Tag Archives: les guis

Monday 27th April 2015 – THE WEATHER …

… was much improved today. We only had 30.5mm of rain.

And after everything that I have said just recently about good nights’ sleeps, I was awake at 06:30 and I couldn’t go back to sleep. In the end I got up (before the alarm too) and vegetated on the sofa for a bit.

Mind you, I’d been on my travels again during the night. I can’t remember who I was with but she was tall and quite well-dressed in a flowing black skirt. We were watching the Grand National and had to cross the course in front of the horses (I had memories of suffragettes and being trampled to death by the King’s horse) and they obligingly split into two packs to have a better go at getting us.

After the horses passed, we climbed into the car to head around the course and into town but we must have missed the course and instead ended up straight in the town. Parking the car, we had to find a cafe so we walked through an old granite building, formerly a cinema but now let into little shop units, and as we passed down the stairs we commented that this would make a good little theatre area.

We were having a coffee on some tables at the side of the street and there in a cafe just a couple of doors down was someone who, in real life, I haven’t given any thought at all but who has appeared a few times just recently in my nocturnal voyages. So what is going on here then? This is the biggest mystery in all of this.

At Radio Tartasse, Violette forgot that we were coming so I had to phone her, and we ended up running quite late. But a coffee afterwards warmed us up and then I came home.

Back here, I’ve done nothing. The weather is cold and miserable and I ended up crashing out for a couple of hours. This led to a very late (like 17:00) lunch and so I’ve had no evening meal again.

I did manage to shin up the scaffolding in the middle of the torrential downpour in order to check on the guttering. Mind you, judging by the speed at which the water was cascading out of the overflow in the waterbutts, everything must have been working fine.

And indeed it was. Everything was nicely aligned and all of the water was flowing right where it ought to flow. I can glue it all together now whenever the weather allows.

Now I’m off to bed to see if I can summon up a better morale and more incentive for tomorrow.

-2

Sunday 27th April 2015 – I WAS ON MY TRAVELS …

… last night too.

If you’ve ever seen the film Smokey and the Bandit you’ll remember the scene where the car transporter rips the door off the Sheriff’s car. Now I was at a similar site in an area of similar vegetation – a flat-bottomed river valley with a river (as you might expect), a road, a strip of vegetation of about 100 metres width and then a steep slope upwards with a winding side-road going up to the top.

I was here with a small army – a hundred or so men – and we were the rearguard installed here to hold off an advancing army. Every now and again, a lorry would come down the hill, take away more of our personal possessions, until in the end we had just the clothes that we were wearing, and some weapons and that was that.

What surprised me about all of this was the silence. I’ve never been anywhere or in any situation where there was such a complete and utter silence as we waited for the enemy to show up.

All of this goes to show just how deep my sleeping is and how comfortable my new bed is.

My lie-in lasted until about 08:50, which was nothing like enough as far as I am concerned, but again, I must have had a good night’s sleep.

After breakfast, I made a start on writing the radio programmes for the next series of programmes but my heart wasn’t really in it and I didn’t last long. I ended up watching Bala and TNS on the laptop and doing some more editing of old radio shows to extract more soundbytes.

So that was my Sunday – apart from the rain of course. 33mm fell during the course of the day and as I said yesterday, the big benefit of having the bedroom is that I can’t hear the rain falling on the roof when I’m in bed, like I could when asleep on the sofa bed in the attic. That’s definitely an improvement.

-3

Saturday 25th April 2015 – IT RAINED DURING THE NIGHT

And here’s an added advantage about having a separate bedroom on the first floor, and that is that the rain cascading down on the roof doesn’t awaken me. And that’s certainly a bonus. I slept right through it, and as a result, the washing that I did the other day and which was hanging up outside had an unexpected rinse.

Now I’ll have to wait for another week or so for it to dry.

The 5mm of rain that we had filled up the water butts, and I do have to say that I’m catching much more water than I ever did before, since I repositioned the guttering the other day. That’s good news.

During the night I was on the move again – in a 2-door Cortina MkV saloon although while the main part of the body was MkV cortina, the roof was off a BMW 1602 or 2002 and the car didn’t ‘arf look weird. Being yellow and black, like my old taxis, didn’t help matters too much either.

