Tag Archives: crepi

Sunday 15th February 2015 – ONE THING THAT I LIKE …

… about Sundays is being able to lie in bed. And when I have nice clean bedding to lie in, it’s even better. I must admit that I’m looking forward to having a nice bedroom and nice brand new bedding to lie in too, and that day is coming closer and closer too.

So despite being awake at 09:15, it was 10:30 when I crawled out of bed, and I do have to say that that was probably the hardest work that I have done today. I did manage to bring up a small load of wood and a couple of kettles of water too, but I can’t think of anything else.

With the rain that we were having (12mm today) I didn’t plan on going out anywhere anyay.

I did have a look in the bedroom though, and the crepi that I had put on the OSB wall was drying nicely and had changed xolour to match the crepi that I had put on first from the almost-empty tub. I’m pleased about that.

Funnily enough, the part that is taking the longest to dry is the part that is on the piece of OSB that I had brought in from outside.

And I did say that, after fitting this piece, I found a complete OSB board that I had forgotten about – and in the house too.

I’ve been making the most of my day off working with this 3D program and I’ve overcome another major issue that was holding me back, as well as finding a “hidden menu” – something that completely baffles me. It doesn’t baffle me that there’s a hidden menu – I can in fact see the prupose of it – but why it should be set as the default and needs to be switched off, rather than the items in the hidden menu being shown in the default mode and “hidden” being an option. It doesn’t make sense to me.

But I have had a tragedy here today. I accidentally closed my browser window (with 22 tabs open) leaving a pop-up window open. Consequently when I reopened the browser (configured to show the last open configuration) it was the pop-up window that came up and I’ve lost my 22 open tabs.

That’s a tragedy and no mistake.

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Friday 13th February 2015 – THIS SUMMER DIDN’T LAST VERY LONG

It clouded over at about 18:00 this evening and by 20:00 it was p155ing down outside. So that’s that then.

But I have made enough progress today, so that it doesn’t matter too much.

First job was to sand off the second layer of filler on the wall. That didn’t take too long to do, and it doesn’t look too bad, although I would rather have been able to take off all of the plasterboard and start again. Anyay, it’s ready to paper and paint, whenever I’m going to be doing that – which won’t be for a while yet.

Next job was to move everything around in the bedroom so that the working space is next to where the wardrobe is. And hen I’d done that, I emptied the wardrobe. That was a horrible job and I hated every moment of it. I’ve found quite a bit of stuff that I had “lost”, as well as another hundredeight of screws and nails, but none of that compensates for the rubbish that I pulled out of the wardrobe area. There was even stuff in that corner that came from off the old roof when we ripped that out in 2009.

I can see a great big issue now in that I don’t have enough space left to store all of the stuff that I’ll be taking out of the bedroom when I need to empty it

There was still an hour left before lunch so I made a start on crepi-ing the OSB alls of the wardrobe. I worked up a good rhythm in there and I as doing so well that I ran a good half-hour past my normal knocking-off time and I didn’t care either.

crepi osb wardrobe wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfterlunch I cracked on with the crepi-ing and at 18:30 (another long day) I’d finished it all.

You can’t really see what it looks like because it as dark by the time I took the photo, but it’s come out quite nicely and I’m impressed. On Monday I can even fit the shelving, which will be progress indeed.

I had a nice hot wash in the water out of the home-made 12-volt immersion heater and then another load of the potato and lentil curry.

Now I’m all set up for the weekend – I’m off to Montlucon tomorrow.


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Monday 29th December 2014 – OUCH!!!

Yes, I fell down the stairs today.

I was at the top of the stairs fixing in a piece of wood into the corner at the back of the upper stairs and I had to reach right across the stairwell to screw it in. And then I forgot that I was reaching right across a void and put my foot down again. And that was that.

But that’s not the worst of the problem. I’m going to be having water issues here when the thaw sets in. It’s not so bad at minus 10.5°C such as we had during the night, but the severe temperature has cracked one of the taps on the water butt. The other two taps that control the flow into the front water butt are frozen solid so I can’t cut off the supply. That means that if the front water butt defrosts before the rear one, then I’ll lose all of the water in the containers.

That’s not the only issue that I’ve had with water either. I keep a 5-litre container of water in the bedroom for all kinds of different purposes, and I’ve managed to kick that all over the floor.

And that’s not all either. After varnishing the stair treads and risers that I cut the other day, I went to emulsion the wallpaper that I’d fitted in the stairwell. The first tub of white paint that I found had varnish in it. The secpnd one had lime mortar in it. And that was that.

Luckily I had some crepi left over from when I did the walls in the cupboard under the stairs, so I applied that to the wallpaper. And when I checked the job an hour or so later, the weight of the crepi had pulled the paper off the wall. In the end, I pulled the paper off the wall and put the crepi directly on the plasterboard. And if I had done that first instead of last, this job would have been finished three days ago.

I forgot to ention that Brico Depot on Saturday was having a sale of LED light bulbs – 4.2 watts at €3:99 each which is a bargain in anyone’s money. I bought all 14 that were left and this will complete the bilbs that I need for the barn with a couple left over.I tried a couple in the barn and I wasn’t half impressed.

As you know, I’m working in the bedroom and on the ground floor at the moment so I took out the 1.2 watt LED light bulbs in each room and put the extra 4.2 light bulbs in there. And the difference is phenomenal. I can actually see what I’m doing now in there at night and that makes a change.

This was something else that I should have done ages ago.

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Tuesday 9th October 2012 – I’M TRYING …

… to think what I did today.

