Tag Archives: crash out

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.

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Thursday 12th August 2010 – I shan’t be sorry …

… to see the back of this roof. The rainstorm that we were promised for today never arrived and so we were up there all day. Well, Terry and Simon were mostly. I was out for some of the morning looking for supplies. And you can’t believe that a builders’ merchant would have no 40×27 laths in stock, and not expect any more until September. I had a little bit of a hunt to track some of them down after that.

But once I returned and we carried on with our production line method of roof-building, we made enormous progress as you can see in the photo below.

roofing chevrons lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome france We’ve attached chevrons to the top crossbeam that we fitted to the house wall a couple of days ago, and you can see them fitted to the other crossbeam that we embedded in the cement on the top of the wall that we built up previously.

And now it’s all looking thoroughly impressive. I reckon that another 10 working days or so might see the job completely finished. And I shan’t be sorry for a moment.

So when we knocked off this evening I had to move Caliburn, and Simon got into his van and piddled off – and so did Terry – leaving me to put the tarpaulin on all on my own. Luckily Terry remembered and came back to help, otherwise it would have been embarrassing.

Once everyone had cleared off I took my life in my hands and moved the methane digester that had been by the barn. And once I had manhandled … "PERSONhandled" – ed … it down to the compost bin that I built the other day I tipped it all in and covered it with wood ash.

That’s the end of my experiments with the methane digester for now and I’m not sorry about that either. I can sit out on my terrace now.

After that I came in and crashed out again. I’m totally whacked. I’m not as young as I was and it’s not so very encouraging.

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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

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Wednesday 7th July 2010 – We’ve almost finished this roof

chevrons laths barn roof roofing sheets les guis virlet puy de dome franceWe started off by changing many of the chevrons and fitting the laths. All of this lot, in fact. But despite what it looked like, it didn’t take long at all and it was finished before midday, even with the little alterations we needed to make.

But I now know why there was a very large overhang on the other side. The two sides of the barn roof are different length and we’ve put the sheets on the wrong side of the roof. Hence we were struggling for space here and I had to cut the ends off some of the chevrons on this side.

roofing sheets barn roof les guis virlet puy de dome france>But after an early lunch we started to put the sheets on and by 16:00 we were finished.

All that remained for today was the fitting of the ridge sheets but that was another story. I managed to fit half of one and that took half an hour. It was no fun mauling them over the apex of a hot tin roof in a scorching sunlight. They wouldn’t bend where they were supposed to and when they did the screws weren’t long enough to fasten them down.

There was no point getting frustrated and so in the end we called it an early day. We’ll have another go tomorrow and use some longer stainless steel screws, some silicone washers and a couple of speed clamps. And if that doesn’t work we’ll use a pilot drill and some pop rivets. But I’ll get them on somehow.

Once they are done, there’s just trimming the sheets, fixing the guttering and then dismantling the scaffolding and that will be that. And I won’t half be relieved. I was so knackered that after Terry went I sat in a chair and crashed out until 18:00. But another solar shower (the fourth consecutive one) brought me round.

And that’s Friday’s job – working on the solar shower.

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Thursday 10th June 2010 – Look what I’m having for tea!

home grown strawberries les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, strawberries. The first of the year, and all grown with my own fair hands too in my own garden.

Unfortunately there aren’t not all that many. It looks as if the local wildlife has been helping itself to them but nevertheless there were five left, and these, together with some soya cream, is a sure sign that summer is here at last.

Or is it?

rain fall in wheelbarrow les guis virlet puy de dome franceIt was raining again this morning and although it stopped for several hours, at about 18:00 it started up again in earnest and it’s still chucking it down now.

A quick look inside the wheelbarrow will tell you everything that you need to know about the amount of rainfall that we’ve had this last couple of days. Remember that this was empty just a couple of days ago when we were shovelling all of these stones around.

Liz came round this morning with my beans and vegan cheese and that’s good news. There are also some tins of curry and so it’s back to my Saturday night ritual again. We had quite a chat and it was a shame that she had to go.

And after that I carried on with the tidying up outside. Now that I have a hardstanding (or a wetstanding, or a notwithstanding) I’m moving over there everything that was propped up against the side of the barn. In a couple of weeks we’ll be putting up a scaffolding against the barn in order to do the barn roof, and I’ve been waiting years to do this. For many reasons actually – not the least being that I can finally move the solar panels off the roof of the Luton transit and onto the wall of the barn.

I’m tidying up a few other things too so I’m clearly not well. And when it clouded over at about 17:50 I called it a day and came up here. In fact I crashed out for half an hour.

In other news, I see that the new Conservative Government is planning to remodel University education. The Minister has considered several University models, including major part-time suppliers, ans has decided to try to remodel things on the lines of that well-known supplier of distance education, the … errrr … University of London.