I was in Crewe, driving up Market Street (before they closed it off) from Badger Avenue past the old Co-op place there and the left-hand lane was colsed off with crowd barriers, meaning that we were having some exciting incidents with cars and buses coming round the corner by the Grand Junction pub. There was a fire or something over on the left at the back of the Old Vine pub Right at the top of the hill (by now, in Stoke on Trent) I turned left and drove down a dead-end road onto an area of demolished houses and below me I could see a big factory with clouds of smoke billowing out of it. Chatting to some people, it turned out that the factory was burning a pile of wood and cardboard dummies as it didn’t need them and had no place to store them, and a group of people were heading off on foot down an old back-entry to go down to the factory for a closer look.

After another good night’s sleep and breakfast, I spent the day in the house and I’ve hardly been out. I’ve had a football day, watching Watford win promotion to the Premier leaguen by beating Brighton, and Barnet winning promotion to the Football League by beating Gateshead.

As well as that, I’ve been hacking bits more out of old radio programmes to make up some more soundbytes and I’m building up a nice library of them to slip into the radio programmes every now and again.

Now, I’m off for an early night and a long lie-in. I intend to make the most of my new bed and bedroom.

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Friday 24th April 2015 – APART FROM HAVING …

… to leave my nice comfortable bed for obvious reasons during the night, I had the best night’s sleep that I have had for a century. It was wonderful.

I was out like a light, and was off on my travels too. I was at a Gothic cathedral somewhere in the UK auditioning singers to choose one to front a huge concert and trade show. And after having listened to all of them, I had the very disappointing task of announcing that there wasn’t one of them sufficiently good to be given the task. That was not a popular decision by any means.

From there, I went with Liz to the Trade Show. It was in a new all-glass exhibition hall and was on several floors, and packed to the gunwhales with people. We spent our time wandering around the mezzanine between the first and second floor looking at all the technology stands.

After breakfast I finished off the rock music radio programmes for the month of June, and then attacked the shower room. I’ve assembled the stud wall and screwed it into position. And I was right too – it’s much more solid than its predecessor.

I had to cut down a sheet of plasterboard while it was standing upright. I didn’t think that this would be very easy at all, to say the least, but clamping a long and heavy straight-edge in position where I wanted to cut – that simplified the task considerably and it’s not all that much more difficult than cutting it when its lying down on its back. It’s amazing how your technique adjusts itself when necessity is driving you forward.

So having screwed the first piece or two back on, I’ve made a start on constructing the new beichstuhl. This is going to be a permanent fixture instead of a “thunder box”, but the container can lift out and be taken downstairs to be emptied all the same.

I went to St Eloy for shopping this evening. There was no-one there whom I knew, and it was a comparatively cheap trip (apart from the fact that I treated myself to a couple of things in the “reduced” box).

And that is that. I’m off now for an early night in my lovely comfortable bed. It really is the business and I keep on sticking my head in there during the day, just to admire my handiwork.

That’s definitely a sign of contentment and, strange as it may seem to say it, I’m glad that I didn’t do it earlier as my technique a couple of years ago was nothing like what it is now. This is one of the reasons why I’ve dismantled the shower room and started again, and I do wish that I could restart the attic from scratch. Compared to the bedroom, the attic is something of a shambles.

I would love to do it all again.

-1

Thursday 23rd April 2015 – SO, HOW WAS IT?

My first night in my new bedroom, in my new bed with my new bedding?

The answer was that it was delicious.

It took me a while to settle in there. There was something of a smell of rubber from the new pillows and that took some getting used to, and then I found it difficult to find a position in which I was comfortable, but once I was in, I was away and slept right through until 09:00 – one of the best nights’ sleeps that I have ever had.

And I deserved it too. It was worth all of the expense and the hard work.

I managed eventually to crawl out of bed and after breakfast, I had – would you believe – a day off! Well, not quite a day off because I did a pile of radio stuff such as preparing another live concert for the rock programmes and also clipping bits out of old radio programmes so that I can make little insets to run within the rock programmes.

I’ve also done another machine of washing. This means that the washing is almost up-to-date now. There’s just a couple of items left to do but I’ll do this when I organise some clean clothes at the weekend.

I went and had another 15 minutes crashed out on the bed this evening and it was just as comfortable as in the night.

