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.

XMAS Broadcast to the Nation

There has been a break in our irregular updates to the blog, due to the commitments of our whirlwind UK tour, taking in Salisbury, London, Southampton, Exeter, Andover, Birmingham, Leicester and Southampton again.

It was great to see everyone again, sorry if we missed you, but our schedule was quite hectic. There were plenty of pubs and restaurants, 3 Saints games ( 7 points) and a five-a-side comeback appearance ( I seem to have turned into a later day Ted MacDougall, a poachers hat-trick but can't run back for toffee!). My old office at le banque de chaval nior has turned into a new Theme Park, "Secret Squirrel Land". It must have some scary rides, as you can't take your mobile phone in there.

After all that excitement, it was time to get back home to France for a well earned rest, and return to work.

The ceiling has finally been finished, although I do have to keep filling the odd hairline crack on some of the joints. It will probably get worse once we put the fire on, and things start to expand, but I've got lots of caulk in reserve.

Mr H has plastered the chimney breast, and Tina has been hard at it, painting all of the walls.

I 've fitted all of the new lights, and have finally got round to connecting the new circuits to the mains. It took a lot of work, dragging the heavy cable through the loft, and it was a bit scary, working on the meter and being so close to the live cables, but it all worked first time. I was so drained by the whole experience, putting all that theory into practice, that I gave myself the afternoon of to calm down.

Anyhow, enough of my ramblings. Here is what it looks like now.

Window dressing

I've just realised that we are coming back to the UK next week, and I haven't updated the blog for a while.

We are mostly working on the ceiling still, and are now about 9/10ths of the way through it at the moment, but there are other bits and pieces we have finished.

Tina has pointed all of the stonework around the windows and doors in the barn, and I have built up the stonework under one window, and made some mantle shelves from old bits of wood.

Before

After

As you can see, it is a bit of a transformation. It also cuts out all the draughts, so you don't have to worry so much about brain freeze any more.

I've also managed to finish connecting up the lighting circuit in the barn and test it fully. It took a while, as the two double switches needed nine different connections in a big junction box, which took some working out.

The testing took forever. There were a couple of loose connections at first, but after they were sorted out, I still couldn't get a reading through the double switches. I tried various combinations, to no avail. In the end, after two hours or so, I decided that it must be the switches, so I tried the circuits with single switches instead and it worked.

I don't now what is wrong with the double switches. I fitted some new ones and the worked straight away. I think it might be that they got filled up with plaster dust or something like that. The morale of the story being, don't fit delicate equipment before you finish sanding, and always test things straight after you fit them, so you can take 'em back if they're broke.

We haven't put a live supply in the barn yet, but we still managed to test them out with an extension lead.

The limestone for the floor has now been delivered , so Tina and I spent a fun afternoon shifting it from the garden into the barn, all 3 tonnes of it!

Hopefully, when we get back from Blighty, we can finish the ceiling, paint the walls and finally start the mammoth task of laying it all out.

HIDE THE BREEZEBLOCK !

I know what you may be thinking, but I am not referring to some bizarre sexual practice but am, in fact, talking about a new building technique that we have mastered.

When Mr H the builder replaced the barn roof, he had to put in lots of new timbers, and in places he had to build block work and fit wooden wedges to straighten out the roof. Some of the block work is now covered up with plasterboard, but this left us with some breeze blocks showing at the top of the pointed wall.

In the picture above you can just see some block work near the chimney. There were also lots of gaps between the beam at the top of the wall and the ceiling, which needed to be closed to seal the room.

I asked Mr H about the best way to disguise the block work and he suggested covering them with thin slices of stone, glued on with tile adhesive. We also decided to use some old planks that had formed the old hay store to fill in the gaps at the top of the wall.

Gluing on the stone was fairly easy, as the tile adhesive worked a treat, but chipping layers off of some of the large stones from our rubble heap proved a bit tricky. I took a while, but I managed to get enough stone without smashing my thumbs too much with the hammer. There was also a gap under part of the beam at the top of the wall which we filled with more stonework and the next day we were able to point them up

The woodwork proved a bit more time consuming, as we had to scribe round each joist, as well as trying to meet the pitch of the roof. This involved a lot of measuring, cutting, taking the wood up and down the scaffold, remeasuring, re-cutting and planing the wood to get it right.

It was a lot of work, as a lot of finishing tasks are, but we think it has been well worth it.

Even after all the measuring, there were still the odd small gap, but these have all been filled now with either strips of wood, decorators caulk and rock wool.

Hopefully, the room is now sealed up ready for the winter, and we should have less of a problem with brain freeze this winter.

It's Been a While Since the Last Update

Sorry, but it has been a while since the last update. We've been quite busy, and have had a lot of visitors, which doesn't always give much time for blogging.

In the last month or so, we have had Tina's Mum, my Mum and Dad, Tina's sister Helen and my brother Terry, which is a lot of people for country folk like us.

