Tag Archives: bedroom

Wednesday 2nd December 2009 – If you look very carefully …

bedroom new floor beam stud wall les guis virlet puy de dome… at today’s image you will see the horizontal beam that I fitted yesterday. That will give you some kind of indication as to how wide the stairs up to the first floor will be. They will be fitted between that beam and the wall in the background – although there will need to be an allowance for the width of some insulation and plasterboard.

You can also see that I’ve fitted an upright into position in the new beam. This is level with the door into my attic on the floor above, and is where the head of the stairs will be for the floor below. To the right of the upright is where the bathroom is to be fitted – you can see the window that will be incorporated into there.

Yes, I’ve fitted one upright. And that will be the only upright that I’ll be fitting for a while too. The uprights are called chevrons – 63mm x 75mm and they need to be at least 4m long. Although the height between floors is only about 2m90, the chevrons need to project some way below the level of the floor so that I can secure the head of the stairs to them. And search as I have done all of the afternoon, I cannot find anywhere my stock of 4m chevrons. I’ve found the 3m and 3.5m ones, but not a single 4m one and that’s a perishing nuisance. I’ll have to wait until I go to Brico Depot at the weekend.

Mind you, while I was searching for the chevrons I discovered my missing beam. It was in the barn in the stack with all of the other new, unused wood. What a silly place to put it! Who on earth put it there?

Tomorrow I’ll be fitting the beam against the wall (if I can find my anchor bolts) and cutting the lets into it to take the verticals (whenever it may be that I will find them). I’ll have to think of something else to do on Friday which is a shame – I was hoping to have all of the verticals in place for this weekend so I could make a start on the stairs on Monday.

But then again it isn’t as if I don’t have anything else to do round here, is it?

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Tuesday 1st December 2009 – I woke up this morning …

… to the sound of heavy rainstorm cannoning off the roof, the barn, the windows and just about everything else in the vicinity (this sounds like a rather good blues song, although I haven’t had the blues since I started taking the Prozac). That was at the usual time of 08:00 this morning.

Even though I’m working inside, it’s still not the kind of weather that you really want to wake up to so I turned over and went back to sleep.

hanging cloud les guis virlet puy de dome franceAt 09:10, the next time that I surfaced, it had stopped raining so I decided to raise myself from the dead. And this was the view from my window.

You’ve heard me talk about the hanging clouds that sometimes hover right over the mountain. Well, this is one and it was a good one. 7.5mm of rain we had, and badger all electricity (although not absolute zero like a few weeks ago).

On a different topic I do recall saying to my loved one that I would never let her down. But since I’ve moved into my attic, it’s just as well that I remember to let her down every morning as I seem to be attracting a stream of visitors coming to inspect my living quarters. Today, Liz came round after her French lesson to see what I was up to. She even brought some vegan ginger cake with her, left over from Saturday’s chantier. It’s nice to have visitors round even if it means that Randy Raquel has to be deflated every morning.

She’s the second one of that ilk that I have had. The first one – we were having a discussion about Uganda when I accidentally bit her. She … errr … broke wind and flew off out of the window. I went to the local edition of Ann Summers to get a replacement.
“Do you want a normal one or a Muslim one?”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“You don’t need a foot pump with the Muslim ones. They blow themselves up“

stairwell stairs dismantled les guis virlet puy de dome franceToday I fitted the beam in the floor. It took ages as you need to very carefully make the lets in the existing beams so that the new beam is a tight fit. It takes ages to drill out the lets, chisel them to slightly undersize and then file them to perfection. Then cut the beam to slightly oversize, file it down to perfection and then whallop it into the lets with a huge sledgehammer. Finally drill through the original beams into the new beams with a 3mm drill and then whack a pile of 5×200 nails in through the drill holes to hold everything in place.

And I know why the beams that I fitted in the attic floor were too long and too deep – the one that I fitted in the floor today is too shallow and not quite long enough. How on earth did I manage to do that? And I still can’t find the missing beam. How do you lose a beam that is 4m x 20cms x 6cms?

Tomorrow I’ll be cutting and fitting the verticals. I need four of those but I can only do two of them as I don’t know where the other two will be until I start to fit the stairs in.

And in other news, I had the pompiers round selling calendars. The one I bought is an organiser-type that gives you a space to write appointments in. It also gives the Saints’ Days, and I see that my birthday is the day of St Modeste. Now how appropriate is that? My overwhelming modesty had always let me down – if it wasn’t for that I would be absolutely perfect.

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Friday 27th November 2009 – I’ve finished knocking down the wall today.

demolished wall bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome franceIt took me longer than anticipated as I took my time doing it. It’s made of large hollow lightweight bricks and it occurred to me that with having to build retaining walls outside as Krys wants me to, a supply of large hollow lightweight bricks might come in handy.