The one thing that I do appreciate about it all is that when I feel tired I can go to bed. There’s none of this 10 minutes or so tidying the sofa and making up the bed, or putting all of the bedding away in the morning. That’s the best thing about all of this.

-3

Wednesday 22nd April 2015 – HAVE A GUESS …

bed bedding mattress les guis virlet puy de dome france… where I’ll be sleeping tonight!

We now have acquired a mattress (which cost more than everything else in the bedroom combined), a new sheet, new pillows, new quilt, new mattress cover, new sheet and new pillowcases. And I shall be in there in a very short space of time.

I’ve even had a shower (5 litres of hot water at 69°C out of the home-made immersion heater that I use as a dump load for the excess solar energy and poured into the solar shower at 32°C and the result was gorgeous) and a shave too. I’ll be nice and clean in there.

And no alarm either. I’ll be sleeping in there until I awake and I don’t care if it’s not until lunchtime either.

Many thanks to Terry who helped me bring the mattress into the bedroom. It had to come in through the window and that was something to which I was not looking forward. But with Terry, we had done it in 2 minutes, and then spent two hours chatting and drinking coffee.

And that reminds me – talking of coffee – I had the percolator running again – and twice too. Once for me at lunchtime and once when Terry came round. The weather was such that I could certainly spare the electricity.

This morning, I had another go with the weedkiller and then I used the wood treatment to cover the stud wall that I had built the other day. At least – I’ve not built the wall but everything is cut and shaped, and it was the pieces that I covered in wood treatment.

So I’m off to bed in a minute, and tomorrow I’ll let you know how the bed is.

-2

Tuesday 21st April 2015 – AT LAST …

furniture in bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome france… we finally have some furniture in the bedroom.

The chest of drawers is a couple of years old, the chair and cushion is from last year, but everything else, including the fluffy carpet that you can’t see, is from yesterday.

No mattress yet, but that will be up there tomorrow one way or another and that will mean that tomorrow night will be my first night sleeping down there. I have new bedding as you know, and I’ll have a good shower too so that I’m nice and clean for my nice new and clean bedroom.

I spent all morning installing the bed, and that was much longer than it ought to have taken. However, one of the sets of laths was 80cms, not 70cms – misfiled by someone at IKEA I reckon, and as I had no intention of driving back to Clermont Ferrand, out came the chop saw and that dealt with that.

After lunch, I emptied out the two chests of drawers, cleaned them, dismantled them, took them downstairs and reassembled them. So they are in place now. And that took me nicely up to 18:20 when I called it a day.

During my lunch break I did another load of washing seeing as how we had a nice day, and I emptied out the beichstuhl – such delightful jobs that I have to do around here. And I also fitted into the lights under the eaves of the house two of the new LED lightbulbs that I bought yesterday. 1.7 watts each, so that’s an equivalent of about 20 watts of incandescent light, they are much smaller and weigh less than half of the weight of the usual LED light bulbs. So with these, there’s not that much risk of them falling out of the bulb holders.

After having crashed out for an hour this evening, I made another mega kidney-bean and aubergine whatsit, and I remembered to put the olives and peanuts in it too, which is certainly progress. That will do me for the next 3 days too.

But I forgot to tell you yesterday – something that I saw that goes to prove just how far ahead of the times that I am. In IKEA yesterday there were a couple of proud notices – “all the water in the toilets comes from the rainwater that falls on the building” and “all the hot water in the toilets is heated by solar energy”.

Well, regular readers of this rubbish will know that I have been doing this for almost 20 years. As I have said on many previous occasions … "and you’ll say it again and again" – ed … the world is slowly catching me up.

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Monday 20th April 2015 – WELL, I’M ALL SPENT UP NOW.

€790 in IKEA today, and I didn’t buy anything like what I was planning to do.

None of the kitchen worktops impressed me except for one – and that was a mere €399 per m², which is perhaps a little over the top and in any case, I don’t have the machinery to cut the marble.

I’ll have to see what’s on offer elsewhere.

But I now have my bed and a nice and expensive firm mattress, as well as a pile of new bedding, and a nice dark-brown deep-pile rug to go by the side of the bed. I’ve also bought some mirrors for the bedroom.

And that’s where all of my money has gone today. But it’s all good stuff anyway.

This morning I finally finished off everything for the rock music programmes that we’ll be recording next week, and I’m well on the way to doing the next month’s too.