As I said a few years ago when they set up a committee to consider part-time degree education and it consisted of staff from that other well-known supplier of distance education the … errrr … North Staffordshire University, the days of the Open University having any kind of significance and playing any kind of major role in shaping Government policy, these are long-gone. The OU has lost its relevance and has received yet another kick in the teeth.

Increasing prices and tuition fees brought an angry response from the National Union of Students. But of course they are a small-minded militant body made up of kids still wet behind the ears. So where was the response from the Open University Students’ Association – that body of 180,000 grown-up and mature students? The answer is of course “nowhere”. Either no-one considered the OUSA to have any relevance (which is a damning indictment of OUSA) or else whatever OUSA did say was considered to be not worth reporting (which is a damning indictment of OUSA).

It seems that OUSA has outlived its relevance too. But we all knew that, and a long time ago. A couple of years ago when the Labour government considered the idea of increasing costs and reducing subsidies, the response of that grown-up and august body of mature students was to … errr … sign a petition! I mean! We did things like that in Primary School when we were 10 and 11. Was that really the best that OUSA could come up with?

I once worked in a multinational multi-government organisation and we used to receive petitions from all kinds of people in all walks of life, on a regular basis. And do you know what we did with the petitions that we received? Well, we never bought any toilet paper, that’s for sure. That’s how petitions are treated in organisations such as that.

And the strawberries were delicious!

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Sunday 30th May – Sunday is a day of rest …

… as you know. There are no alarm clocks, no nothing. And I lie in bed until whatever time I like and I don’t care.

So what the heck was going on that I was wide awake and sitting up in bed reading a book at … errr … 06:52 this morning? And by the time 08:00 had come I had eaten my breakfast, drunk my coffee and watched an episode of Up Pompeii.

caliburn parking les guis virlet puy de dome franceFirst thing I did though was to stick my head out of the window and take a photo of the work that was done yesterday. And it’s even more impressive from up here. They did a really good job and I can’t wait for it to be finished.

Once I had taken the pic I made a start on a big mega-tidy-up here in the attic. It looks completely different now up here with everything where it ought to be (more or less) and it’s much more like a living room.

And do you know – that was that. I crashed out for an hour after lunch (no surprise there) and did nothing else of any importance. Apart from talking to Helena that is. She was the girlfriend of a mate of mine at school and we kept in a little bit of touch after that and then we disappeared. I briefly encountered her on a schoolmates website and we have now met up on a social networking site.

In other news, the nuclear talks in New York broke up with the contributors agreeing to a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. One group of people has objected and decided to oppose the idea. let me ask you to guess which group?

Hamas? The Iranians?

No – the Zionists! Now of course the Zionists refuse to admit that they have nuclear weapons (although it’s an open secret that they do and that they were built in conjuction with white racist South Africa) but ask yourself this – if they didn’t have any nuclear weapons, why would they be objecting to a nuclear-free zone? And while Iran agrees to suspend any question of nuclear activity there if everyone else does the same, then now tell me who it is that is the REAL obstacle to peace in the Middle East?

Yes, it’s high time that the west stops this absurd and illogical defence of the Zionists at any costs and starts to concentrate its activities on the Muslems, Jews and Christians that the Zionists are massacring. If the west pulled its support of the Zionists there would be peace in the Middle East inside a month as they would be forced to negotiate with their neighbours.

And in other Middle East news, there’s an aid convoy sailing from Cyprus to Gaza bringing in urgent supplies. The UN reckons that the Palestinians (many of whom are women and children and many of whom are Christians) need about 60,000 tonnes of supplies per week to survive and the Zionists permit only 15,000 tonnes – and no building materials so that the Palestinians cannot rebuild the houses that the Zionists demolish with bulldozers. So an aid convoy is setting off with supplies. And the Zionists have vowed to stop it.

This of course raises two important questions.
Firstly – have the Zionists forgotten already about the ships that brought them and their supplies to Palestine in 1947 and 1948 and which led to start of all the trouble in Palestine? Surely not, the hypocrites.
And secondly, how does the treatment that the Zionists are handing out to the Palestinians differ from how the Nazis treated the Jews back in the 1930s and 1940s. We haven’t got as far as ;ass murder yet, but we have the economic blockade and if you have been keeping up with the news just recently we are having the ethnic cleansing and the deportations. The Zionist treatment of the Palestinians has been described as a “pogrom” – and by a Zionist politician too!

When is the west going to put a stop to it?

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Saturday 24th April 2010 – I’ve just watched …

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire cebazat puy de dome ligue de football league france… this ...errr....interesting football match this evening.

We had all kinds of blood, guts and thunder for 90 minutes, and played almost entirely between the two penalty areas. Matthieu in the Pionsat goal had to be at his best to claw away a free header from the corner and the Cebazat keeper had to save two weak shots, but that was the sum total of the attempts on goal.

