Tag Archives: cement

Wednesday 16th July 2014 – I’M DOING IT AGAIN.

It’s currently 03:30 on Thursday morning and I’m wide awake – not the lest inclination to go to sleep.

And I don’t understand why either because I haven’t had an idle day.

This morning I was up at the usual time and after breakfast cracked on with the website. Later, I went outside and, just as I feared, it seems that the little cement mixer that has done such valiant service here has given up the ghost. Switching on, the motor “pings” into action but the drive doesn’t engage (that’s not so unusual). Swinging the drum by hand, the usual method of working it, does nothing at all except to trip the 100-amp fuse that controls the battery. In other words, the 40-odd amps being generated by the solar panels plus 100 amps out of the batteries is apparently not enough to power a little 375-watt motor.

Clearly something isn’t right here and I’ll have to look into this.

lime mortar cementing under eaves les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfter lunch I mixed a bucket-load of lime mortar by hand and spent a delightful couple of hours up on the scaffolding smearing that everywhere. All of the sealing-in is now done and it makes a much better seal that the mess that was there beforehand.

When I had finished the cementing, I started to paint the wood treatment product all over the wood underneath the roof – the plywood, the battens and the chevrons. I’ve done half of it, and tomorrow I’ll finish the other half and do the second coat. Yes – I’m putting as much as possible on everywhere because I can’t imagine that I will ever be up here again so it will have to last at least another 30 years.

We had a glorious hot day today and the temperature in the 12-volt immersion heater running off the surplus solar energy had gone off the scale (over 70°C). In the solar shower the temperature was 36.5°C and that meant that I could have the first solar shower since I came back from Munich. That, in turn, meant disturbing a bat that had taken up residence there.

And that was that. And here I am. And I’ll probably still be here tomorrow night too.

Thursday 20th September 2012 – I BET THAT …

collapsed lean to repairing stone wall les guis virlet puy de dome france… you are fed up of seeing photos of this blasted wall.

But you are lucky – you only have to look at it for 30 seconds or so. On the other hand, I have to look at it every day from about 12:30 until 19:00, so imagine just how fed up I am!

It’s still not finished either. There’s about 2m² to finish off and then to dig out and clear away at the foot of the wall and seal that in.

And if you think that that is the work of just 5 minutes then think again because this is the crucial bit.

The stones are held in by cement which was pasted over the top of the sand and clay mortar, but that has been washed away a long time ago by the rain infiltrating down behind it when there was no roof on, and so there’s the cement with nothing behind it.

What I have to do is to knock out the cement, remove the loose stones one-by-one (which is about all of them I reckon) and then knock oversized ones into the gap to bind it all together and cement them in.

Doing it from the top down means that the ones above where I’ll be working are held in by the cement and by being wedged well in. But it’s still not comfortable and so if I don’t blog tomorrow night then it will be because the lot has crashed down on top of me.

And that’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

It’s getting to me, though. For the first time in absolutely ages I overslept – clean through the alarms.

Missing most of the morning put me in a bad mood as I had lots to do, but I managed to record the music for my rock music programmes that I shall be recording tomorrow morning (assuming that I wake up).

No, I can’t wait for the weekend, a rest and a good, comfortable sleep.

Monday 30th August 2010 – No photo tonight people.

That’s because I forgot to take one, and probably there wasn’t anything worth photographing anyway. But what a day it was!

This morning started with the website. I’m trying to bring August 2010 right up to date and then that will be all the arrears sorted out and I can move on to doing some new stuff. I’ve not had the opportunity to do anything to it properly for over a year.

So when the battery went flat I went outside to try to sort myself out a wheelbarrow. The Caliburn-coloured one won’t be going anywhere for a bit. It was okay until a huge pile of slates from the house roof landed in it from a great height last year and that blew the tubeless tyre off the beading and try as I might I can’t get it to go back. So into the barn to look for the B&Q wheelbarrow that is in pieces and I eventually tracked all of the pieces down, despite doing a good deal of tidying up … “Aren’t you feeling well?” – ed … and discovering more things I never even knew that I had.

That inner tube is perished and the two tubes that Claude gave me – so are they and so that was that. I’ll have to bite the bullet and get some wheels or tubes the next time the lorry comes round, or see what there is on ebay.

This afternoon I played a round of the French national sport of “here we go round the mulberry bush” trying to get a Social Security number. Seven different numbers I was given, and seven different people I spoke to until I finally found someone who could help me with this. Apparently I need to produce a birth certificate giving not only the details about myself but also the details about my parents.

Now many people reading this blog, especially Turdi de Hatred and everyone else from OUSA, will be wondering how I will be able to find out the details of my father, and they would be surprised at how close they might be to the truth.