Then it was off to pick up Liz and down to Gerzat to record the Radio Arverne sessions, and then we went to IKEA.

spectacular clouds st gervais d'auvergne puy de dome franceOn the way back, we had some spectacular clouds. This one over St Gervais really was impressive – much better than it looks in the photograph.

And the town over there, bathed in the sunlight, looked quite good too. All in all, it really was a beautiful evening to be out and about. We could do with a few more of these.

buds on apple trees les guis virlet puy de dome franceDown at Riom and Gerzat, the trees are already in full bloom, so I was quite impressed to see that the fruit trees that I have in buckets outside the front door are now blooming too.

It’s all of a couple of weeks late of course, as I have said already, but it’s still as beautiful as ever when it does arrive. It’s a sure sign that summer is on its way.

-4

Sunday 19th April 2015 – I HAD A NICE LIE-IN …

… this morning – but I nearly didn’t!

When I woke up, it wasn’t even 08:00 but if anyone really thinks that I am going to heave myself out of my stinking pit at that time of a morning on a Sunday, they are mistaken. I turned over and went back to sleep – and it was a much-more-respectable 10:30 when I finally awoke from the dead.

First job, after the usual offices, was to make another load of muesli, seeing as how the muesli drum was empty. For the benefit of my readers, it’s a pile of porridge oats with cornflakes and bran sticks mixed in. And then a bag of nuts, some trail mix (you know – the dried fruit, raisins, coconut shavings and the like), some dessicated coconut and anything else around here that looks nice. Sunflower seeds, sesame seeds and so on.

After breakfast, I finished off the live concert that I was engineering and I do have to say that it’s the best one yet. Tons of stuff has been hacked out, tons of stuff added in, and now that I’ve worked out how to overlap tracks and dub sound effects and so on, it comes out really well.

Working under pressure is a great way of pushing back the boundaries of knowledge with a computer program. When you know that a task is useful and that it seems logical for people to want to do it, then it’s sure to be there in a program somewhere and you need to spend the time to ferret it out.

When I first started to work with Audacity, the program that I use for sound engineering, I remember posting at length about how disappointed I was with it, and how I wished that I had the older program that we used in another lifetime – Polderbits – back again. But credit where credit is due. I’m becoming much more used to Audacity and each week I’m discovering more and more facilities and functions, and I’m now a quite happy little user of the product.

For lunch, I made some hummus again. A pile of chick peas, tahini, water, olive oil, turmeric, cumin and garlic. I remembered that I had fetched from Marianne’s an ancient electric stick-mixer and with that I made a hummus 10 times easier than I have ever made by hand.

The I sat down to watch the football. Next week is the final match of the Welsh Premier League season (already!) and Bangor are playing Rhyl. There cannot be two clubs anywhere in the footballing world that hate each other more than these two, and Rhyl will be going for the throat. They’ll do Bangor no favours whatever in their battle to avoid relegation. And Cefn Druids have an easier match against Carmarthen Town.

So today’s match against Prestatyn is vital to Bangor. Bangor are just two points ahead of the Druids and this is their match in hand, so they must get at least a point from this match to be safe. And of course, it’s being streamed live on the internet.

For once, the Bangor players remembered to turn up and while in the first half they were struggling a little (even conceding a penalty, but the Bangor keeper saved it) in the second half they came good and raced into a 3-0 lead before I’d even settled down.

Towards the end, Lee Beattie for Prestatyn scored what must be a contender for the Goal of the Decade – you won’t ever see a better goal than this one.

I was round at Liz and Terry’s later. We’re recording the Radio Arverne programmes tomorrow afternoon and so we had rehearsals to do. And Liz made a nice meal too.

Now I’m going to have an early night – I deserve it.

-1

Saturday 18th April 2015 – I WAS ON MY TRAVELS …

… again during the night.

It was supposed to be in Brussels but not the Brussels that I knew. However I was with Laurence and Roxanne and we were moving from an apartment to a big 1930s-type of semi-detached house in a cul-de-sac somewhere, a house that was situated down in the far corner. And I had a collection of Cortina Mk111 saloons, all different colours such as yellow, white, bronze and so on, and I used to leave a different one outside the house every day. From here, my friend (he who lives in Stoke on Trent) had to go home and I had to go with him to the edge of the city to put him on the correct road to the coast. Of course there was a huge traffic queue at the roundabout so we were there talking when someone came around the outside of the traffic on a kind-of motorcycle which was coughing and spluttering. So I made my excuses to my friend and went off to see if I could be of any help to this guy.