We took Tina's mum to La Rochelle for the day, which was even nicer than we remembered it. We hadn't been to La Rochelle since the World Cup ( the proper one, not the egg chasing) and they seem to have developed the harbour area , with even more bars and restaurants.

We found a nice Spanish restaurant on the harbour side, makes a change from all that French stuff, and had some good tapas and fish dishes. It was also great value, considering what a tourist trap La Rochelle can be.

Mum and Dad were happy just to potter around, so we got a lot of work done in the garden, and got a bit done in the barn as well.

We took Helen to Limoges for her birthday lunch, and we also took her to Oradour-sur-Glane, the World War 2 martyrs village. It's not the cheeriest of places, but it is an important monument. The whole village was wiped out by the SS as a random revenge for a resistance attack and it has all been preserved ever since. You can still see the tram lines that used to run all the way to Limoges.

My brother Terry popped over for the a busy weekend during the international football break ( no Saints fixture). We started of with a round of golf at St Junien, where my handicap refuses to come down below 80. I did manage a couple of bogie's, and one 200 yard drive, but there were a lot of horrors as well. Yet again, neither of us could get across the lake at the 14th. There's always next time.

Check the course out yourselves .

http://www.golfdesaintjunien.com/

On the Saturday, we watched the England Estonia game, which was so dull in the second half that we turned over to watch the Jocks instead. James McFadden seems to be the Scottish Matt Le Tissier. Luckily for Scotland, he isn't being kept out of the team by a Scottish Teddy Sherringham.

That night, it was the village football club Moules et Frites night, which clashed with the England France Rugby. They put some TVs in the salles de fete, so people could watch, and fortunately for us the French are much better at coping with defeat than people in the UK ( cue lots of Jim Davidson jokes about French war heroes, etc). There was no trouble, apart from one drunken Frenchman banging the table so hard that our friend Peter's glass of wine flew off the table, onto Peter's shirt. Other than that, there was a bit of Gallic handbags outside, between two footballers who didn't get on, but there was no ceremonial wrecking of any cars with GB stickers, as there is in England whenever we lose a big game.

The food was very good, as last year, and the service was a bit faster, so we managed to be home and in bed before 4 am.

Terry and I were invited to watch the team play a home game the next day, by the club president, so we took in some air, to shrug in the excesses of the next day.

We caught the end of the reserve game, which Suris lost. It was a fairly gentle game, with lots of space which Terry said that he thought I could play in comfortably, a shocking statement from him as he would normally leave me as the last kid picked for a playground match.

We asked the president and the mayor what they thought the first teams changes where, but they weren't sure, due to the beer consumption the night before.

The first team where quite good. The centre forward was very much in the James Beattie mode, with an ego to match ( he was the one that tried to pick a fight with me at last years do). He won and missed a penalty, scored a good goal, missed some sitters and walked off in a strop after getting booked for diving.

They seem to have a strange rule in France that you can have rolling substitutes, so as a manager, you can take of your centre forward and if the sub doesn't work out, you can bring the centre forward back on again.

The opposition keeper got injured early on in the game, making a save at his near post. We couldn't work out what happened, but he couldn't get up, so there was a half hour delay in the game while we waited for the pompiers to come and get him. The pompiers only came from 5 kms away, but it seems that sporting injuries are low priority in the France as well as the UK.

After that, every time someone went down injured, one of the local wags shouted 'pompiers'.

Suris won 3 nil in the end, with two goals from the no 11, who was more in the Anelka style. They also had a very good midfield player, who looked and played like Alan Giresse.

They even had a bar up there, and unlike St Mary', you can drink while you watch. It was very entertaining, although €3 entree fee is a bit steep perhaps, as it's only €15 to watch Bordeaux.

We were quizzed by the club president about what we thought of the whole set up, and we told him that it was much better than our old pitch in England, where you had to clear up the dog shit before you could kick-off!

One Year on

We've been over here for more than a year now, so it seems like a good time to review how things have gone so far.

At le banque de cheval noir we used to have something called Balanced Score Cards, where you had to come up with objectives and targets to work towards and then, at the end of every year, the bank would move the goal posts, so that you couldn't get a pay rise, or get stitched up even worse than that. This was such a good motivational tool that I left.

However, as this is the only sort of review that I know, I am going to use it here.

Financial planning

So far we haven't done a Viv Nicholson and blown all of our cash at once. We may have overspent a bit on the pool, and I didn't allow for all the tools that I would have to buy. It would have been a bit different if Saints could take penalties, as I would have easily spent a grand going to the play-off final.

Next year, we might even raise our wine limit to €3.50 a bottle!