But having said all of this I can understand why it is that so many people in France work on the Black Economy. It’s not that they have any lack of goodwill, it’s just that they get totally fed up of this absurd and relentless paper chase and I can’t say I blame them as I was pretty fed up by this time too and ready to renounce my registration and do it all stumeling, as they say in Flanders.

And the best is yet to come. I need to change my driving licence over to a French one so I rang the sous-prefecture. They told me that I can’t do it there but at the prefecture in Clermont Ferrand. They gave me the number but told me not to ring as apparently the guy doesn’t answer his phone in the afternoon. And do you know what? They were dead right too.

It’s not surprising that no-one ever does any business around here.

I mentioned Turdi de Hatred just now, and that reminded me. When I was at the brocante yesterday I came across a video entitled Return Of The Living Dead. You know, I had no idea that anyone had filmed her reading out the Open University Students Association election results.

So after my marathon session on the phone I went into the garden and sorted out the veg for tea – a veggie burger with onions and garlic, and with spuds, carrots, beans, spinach, sage, rosemary and mint from my garden. Beautiful it was too.

But the meal is in the future. While the veg was soaking itself I mixed a bucket of mortar and started on the pointing of the house wall in the lean-to. High time I did that so I can put the lean-to roof on again. But it’s going to take me forever I reckon. It doesn’t go as quick as you like it and you might remember what happens if you take the cheating way out and just crepi it to hide the gaps. There’s a pic of the results of that on this blog from a few weeks ago.

When the bucket was empty and it was 17:40 – not worth mixing another – I went to chop some wood. An after a little while I rediscovered the branch cutter that had seized up and stopped working. Now that I have a workbench and a place to work I stripped it down to look at it and sure enough there was a bolt that was badly worn that was distorting the cutting angle. So I swapped it round with a less-important bolt from another part of the machine, cleaned and greased it, and now that’s that fixed.

My day isn’t finished yet either! Bernard from the footy club rang up. Apparently my name is now on the referees’ list for the forthcoming season and so he gave me the telephone number of the sports outfitters who supply the club, and told me to order what I need in the way of referee’s clobber.

No wonder I’m knackered after all of this!

Monday 16th August 2010 – We start off today …

roofing inside lean-to lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome france… with a couple of photos that features the inside of the roof, by way of a change.

Don’t mind the loose lath that is on top of the wall just there – we will be moving that in due course. But the rest of it looks pretty impressive.

You’ll also notice the black damp-proof membrane up there. That’s to stop the snow drifting in underneath the tiles and falling inside, something that’s a real problem around here in winter.

roofing inside lean-to lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceYou can see that we have extended the walls by mounting breeze blocks all the way up and we’ve put chevrons on there.

You will also notice the cross-beam that we fitted to the wall of the house the other day. The chevrons are supported on that. The cross-beam goes all the way across the wall of the house and it’s a good job that there were three of us to lift it as I remember it being flaming heavy.

roofing tiles lean-to lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceFrom the outside, however, it looks even more impressive. We had quite a few tiles left over from when we did the roof of the house and so we nailed the laths to the chevrons and popped the tiles onto the roof of the lean-to.

We didn’t have quite enough as you can see if you look at the top left-hand corner, and so we’ll have to go and pick up some more tomorrow. But we aren’t ‘arf cracking on with the job and we can be proud of this.

So my day has been spent in non-stop cement mixing – load after load after load, with a slight break to go to the quarry for more sand. So I’ve mixed a ton and a half of sand since the other day. No wonder I’m exhausted.

And so when we knocked off I went round the garden, weeded the carrot patch, pulled up some carrots, beans, spinach and a courgette, and sowed some lettuce and parsnips.

After crashing out I made tea – lentil courgette and split pea curry, with carrots spinach and beans. All followed by fresh strawberries. And it was gorgeous.

Wednesday 11th August 2010 – We’ve been at this roof all day.

We started off by hanging a chevron (or rather two chevrons fastened together to make one long one) off the side wall of the house to attach the roof beams to. And that would have been so much easier if the holes for the anchor bolts hadn’t been drilled so deep that I needed to hunt down my lengths of threaded rod. And it would also have been easier if we hadn’t have got the SDS drill bit stuck in the wall!

kwikstage scaffolding roofing sloping wall roof lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut once we had organised that we finished building up the wall we started yesterday and then made a start on the two others. We need to keep these two level with each other so that we can cover them up with the roofing sheets at night.

Terry was doing the bricklaying, Simon was cutting and I was labouring. And it’s hard work mixing load after load after load of lime cement and then in my spare time bagging sand (we had to go down to the quarry with the Sankey trailer to buy another load).