And on that note, I woke up – or rather, the alarm woke me up. And I’ve spent most of the day on the radio stuff. Finishing off the additional notes was not anything of a problem but I’m STILL doing the editing for the live concert and I’m nowhere near finished with that.

But it is a difficult one as all of the tracks are scattered about here and there and the lead-ins for one track are on the end of the previous one (something of a regular occurrence these days) so they have to be cut off and grafted into place. It’s going to take me for ever.

To give you an idea of how much interest the players of FC Pionsat St Hilaire have in their club, there were about half a dozen of them missing this evening – attending a party so I was told (and how true this is I really don’t know). And that’s with the club battling desperately to stay up in Division One. There were half a dozen from the 2nd XI out there tonight and young Vincent was in goal. They lost 4-0 to Sayat Argnat and while it looks like a heavy defeat, Pionsat had their moment with two shots that hit the woodwork, one kicked off the line and a couple that went close.

In fact, had Pionsat had a full team out there tonight, then they could have dealt with this opposition quite comfortably, but if the players themselves don’t care, why should I?

But credit where credit is due. Those players out there tonight played with fire and spirit and two or three of them, who probably never ever dreamt a year ago that they would be turning out in Division One, had the matches of their lives. So never mind the defeat – the performance is the thing and it was a good performance tonight. The only players who let down the team were the ones who couldn’t be bothered to turn up.

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Friday 17th April 2015 – SO …

… after the vicissitudes of yesterday, it was “keep calm and carry on” today.

But it nearly wasn’t. I shouldn’t have had that coffee when I knocked off yesterday evening because at 02:45 this morning I was still up and about. Serve me right.

And having slept on it, I’ve decided that the next worktop that I fit, I’ll cut it, fit it into position and then build the cupboard around it BEFORE I cut out the insert for the sink. That way, it might just withstand the whole process.

After breakfast, I made a start on the new stud wall. I’m building it downstairs and then I’ll take the bits into the shower room and assemble it. It’s had a couple of design improvements too, there are also the brackets fitted for a couple of shelves, and even though I say it myself, it’s much better-built than its predecessor – the joints are tighter for a start – but so it should be, seeing how I’ve taken more time over it.

By the time knocking off came round, it had all been built, shaped and had a trial fitting. Now, all it needs is for some wood treatment to be applied because the wood has been stored in the same place where the other two bits (that I mentioned yesterday) had been stored.

At the shops, I didn’t meet anyone that I knew, but I had to go and pick up a parcel that was awaiting me – more of this anon. I spent the grand total of €19 in the shops at St Eloy this evening even with a couple of little extras – it’s definitely cheaper here than at the Intermarche in Pionsat.

So now I’m off to bed for an early night. I need one after yesterday.

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Thursday 16th April 2015 – WE HAVE HAD A CALAMITY.

Yes, and you have no idea just how miserable and fed up I am.

worktop fitted in shower roomles guis virlet puy de dome franceMind you, at about 11:00 things were going pretty well, as you can see.

Here is the worktop in the bathroom. It’s been cut to size and shaped to fit. And now I’ve put it into position just to make sure that it’s fine.

It is in fact milimetre-perfect, except that it’s going under the rails, not over them. But that’s not a problem

star pattern for cutting out inset for sink shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceNext plan is to cut out the inset for the sink.

It’s not as complicated as you might think. First, you draw around the perimeter of the sink, to give you a maximum area. Then using a straight edge and a pencil, you draw straight lines from the perimeter – these correspond with the outline of the inset that you need so that you can drop the sink into the hole that you’ll be cutting.

Then you remove the sink, and continue the lines into the inside of the perimeter and they will all join up and you’ll have an internal perimeter. If you enlarge the photo, you’ll see exactly what I mean.

And then you cut away the internal perimeter. Drilling out the corners with a 10mm drill, you can use a jigsaw then to cut out along the lines.

sink set in worktop fixed into position shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd here we have the sink, inset into the worktop, and the worktop screwed in place.

