pool Problems

We have had a few problems with the swimming pool over the winter. "Tough" I hear you say, "serves you right for having a pool in the first place".


What happened? Over the winter, the pool was covered with the security cover, and part time cat trampoline.






When we first took the cover off, we found that the liner was all wrinkled up, like on of my T-shirts in the back of the wardrobe. Even stranger, when I tried to clean the bottom of the pool, the whole liner moved, like there was a giant bubble under it. Also, the filter box was full of water, so much so that the pump was submerged.











We got straight on the phone to the pool company and e-mailed some pictures to see what they thought. We thought that the liner might have a leak, but it turns out that the problem was caused by groundwater getting underneath the liner. They said that we would have to wait until the water level dropped, then they could come and inspect the liner, but that they would probably have to empty the pool and refit the liner.


I flunked out of geography when I was about 13, so I didn't know much about water-tables, but after a bit of research on the interweb, we found that this was not unusual and that in some cases the water-table is so forceful that it can lift a pool out of the ground, like a cork out of a bottle.

We waited for it to stop raining, then waited some more, but after a few weeks it still hadn't stopped raining, so we decided to take action ourselves. Under the filter box, there was a bed of sand that was supposed to drain away any excess water when the pump gets disconnected for the winter. This was surrounded by a bank of earth when the pool was landscaped.


If we had the same soil as Wiltshire, this would have been fine, but as our soil over here is full of clay, we decided that we might have accidentally built a dyke to hold up all the water. I dug a trench down as deep as the top of the sand bed, and as I dug out the last bit of dirt, by the filter. there was a glugging sound and the earth wall cracked, just like the Dam busters. The water rushed out like I had hit the mains.


The water drained for a good week or so and we didn't notice that the liner had dropped back into position. It was only when we got a digger man round to quote for some proper drainage that we realised that the pool was OK again. I went to show the digger man the liner to explain the problem and it was perfectly straight. Yippee. We had lucked out. The pool had fixed itself without us having to empty it and then wait for the pool company to fix it.


Now it was time to get the pool working again. I connected the pump back up, primed it an switch it on. Nothing. I checked the electricity supply to the pool, and that was all fine, so it had to be a knackered pump. We got back on the phone to the pool company, and they talked me through how to strip the pump down, and get it working again. First we tried cleaning it up, as it had spent the winter immersed in sandy water. Then downloaded the instructions of of the Internet and tried to turn the shaft with a screwdriver but it wouldn't move . Next of was the fan cover, but it still wouldn't budge. Finally, I took the impeller off and managed to turn the shaft using a giant pump spanner. That did the trick.



Excited, we put the pump back into the filter box, connected it up turned the switch and nothing happened. It was buggered, but but a least I now know a lot about pumps The pool people sent us a replacement, and the pool is working fine. Tina has been in a few times, but it is still too cold for me.



The digger man came round the other week and worked the pair of us into exhaustion. He dug out a soak-away next to the filter box, but the earth started to collapse into it, so Tina and I had to quickly fill it up with a tonne of rocks. This is now connected up to another soak-away (tonne of rocks) by a pipe surrounded by gravel. We also have a long drain, running past the pool, to take water away from the pool and out into the ditch.






In one day we managed to fill a lot of the drains back in. Richard Grant, the digger man, even helped us load up wheelbarrows when we started to fall behind his pace and he had nothing left to dig. He was really good, hard working and he knew his stuff. If anything, he was too hard working, as we could hardly move when he had finished.








It took us a couple of days to fill it all back in( six tonnes of gravel). The drain seems to work OK, but I suppose we won't know properly until next winter. Now we just have to landscape in all the left over dirt.


So there you have it, owning a pool is not as easy as you think.

Normal Service Is Resumed

Sorry, you readers out there, but we have been a bit busy lately and so the blog hasn't been updated for a while. Also, with the stress of Saints relegation struggle, I was spending my time on-line searching the web for any news to cheer me up, like a new loan signing for Saints or a plaque of boils for the Leicester squad. I think a few Leicester fans would to a plague of boils over Ian Holloway any day.

Anyway, the blog is now back, with more news of our building work.

Since we finished the new living room, we have been concentrating all of our efforts on the utility room, or as it is at the moment, the dusty corridor between the kitchen and the living room. We had already knocked the old toilet out, along with most of the wall that was behind it too, but there was a lot more work needed to turn the space into something usable.