And it took me a while to do that. Thinking is not my strong point, especially at this time of night.

One thing that I have done is to put my back out. I had to move 8 batteries today – 200 amp-hour ones and each one weighing 60kgs. They are in boxes so I couldn’t get at the handles, and lifting them off the ground into the wheelbarrow was not a good idea.

An even worse idea was taking them out of the wheelbarrow and stacking them in the barn., but I’m glad that I did fix the wheelbarrow the other day otherwise I would have been in real difficulties.

This morning was exciting though. Someone has ordered a pile of photos from me.

A few years ago, knowing that a famous football ground in North Wales was going to be demolished, I wandered around there photographing everything that there was to photograph.

And sure enough, as I expected, someone has decided to write a book about the history of the ground and has seen my photos on the internet. Consequently, I spent all morning editing and enhancing the images.

This afternoon, apart from moving the batteries, I moved a few other things too, but a torrential rainstorm, as predicted, put a stop to that.

Anyway, that gave me the opportunity to finish painting the walls of the cupboard on the 1st floor and that’s now looking quite good.

Fitting the flooring should take about an hour or so, and then I need to make the shelves. That will be a big boost to everything around here when that is finished.

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Thursday 4th October 2012 – I STARTED MOVING …

… the stuff from off the hardstanding today.

I laid down a sheet of plastic behind the Mercedes 240D, covered it in cardboard (the plastic, not the Mercedes), and then stacked up all of the breeze blocks that were lying around.

And as I tool a wheelbarrow-load of rubble up to the rubble pile, I came back with a barrow load of breeze blocks and so the pile down here is growing while the pile up there is shrinking.

Mind you, it’s going to take ages to move it all – not least because I need to rake up all of the rubble from out of the sand and clay that came out of the wall.

And if it’s at all possible I need to remove the sand and clay and use that to fill in the paths between the raised beds.

But even so, I didn’t do too much because at about 15:30 the heavens opened and we had a torrential downpour. Impossible to work outside.

That was the cue to come inside and I had a good search for the mop and mop bucket (which I eventually found) and then I washed out and mopped up the cupboard that I had been building at the back of the stairs.

When that was clean, dry and dust-free I then made a start on crepi-ing the walls.

I’ve gone for crepi in there as it hides all of the imperfections and bad joints – it’s not easy working in a space that’s 1.5m x 0.80m.

I’ve painted about half of it before I called it a night – at 19:55. You can see how much I’m enjoying it, even if it is a swine to apply.

But at least, this idea of having work outside in the good weather, and work inside in the bad weather – that seems to be paying off as I always thought that it would.

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Tuesday 14th September 2010 – I haven’t done a tap today.

Well, that’s not strictly true – after breakfast I started on the website for this season’s adventures for Pionsat’s football club. Even though I might not be there as much as I have been in the past that is no reason for ignoring it and I already have match reports for four games.

When the battery went flat in the laptop I went outside to see what the postie had brought me. I was hoping it might be good news, after all it’s been a long time since I’ve had any. And – to my surprise if not total astonishment ……

…. Yes, I’m very quick with the criticism of French public service and beauraucracy (and not without reason in many circumstances) and so I ought to be just as quick with the praise. And so hats off to the lady in the Prefecture at Clermont Ferrand. Not only did my International Driving Licence arrive today, attached to it was a new bright and shiny French Drivers Licence with medical certificate for driving lorries and buses and also for cars and vans pulling heavy trailers. This latter bit is very important as a French driving licence specifically states that a car or light van pulling a heavy trailer (one up to 3.5 tonnes laden weight) is fully authorised. And of course, what is the total laden weight of our new trailer?

A short while later Bill came round. And he stayed here having a really good chat until quite late in the afternoon. I couldn’t download a driver for his old printer – it’s not supported – and in any case he told me the price of the ink cartridges he needed to buy to fire it up. Over €50, he said, so I pointed him in the general direction of these Epson SX115 all-in-one things that we have been buying. Complete with ink cartridges, it costs a mere €49.50 and the replacement inks are €4:00 for the black and €15.99 for the three colour cartridges.

We were also looking at dial-up modems (broadband hasn’t got to him yet) and the cost is unbelievable. They are clearly a breed close to extinction. But we did find that Orange was offering a basic internet connection on “dial-up” for just €10:00 per month so as he is going to Montlucon tomorrow he’ll stop by the Orange shop to see what they can do for him.

We spent a while looking at photos of old cars and so on, and the discussion turned round to next summer. He has an old Peugeot 106 at his place that hasn’t gone anywhere for a while and isn’t worth anything much as it’s right-hand drive. No-one else wants it so we’ve decided that we will bring it round here and strip it, and then prepare it for grass-tracking. Bill was a racing driver of sorts in his youth and I reckon it won’t take too much persuasion to get him behind the wheel again. And in any case we need to find something else to do in the summer when there’s no footy.

He had a good look around the Ebro and reckons that he will help me have a bit of a play with that too when I can make some space (whenever that might be).

But I also got to thinking again as well. Terry and I have a scaffolding and a heavy duty trailer between us. He has this amazing pressure-washer and I have a big diesel generator. Simon has a huge crepi machine. You can see where I’m going with this. We have all the basics of a little plant hire business here. A big petrol cement mixer which you can buy really cheaply round here and which I can fit my single cylinder diesel engine to is something else we can consider. I reckon that there might be some mileage in exploring avenues such as this.

Once Bill had gone the phone rang twice and each time it was someone reading War and Peace to me and it wasn’t worth starting anything after that. But still, things are slowly progressing and that’s a good sign.

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