Well, in fact the sink is just set into the hole. What you need to do of course is to smear mastic everywhere and then drop the sink in, and that will make a permanent fixture.

So it’s looking good, isn’t it?

worktop collapsed shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceWell, actually, no it isn’t.

If you look at my thunb, you’ll see that the worktop has collapsed – and collapsed under its own weight too (I put the sink in afterwards for a demonstation).

That’s right – more rubbish from Brico Depot. Cheap, nasty worktops that aren’t fit to be used as firelighters. This went into the bin. And there will be another pile of Brico Depot stuff following it too.

I’ve been complaining for ages about the quality of Brico Depot stuff being worse and worse, and it’s hit rock bottom today. I’ve wasted 5 hours on this piece of Brico Depot garbage

Anyway, I went and had a coffee and called it a morning. I also had a listen to Neil Young singing about Brico Depot products

And if that’s not bad enough, then this afternoon I made a start on another job that I had intended to do now that I’ve dismantled the shower room. And that was to rebuild one of the stud walls, only with the shelf rails in the correct place.

dry rot demi chevrons les guis virlet puy de dome franceI sorted out he two demi-chevrons left over from when I bought a pile of stuff years ago to repair the downhill lean-to that had collapsed, and then marked them off and started to cut the lets.

That was when I noticed that both the demi-chevrons had somehow acquired a dose of dry-rot. Consequently, they’ve followed the shower room worktop into the pile of firewood.

Believe me – I’m totally p155ed off by all of this. On Monday, after the radio, I’m going to go and have a look at the real worktops in IKEA and I don’t care how much I have to pay. I’m totally fed up with this Brico Depot rubbish.

The good news is that we had a storm tonight and 8mm of rain fell in 90 minutes. That’s filled the water butts back up and no mistake. If the good weather comes back, I can carry on with the washing.

And I was on my travels last night – around the pubs in the East End of London. and I had to go and change my clothes and disguise myself, and the best place to do this is in the toilet of course. So there I was in the ladies’, of all places, in a cubicle with a woman banging on the door. But I was too busy checking through the stuff in there to make sure that some stuff that I had left a previous time was still there. And when I came out, the woman had gone and the toilet was empty. From here I went on the Holmes Chapel and Shearings depot, wandering around carrying a huge pile of plates. People were telling me that there was a load of new faces for the new season that was starting, but of course that was nothing new as coach-tour driving is something of an itinerant job. Still, there I was, wandering around all of the rooms, and it suddenly occurred to me – why don’t I put the plates down? Why do I need to carry them about?

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Wednesday 15th April 2015 – I HAD AN UNEXPECTED …

rabbit les guis virlet puy de dome france… visitor at the front door this morning.

I’ve no idea what Bugs was doing there but he looked as if he was at home there all the same. Anyway he soon cleared off when I came to the front door and I was lucky to be able to squeeze off a slightly out-of-focus shpt as he scurried back up the drive.

So having been at one with the local wildlife, I carried on with work today.

First thing was to deal with the issue of the solar water heater. The temperature was 59°C in there this morning and at an average of 8°C per hour in the kind of weather that we have been having just now, then once the batteries are fully-charged, the water will boil up before the sun goes down tonight.

So what I did, and for the first time ever, was to drain 20 litres of water off it. Two buckets full, and I simply left it in the buckets to cool down. When the water started to heat up this afternoon, I simply tipped the buckets of lukewarm water into it. As a result, the water didn’t rise past 65°C, and that was fine.

philips les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnother thing that helped keep the water temperature down was to run the coffee machine for the first time this year.

850 watts at half an hour produced a nice pot of coffee as well as swallowing up some of the surplus energy, and I’ll have to do this more often. In any case, it saves on the gas here.

batten for fitting shelf for top of composting toilet les guis virlet puy de dome franceAs for the work, I carried on in the shower room today.

First thing, I fitted the second batten for the shelf that will form the top of the composting toilet. You can see it here, at right angles to the shelf that I fitted yesterday.

There’s a third shelf too, but that’s in the false wall that I’ve temporarily dismantled while I’m working. The fourth shelf will be the top of the front panel, but you’ll see this in due course as the work progresses.

batten for fitting worktop in shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ve also finished the rest of the battens in the bathroom (for now at least).