Yes, I'm back at home after all the excitement of Friday evening in Brussels. And what with the late finish getting everything ready last night, I didn't make it home all in one go. I ended up having an overnight stop at Clamecy where I froze to death in a layby (yes, it's still perishing cold at night)

Still, the one thing about that was that it made me have an early start, and I didn't lose very much as I stopped for the weekly shopping at the Carrefour in Moulins.

I was back here by the early afternoon and promptly crashed out for two hours on my sofa. That set me up nicely for the trip down to Pionsat and the football tonight.

As Golden Earring once famously said, "it's good to be back home".

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Tuesday 1st September 2009 – AS I HAVE SAID BEFORE …

attic insulation white paint les guis virlet puy de dome france… you can always tell how engrossed in a task I am by what time I knock off.

Knocking-off time is usually 18:00 or thereabouts, so no-one was more surprised than me to notice that I was still up here painting at 19:20 and it was only the light that started to disappear that made me sit up and notice.

Mind you, the attic is now painted and it looks quite nice as you can see. Very Tudor-esque – in fact it reminds me of the time Nerina was interested in buying a Morris Minor Traveller and took me along to see it. It needed quite a bit of work, including a new paint job.
“We can paint it white and do the woodwork black, and it will look like a Tudor cottage” I suggested
“The roof has a couple of dents in it” she said.
“Don’t worry about that. No-one will notice when I’ve thatched it”

In fact, if I put a floor down tomorrow, I could quite easily move into there tomorrow night. But I’m not going to – I’m going to do it properly.

If you look at the bottom corner – in centre-pic, you’ll notice that the paint looks pretty thin. In fact, the “plaster” in that corner was just running sand and every time I put a brush of paint up against it, a pile of sand fell off. After an hour or so of messing about, I came up with the solution (in more ways than one). I mixed up a couple of litres of water with a small amount of cement so that it was just grey water, and I painted it liberally over the sand until it had well soaked in.

Then I made a thicker mixture and painted that over. And then a third, thicker one. And then when it had dried, I painted over it with the acrylic paint. That seems to have done the job.

What helps when you are working is some decent music, and I had a lucky dip into the cassette box all day, picking cassettes at random. Lucky find from a long-forgotten past was Runrig’s Cutter and the Clan. A long time since I’ve heard that.

A fine folk-rock band, Runrig, and living proof, as the rest of the non-English-speaking world will already be able to tell you, that good rock music is good rock music even though you might not be able to understand the lyrics. “Alba”, the track that opens the album, is a good thumping rocker, even if the lyrics translated from the Gaelic into English read
“We hate all English-speaking b@$t@rd$ and when we catch one alive we will pull off his testicles and shove them up his @r$e”

Keyboard player with Runrig is Pete Wishart, Scottish MP and former keyboard player with Big Country. I met him at a European Parliament session in Strasbourg a few years ago before he joined Runrig.
“I’m a Big Country member” he told me.
“That’s right” I replied. “I remember”.

It’s rained more-or-less non-stop all day and we have had 9mm of rain. It looked for a while like this magnificent summer might have finally come to an end, but I’ve just been outside and it’s clear blue (yes, blue – there’s a bright moon outside) sky. So it might pick up again and summer might carry on. But you’ve no idea how satisfying it is to be working in the attic and hear the torrential rain and be grateful for the magnificent job that we did on this roof.

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Sunday 16th August 2009 – IT DOESN’T LOOK …

aspire recycled plastic slates lean to les guis virlet puy de dome france… as if I’ve done very much today. And you are probably right too.

In fact there are a couple of good reasons why.

Firstly, the heat on the roof and the glare from the sun meant that I could only stay on there for short periods.

Secondly, I … errr …. didn’t wake up until 12.33 this afternoon.

And that was with an early night too. I’m trying to think of when it was that I last crashed out like that and I can’t honestly remember. But, whatever. It put paid to three hours of work on the roof this morning.

All in all, what with one thing and another, this weekend hasn’t been too successful in the whole scheme of things of getting my living accommodation sorted out. I suppose I shall just have to work a bit harder in the week to catch up.

And there’s a hint that the weather might change too. Seven days we’ve been in brilliant sunshine with not a drop of rain, but later in the afternoon the wind got up and a cloud (does anyone remember clouds?) came drifting over.

I’m in two minds about the rain though. I want to get the roof finished before it rains if I can, but I’ve run out of rainwater in my water butts and they could do with getting filled.

Mind you, it’s given me an opportunity to clean them out and they didn’t half need it.

With this surfeit of electricity that I’m having right now, I’ve got the hi-fi working again too, and Marillion has just come round. I really enjoy listening to Marillion but for some unknown reason, whether it’s Fish or Steve Hogarth singing, it always leaves me in a deep depression. I suppose I’ll be struggling with that for a week or so now.

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