Verdict : Met Expectations

Entertainment

We hoped to see at least one band this year and we've ended up seeing about 20! Not only that, but we saw one of the best live bands of the year, Arcade Fire, some old favorites like Queens of the Stone Age and Hives, Editors and Maximo Park as well as loads of new bands, Art Brut, LCD Sound System, TV on the Radio and Cold War Kids.

The highlight though had to be not only seeing the Mercury Prize winners (Klaxons) twice, but also seeing the bass player shatter his ankle stage diving! That being said, it would be even better to see Mobo winner Amy Whinehouse being thrown off stage/ into rehab again ...

Vedict: Exceeded Expectations

Garden

It has been a bad year everywhere for tomatoes and spuds, and our tiny veg plot has been no different. I didn't know what the difference was between seed potatoes and ordinary spuds, so I planted three that had started sprouting, and duly got back about five spuds 3 months later!

We have had more success with our courgettes and our pumpkin plant is taking over the world.

We have also had more success landscaping the garden, with two new rockeries both surviving ( the nurseries over here must be good, as we normally kill everything. The grass is growing back by the pool, thanks to hard work by Tina and my Mum and Dad, and Tina is also winning her battle with the hedges.

Verdict: Met Expectations

New Skills

We are learning more and more each week.

Horticulture, where not to plant tomatoes, how much room courgette plants need, how to move tomato plants away from the courgette plants.

Tina is a master at pointing now, so much so that she has even been asked to do some repointing at a friends house.

am now qualified as an electrician, and have installed a working consumer unit and supply for the pool, as well as building all of the circuits in the barn.

We've also tried our hand at dry lining, hanging wooden joists, fitting false ceilings and stone masonry.

Next up is carpentry. We've already fitted some new window ledges and trims and we're now thinking of building our own furniture !

Building

We had hoped to have finished the new lounge by now, but it is a bit behind schedule, what with time out for visitors, Rock Festivals, gardening and building the pool patio.

That said, it is really taking shape. This is what it looked like before we started.

And this is what it looked like in September

Verdict : Behind schedule, but we don't have to keep to other people stupid deadlines any more, so we say Exceeded Expectations.

More Days Out

It's not all work and no play. We have managed to get the odd day out, aided and abetted by our friends John and Sue who were over on holiday with their girls, Alice and Lizzie.



We always used to go to Salisbury Races together, so we looked out for a race meeting over here and found one at Pompadour, an hour south of John and Sue's house. It was a bit bigger than Limoges, with a main stand with a restaurant on the top floor, and a stewards box at the finish line, unlike the cherry picker they use at Limoges. This meeting was also a mixture of flat racing and point to point, which is like National Hunt in England, but without rails in places.



We managed to find seats next right by the winning post, and had great views as they went over the jumps, and one fall ( no-one hurt, animal lovers). I'd only ever been to one NH meeting before, at Wincanton, where you were in a box stand a bit far away from the action.






Pompadour is one of the homes of the French national stud, and also to a magnificent chateau, which is almost as big as the rest of the town put together.

The betting on the course was PMU, the French version of the tote, so we were all doing the minimum €2 bet. On the first race, I couldn't decide between two horses, so I did a forecast which came in. Being the Tote, I had no idea how much I had one, so I queued up for ten minutes to receive €2.60 back. Well worth it. All of us picked at least one winner, and I managed 4, so I ended up 3 Euros up on the day. Hurrah, no need to go back to work next week!

Sue picked the best priced horse of the day(7/1) , but we didn't have time to put a bet on that race. Still, it was a good day out, and we managed to avoid most of the showers by hiding in the stand.

While they were all over here it was Lizzie's birthday, so we all did a trip on the velo-rail as one of her birthday wishes. The velo-rail, is a big 5 seater, 4 wheel push bike that goes along the, disused, railway lines. The carriages are quite heavy and it's about 8km each way from Roumazieres to Manot and back. Also railway lines are a lot more up and down hill than you would think, so it is hard work.

We shared the work between three of us in each carriage, but on the way back I started to go purple trying to get us up a hill, while Lizzie's legs were going round like Roadrunner at full pelt. It turned out that the chain had come of on Lizzie's side, so we had to stop to do some running repairs. Another new skill on my CV. After that it was plain sailing, and we even got the girls home in time to watch Neighbours.

We've been back to Bordeaux again, to watch Die Hard 4, which was great, although one quick reading Frenchman was getting to the gags before Bruce Willis could deliver his lines, getting his laugh in early. Also, the translation of the Yippe-kay- aye M.... F.. line was a bit different on translation ( .. connard ) . While we where there we took the opportunity to go back to La Tupina for lunch. This time it was the €32 menu for 3 courses and a bottle 3 glasses of wine each. Well worth it.

We've also been out and about locally, to a local night market at Montrbron. The market was a bit arts and crafts but it was a great atmosphere. The whole town centre was blocked off, with bars and restaurants spilling out onto every available bit of pavement. Very good, apart from the fact that it was my turn to drive.