The first thing was to sort the plumbing out. We had lots of pipes that were attached to the old wall, and now hung in mid air, like some sort of still. To get them seamlessly across the new room, I carefully dug out a channel the width of the room, at his suggestion, for Mr H the plumber to bury the pipes in.

When Mr H arrived to move the pipes, he did another survey of all the pipes and remembered that he had already laid some pipes under the concrete, and so we didn't need the channel after all. We managed to move the rest of the pipes under the bath into another hole that I had cut in the bathroom wall, and suddenly you could walk through the room without risking tripping over a mass of copper pipes, although you could still fall down the unused channel that I had dug.

Now the floor needed to be sorted. First we had to take up the old blue tiles that were in the old loo. These were laid on a thin concrete screed, which was on top of the main concrete base of the house. We took a long time to decide how much of the tiles that we needed to remove, as we needed to get a good straight line to finish on. We thought about going right up to the bathroom door, but it would be very tricky to cut a straight line in such a confined space, and there would have been more fun and games with the step at the other side of the room, which is also covered in the blue tiles.

In the end our mind was made up for us, as we had decided to use the stone left over from the living room in the utility room and there wasn't enough to cover the whole space. I worked out the different sizes we would need to cover the whole room and we went to order them, only to find that you can't order just 1 stone of a particular size, but that you have to buy it in linear metres, which would be far more than we needed. So now we have a blue corridor at the end of the room, which avoids a lot of problems.

Next up we filled the empty channel back up, and put down some levelling compound to tie the floors in, either side of the old wall. This was a lot more successful than when I tried it in our first house, and ended up with a little mound of leveling compound in the middle of the kitchen.

The last wall now needed to be studded out, and as it needed to be able to support cupboards, it had to be studded in wood, with an extra layer of chipboard for strength.

Before we could plaster, I had to remodel the cellar doorway, as I hadn't allowed for the width of a door frame, as well as the door, and we would have ended up with a door so thin that only size zeros could get through it. It might have been handy for incarcerating Victoria Beckham, but not much good for the pair of us.

Finally, the room was ready to skim, or in my case skim and sand all the bumps out. Skimming the plasterboard was not too bad , and even the ceilings were OK. I was expecting to come out looking like a wedding cake, but managed to get a lot more on the ceiling than I did on myself.

So this is how it looks at the moment.

BREAKTHROUGH!

The time has finally come to break through into the new rooms. The flooring has all been finished and grouted, although we did have to spend a long time getting grout stains off of the stone work. Limestone tends to be hard to clean, as it is so porous.


We hired a large polisher for a day, which was so powerful that it slid me across the room into a wall, like Wile E Coyote.






It did clean up a lot of the grout, but it wouldn't clear up the edges of the slabs, so we had to scrub it all of by hand. We tried scourers and different cleaning products, but in the end the most effective thing was Wet and Dry paper. Tina did most of the cleaning, I helped out for the last couple of days as she got RSI, and she did so much scrubbing that she lost all her finger prints. It would have been a good time to go out on a burglary spree, if we were scouses.


While all this was going on, we started to knock out the old toilet, and the wall behind it, so that we could open up the utility room. The block wall was rock solid. In one week, we managed to knock out two blocks. The original builder must have come straight from building the Maginot Line.


The next week was more productive. After Saints non performance against Bristol Rovers. I knocked out a quarter of the wall in one day, and another quarter came down after the home defeat by Plymouth. The top of the wall proved most difficult, as the concrete of the lintel was poured into the hollows of all the breeze blocks, making a super hard pain in the arse concrete slab. We tried to get the blocks of, and leave the lintel, but the first block to a big chunk of lintel with it, at which point I made a quick trip to Robert's house to borrow some Ac-row props.





A few days more drilling, hammering and angle-grinding, and we were ready to put a beam up in it's place. Tina was let loose on the power tools to clean the beam up, and Robert popped in for an hour on Saturday morning so that we could lift the beam into place and prop it up, then I cemented it in at both ends.





We still have to cut more of the wall away at the bottom, and this is quite a delicate operation, as there are a lot of pipes there, but we now felt ready to move the furniture into the new living room.