I’ve salvaged about 50 of them and put them to one side.

This afternoon I’ve fitted the insulation to the stud walls at the head of the stairs – it’s made a difference to the sound travelling through the walls so it has undoubtedly made a difference to the thermal qualities. And just as well, too. The temperature has fallen dramatically and I was obliged to put the heater on for an hour tonight – the first time in two weeks.

I dunno what kind of weird sense of humour people have round here. If you look at the wall under the stairs you’ll see the wallpaper from about 100 years ago. This house is built of stone and then someone plastered over the stone – and then lined the plaster with stone-patterned wallpaper. Why didn’t they simply forego the plastering?

hammer and sickle carved on wall les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd not only that either. When I scraped off some of the wallpaper to see what it was like underneath, I came across a hammer and sickle insignia crudely carved into the plaster on the wall. I wonder what that’s all about? It’s something else that strikes me as totally weird in this place – we’ve discussed sacrificial chickens embedded in the concrete before now.

I’ve rescued all of my pointing tools and given them a good clean. Apparently we are all pointing at Liz and Terry’s chantier tomorrow. But I hope the weather is better than it has been for the last few days. Nothing but miserable grey skies and rain. The clothes I washed have been rinsed innumerable times by the heavens but the could really do with drying.

And we have two footy matches tomorrow night – the 1st XI against hated local rivals St Gervais d’Auvergne and the 2nd XI against hated local rivals Charensat. A large crowd is assured (if the weather is half-decent) so just you watch the hotel next door close its doors right on the final whistle. No wonder they can’t make any money.

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Wednesday 25th November 2009 – Now you see it …

bedroom wall les guis virlet france… now you don’t. That could either refer to all of the mess in what will eventually be the bedroom, which has all been swept up and bagged for binning, or the wall between the stairway and the bedroom, half of which has been demolished.

That wall needs to be demolished and moved one roof-beam in towards the camera. And then with my patent narrow stairs I can fit a U-shaped stairway in.

The space that will be saved by having the stairs in a U-shape will be the bit by the window (at the foot of where the stairs are right now) and that’s where the shower room will be. I’m not sure if you can fit all of the OUSA Executive Committee in there, though.

I need to fit two floor beams in and that will be tomorrow afternoon’s job after I’ve demolished the rest of the wall.

bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, I’ve gone berserk with a sledgehammer. And also a broom too.

And why not tomorrow morning? Well, Terry is coming round. He needs a hand to fetch some sand and as he has no tow-bar as yet on his new van to pull the trailer, we need to bag it up at the quarry.

Rhys and I were earlier talking about brassieres and the subject seemed to veer round to chastity belts. It reminded me of the time just before Nerina and I were married and we had to go to see the priest.
“Are you chaste?” he asked Nerina
“Quite often” I replied. “And she always lets me catch her“.

And in other news, Day 2 of this public enquiry is going down a storm. Apart from the Government’s case having fallen away to nothing already (and there’s another 9 months to go!), we have a plainted “(Iraq) had shown itself willing to use weapons of mass destruction on its own people and its neighbours and was flouting a range of UN disarmament resolutions.”. We know this of course from yesterday. It was our best friends the Septics who sold the weapons of mass destruction to Iraq and provided the intelligence to enable Iraq to use the weapons to the best effect. And it was also a whole series of British and American companies, in some cases aided and abetted by the British Government, who were encouraging Iraq to flout the resolutions.

But if you want to talk about a country that is using weapons of mass destruction on its own people and flouting a whole range of UN resolutions, where is the criticism of the Zionists and the crimes they are committing against the Palestinians, many of whom are Jews and some of whom – shock, horror – are CHRISTIANS?

And while we are on the subject of the Zionists, there’s this huge outcry about the fact than Iran may one day sometime have a nuclear bomb. Well, so what? The Zionists have plenty and no-one says anything about that. So if they have them, why can’t Iran have them to balance out the power? Keen students of british history will know that all through the 18th and 19th Century it was British foreign policy to keep the peace by having a balance of power.

During the period that the Soviet Union was “confronting” (which it wasn’t – it was strictly abiding by the terms of the Yalta Agreement) the west, the wars involving European powers were few and far between. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA and the UK have been dragging the world through the mud.

Vive la Soviet Union! say I.

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Tuesday 24th November 2009 – I lit a fire in my brassiere this evening.

home made brazier fireI started off by putting samples of all of the construction material that I had been using in the attic. And I’ll tell you – the effect is frightening. The plasterboard took the longest to burn but eventually it did. Everything else was gone in minutes.

No wonder there are so many conflagrations in domestic property. There won’t be much left of my place if it sets alight.