.

roofing sheets sloping wall roof lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut we weren’t out there for all of the afternoon – we called it a day after a while because it’s absolutely p155ing down outside. You can’t work outside in this kind of weather.

We heaved the two left-over sheets from my barn roof onto the area where we were working to keep the rain off our working space and Lieneke’s bathroom and then we all went home. I for one don’t fancy the idea of mixing cement with an electric cement mixer in the pouring rain.

Shocking, what?

But all of this work is wearing me out – so much so that when I got back here I crashed out for a bit. I need to keep my energy for tomorrow

Tuesday 3rd August 2010 – We cracked on with this roof …

fitting slates guus lieneke roof les guis virlet puy de dome france… today.

First thing that we did was to fit all of the laths, and it was far easier doing that this morning that it was trying to do it last night when all of the cement was still wet.

Once the laths were on we had to fit the voltige in between them. This is very thin wood and it is designed to stop snow and the like penetrating underneath the slates. Snow of course is a real issue round here in winter. Personally, I wouldn’t have gone for the voltige. Under my slates, as keen readers of my outpourings will know, I have sheets of waterproof plywood and you simply nail the laths on top. It’s much easier but then again this isn’t my roof. And of course we did my roof from scratch – here  we are trying to match it to whatever is there already – and has been there for probably 100 years – but that’s not an easy job.

Once the laths were on we refitted the tiles. And as we have extended the roof we didn’t have enough of course and this led to Yours Truly grubbing around in the undergrowth unearthing another 20 or so.

Tomorrow we need to fit the half-tiles to the edge and trim where necessary with the angle grinder, then a demi-chevron to support the edging tiles, then fix the edging tiles, then cement them in place, then fix the ridge tiles and finally fix the crown. Once all of that is done the rest of the chimney needs re-pointing and that will be that. It will then be time for phase two.

roof collapsed lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfter Terry had gone home I carried on with the flooring in my lean-to. There was a strip of about 140mm that needed doing and luckily I had some lengths of 70mm left over from a previous project and so I used them.

You can see fairly well the hole in the floor. There will be a hatch there that will open upwards, with a set of stairs going downstairs. That’s much more civilised than having to shin up the fence and climb in via the window. It’ll look pretty good in here once I can sort out a tarpaulin to go over it where there is no roof as yet.

But if we finish the roof on Lieneke’s house pretty quickly and Simon comes to give us a hand with phase II then it won’t be much longer until I can crack on in here on a permanent basis.

Friday 25th September 2009 – AND JUST FOR A CHANGE …

fitting stud wall attic les guis virlet puy de dome france… today’s pic is taken from almost the same spot as the previous two.

You can’t see the battens that I affixed to the wall but you can see the insulation that I attached. That is on the rear wall to the left of the wooden framing, and in the apex above the door. There’s even a shelf up there now – that’s where I’ll be fitting the water tank.

You may be wondering why it is that I haven’t fitted the insulation to the rest of the wall. Two reasons really –

  1. it is outside the limits of my room so I don’t need to do it just now. I’d rather concentrate my efforts inside my room
  2. I ran out of insulation

I’ve also fitted all of the rest of the flooring – one piece of which was not without some considerable effort.

The orange cable that you see is an American 110-volt extension cable, bought in Farmington, New Mexico, in September 2002 and brought back to Europe in my hand luggage. I use American 110-volt fittings for my 12-volt circuit on the farm as it’s capable of handling a much heavier current than European fittings. And I needed the extension cable because with fitting the flooring I’ve had to take out the temporary circuit that I installed the other week.

And of course I clean forgot that I had moved the cassette player across the room. Consequently, in a moment of inattention, I kicked it down through the hole in the stairs all the way down to ground level. I bet that’s done it a world of good.

But cassettes are so depassé these days and CDs are in and as I don’t have a 12-volt CD player I will have to see if I can’t liberate one from a brocante some time and make a more modern 12-volt hi-fi.

Terry and Liz came round again too. They had been to get more sand and came round to see if I had any cement. There were three bags in Caliburn and as they are temporarily in the way I donated them to the cause.

Tomorrow, no Brico Depot. Caliburn is still choc-a-bloc of stuff so I’ve plenty to be going on with. I may well have a run around Commentry tomorrow – it’s quite a while since I’ve been shopping there and there are an Aldi, a Lidl, a good DiY place and a couple of cruddy cheapo shops that are sometimes worth a poke around.

And in other exciting news I’ve had an e-mail from Simon. He wasn’t able to pick up a cheap woodstove for me from Machine Mart as he was leaving last night and delivery wasn’t until today. But a change of plan means that he isn’t leaving until Monday so he’s picking up a stove for me. Many thanks to Krys and Terry for teaming up to work that out for me, and for Simon for putting it into operation.