So we are finally in. There are still a few bits to do, and we can't seal the floor yet, so we have to be careful not to spill anything, but it is nice to be in the room at long last. Only another 8 rooms to go!

Almost finished

After only 18 months effort, we are nearly ready to move in to our new living room.

Laying the flooring took us a long time, about three weeks in all, including 4 days grouting. We have even been working on Sundays, which is why this blog hasn't been updated for a while.

Laying the stone was a bit of a challenge, as the concrete base was not as flat as it looked. It was only a few millimetres in most places, so you only really noticed it once you were on your knees trying to lay a stone. It took a lot of filling with extra glue, or scrapping all the glue out to get it level. I looked for help in our Collins DIY book, but all it said was that natural stone was very expensive, so get an expert in!

I think we will put a levelling compound down in the dinning room when we come to do that, but I will probably need some help with that, as when I tried to use it in our first house, I ended up with a nice smooth mound in the middle of the kitchen.

Cutting the stone was fairly easy, as I had a new wet-saw that a friend had acquired for me. It was easy to use, but you had to keep unplugging it as you get a slight electric shock if you touched the water in the tray. Not too serious, but don't be tempted to put your goldfish in there for a change of scenery. We only broke one stone during all the cutting, so we've almost got enough left to do the utility room.

We've now built a bookcase to fit into the old doorway, and re-hung the main door into room, as it needed a bit shaving off the bottom, but we are ready now to start knocking through. After that, we just need to clean up the floor, and we can move in.

XMAS and Beyond

Soon after we came back to France, it was the national Telephon weekend, a national televised Charity event.

In our area there was a 30 kilometer walk to raise money. Our friend's Robert and Rosie were going along, so we said we would join in too. This involved getting up at 6am on a Saturday morning ! I think the last time I was up that early on a Saturday was an away trip to Barnsley.

The walk was very well organised, starting in Chirac and going all the way round to Chabanais, stopping in every village along the way for coffee and cakes, and including a lunch of French Onion Soup ( or Onion soup as it is known over here) and home made pates at St Quentin, the village not the US prison.



All we had to do for all this hospitality, was make a donation of some euros and 30km of shoe leather. It was hard work, and we were a bit achy by the end of it, but it was nice to do something for the local community. Also, Saints won 4.0 that day, so I told Robert and Rosie that we would have to walk 30 K's every Saturday from now on, for superstitious reasons. Strangely, they weren't up for it next week, and Saints were held to a draw at Coventry.
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After treating ourselves to Indian ( 2 curries ), Asian (Wagamamma's) , Spanish (Morro's), German ( Birmingham Xmas Market), KFC and Italian while we were back in the UK, we thought we would try a French take-away. Living out in the sticks, there is only one take-away near us, the Pizza and Kebab shop in Roumazieres, but for Christmas and New year the charcuterie counters at the supermarkets all produce brochures full of fancy stews, little starters, bigger starters and all sorts of goodies.

With so much to choose from it took us days to make our mind up, eventually settling for the Super-U's selection, including foie-gras bruille, red mullet kebabs, langoustine cassollet, goose in perigord sauce all finished of with a chocolate pyramid. 5 courses for 40 Euros. You have to order it all in advance and go back and collect it on the day you want it.

We chose Christmas Eve, which looked like a mistake when we arrived at the supermarket to find the car park packed. All the normal French good manners go out the window in situations like this. I was doing the polite thing of spotting someone about to pull out and waiting patiently until the had left the space to park up. I did this twice, and each time a French driver shot into the space from the other direction. I was on the point of driving pack home to get tooled up and sort it out the British way when we spotted a space before any of the locals. Hurrah, although technically still 2.1 to France.

Inside the shop was busy, but no worse than Waitrose on a Friday night. I waited patiently at the charcuterie counter to pick up our order, while Tina did a bit of last minute shopping. It took less than half an hour to get it sorted, waiting in line and then checking through the box of goodies to make sure it was all there. When it was all ready, we were whisked off to the main desk and passed all the queues at the check-outs. The sort of first class treatment Louis Hamilton used to get at Asda.

It was all very efficient, and even had heating instructions for each dish, and it tasted lovely.

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Now onto work. We have finally got the back room ready to tile, cleaning and re-cleaning the floor and then Uni-Bonding it ready to lay.

We have now been hard at it for two weeks, and this is how it looks so far.