But the tidying up is progressing, and it’s looking quite impressive downstairs. Another day or so and it’ll be done. The pallets that formed the old floor in the attic, they will have to be chucked out of the window but I can’t move the broken slates yet. They are destined to be used for the footpaths between the raised beds in the new vegetable garden once make a start on that later this winter.

And once the tidying up is completed it will immediately become untidy again as I demolish the wall between the bedroom and the stairway. All the rubble will be used for making the steps outside up into the house.

Claude came round today for a chat and bought me some news. Someone has had a really good stroke of luck – an exceptional one in fact. It’s bad news for me as it happens but I suppose that if I stopped being selfish and looked at it from other people’s points of view I should really be pleased at their exceptional fortune.

I can’t say any more about it right now as there needs to be something of a proper announcement at the right time by the right people in the right places.

In other news, the public enquiry into the War to Steal Iraq’s Oil has got under way. Many people wonder why I call it that, but don’t take my word for it – take that of Australia’s Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.

But back to the plot. I was particularly impressed with the phrase “that Saddam had a “continuing intention” to acquire weapons of mass destruction, having used them in the past”. We all know by now that Saddam Hussein had Bacillus Anthracis, Clostridium Botulinum, Clostridium Perfringens, E coli, Histoplasma Capsulatum and Brucella Melitensis, and that he used them on Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war. And how do we know this? Because the USA sold them to him and then gave him the satellite photos of Iranian troop movements so that he knew where to aim the chemical weapons.

The other bit that drew my specific attention was that “the sanctions policy in place against Iraq since 1991 …was steadily breaking down”. Here’s one reason why it was breaking down. And here’s another one. And there are plenty more where those came from. No wonder the wheels fell off the sanctions policy when Western companies put greed before ethics and legality.

Another Western company implicated in the breach of sanctions was Matrix-Churchill. They were one of the companies, by the way, that were named and shamed by Michael Moore as having supplied chemical weapons to Iraq. And would their “breach of sanctions” have anything to do with Saddam’s “continuing intention to acquire weapons of mass destruction”? During the company’s trial in a British court for its alleged breach of sanctions, the directors of the company claimed that their breaches of sanctions had been guided by the British Intelligence (there’s an oxymoron) Services and the British Ministry of Defence.

This startling revelation so clearly shocked the Court that the British Minister for Trade, Alan Clark was summoned to give evidence and under oath he was obliged to admit that he had been “economical with the truth” in an earlier statement denying all knowledge of the affair. Of course, the trial collapsed and the directors were awarded compensation.

This entire Iraq affair stinks to high heaven.

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Monday 23rd November 2009 – I made myself a brazier today…

home made brazier… out of an old 25-litre chemicals drum.

Now a brazier is something that you use for burning stuff, not something that a woman puts her boobs in, Rhys. And I have plenty of stuff for burning.

Long-term readers of my outpourings will recall that I already have a brazier – the legendary galvanised steel dustbin with which I am very impressed. But it’s full of ashes and overflowing with other stuff and all of that is extremely damp with the hurricane that is still blowing outside. And the stuff for burning is piling up so I’ll use this, burn stuff in small amounts and then empty the ashes regularly.

Today I’ve started the megtidyup inside the house on the floor below here, getting ready to resume work. I have a brick wall to demolish so I need to make the space to drop it. Then I have to take the stairs out. I was going to make some stairs completely from scratch but it occurs to me that I can use the sides from the one Im taking out, and just narrow the treads and the risers.

In other news, the commune is organising a discussion evening in a week or so’s time. The subject?
“Cremation and Funeral Customs in the Auvergne“.
In a commune of just 270 people where there is an average age of 103 I bet that will go down a storm. Last time they did it, they went on a guided tour of the local crematorium. The superintendant of the crem. got talking to one of the visitors.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“I’m 104” was the reply.
“Well, it’s hardly worth your while going home again, is it?”

They are also organising a visit to an opera at Vichy – you can see what exciting lives we have here. But I’m afraid I shan’t be going. I’m sure I can find plenty of things much more exciting to do than going to an opera – such as visiting the dentists or emptying the beichstuhl. I’m a big fan of Kenneth Williams, who on one occasion was talkiing about the opera with a friend.
“You must admit that Wagner has some really magical moments” said the friend.
“Indeed” replied Kenneth. “But he has some dreadful half-hours“.

But Sir Edward Appleton summed up operas succinctly as far as I am concerned. “I don’t mind whatever language an opera is sung in – as long as it’s sung in a language I don’t understand“.

And the temperature has plummeted. It struggled to 11 degrees outside today and it’s only 14.2 in here right now. I’ll be putting the heater on tomorrow if it doesn’t warm up again.

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