You’ll see on the left just underneath the window the batten which will support the worktop into which I’ll be fitting the sink. This is something that I’ll be tackling sooner than you might think.

As for the battens, I’ve finally found my mitre gauge and with setting it up to 13mm (the battens are 26mm) I can mark off the mitres with some kind of accuracy. And even with my slightly-bent mitre saw with a couple of teeth missing, and my 100 year-old wood chisel, the level of accuracy that I’ve been managing has certainly astounded me.

So I’m having a well-earned rest and I might even have an early night too.

-1

Tuesday 14th April 2015 – THIS MAKES DEPRESSING VIEWING;

plasterboard taken off back wall in shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, if you look very carefully at the back wall of the shower room, you’ll see that the plasterboard has been taken down.

And that’s not all either, for half of the plasterboard on the side wall has gone too. And when all of that is sorted out, half on the other side wall will be coming off.

You may remember that I did the plasterboarding in a hurry in 2013 in between trips to belgium, and I really wish that I hadn’t, because firstly, it’s a total mess, and secondy, the studding is all wrong.

I have to fit a variety of shelves in here, and it would have been ohh so easy to have fitted them and then done the plasterboarding around it like I did with the stairs, but that’s far too simple an idea. When I was looking this morning at how to fit the shelving in, and not seeing a satisfactory solution, I thought “sod this for a game of soldiers”. It was quicker to take off the plasterboard and start again.

I don’t know how I’m going to find the space to cut it down to the new shape, by the way, but I’ll worry about that in due course.

shelving bracket for composting toilet shower room les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis is what I should have done before I fitted the plasterboarding.

Here’s the shelf mounting for the top of the composting toilet and it took me about an hour and a half to make it, including searching for the wood and changing a few light bulbs in the barn. However, it took about 5 hours altogether given all of the messing about. And that’s sad news. You can see what I mean about having done it first rather than last.

There needs to ne another shelf bracket fitted to the adjacent wall and I’ll finish that tomorrow – I’m well on my way to doing that already.

blossom on trees les guis virlet puy de dome franceIn other news, the blossom has finally arrived on the trees. 3 weeks later than usual, but it’s here nevertheless. And it does look pretty too – well worth the wait.

And you can see how nice the weather was – another beautiful blue sky all day long.

199.3 amp-hours of surplus solar energy (and wind energy too because we’ve had a nice windy day) went into the dump load – the home-made 12 volt immersion heater. The water temperature in the dump load was off the scale (over 70°C) by 15:00 and when I went to fetch hot water to do the washing up at 22:00, it was still not back on the scale again.

I’ve finally fixed the data logger too – the new one that I bought a few months ago. And this is what I call accuracy. I checked it tonight with a 1-watt bulb and it showed a discharge of … errrr …. 1 watt. I rigged up a few other low-powered items and the discharge was 9 watts. Switching everything off again went straight to 0.

I’m well impressed with this.

I was back in Crewe on my travels, with some people who figure more in my nocturnal adventures that they do in real life which is just as well as they aren’t people whose company I would appreciate for real.

We were in one house – a Victorian semi with waste land at the side that was a zone of special scientific interest – a marshy wetland. A car driven by a woman went past, did a U-turn across the marsh, went across the drive behind my car, and out across the lawn and back onto the Highway. This had caused a huge pile of light-grey gravel to be pushed into the marsh and had totally dried it up.

Then, I had to take one of these people to see his father, and he gave me directions. When we came to what he reckoned was the house number, it was an empty plot of land in Delamere Street where the little old school used to be. Now it’s been 23 years since I last lived in Crewe, and yet I could tell the difference between Delamere Street and Flag Lane, even when I’m deep in the arms of Morpheus.

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Monday 13th April 2015 – I SMELL ALL WHEATY TODAY

And the reason for this is that I’ve had another shower.

solar shower unit les guis virlet puy de dome franceI started off today by dismantling the solar water heater and giving it a really good clean out. The solar water heater by the way is a black plastic box with an old caravan window over the top, and the back is insulated with some of this space blanket insulation. It’s stuck on the roof of the outside shower cubicle where it catches the sun quite nicely. The water then descends by gravity through a tap and then to a shower head.

It needed a really good clean too as it’s not been used in a while and there were all kinds of dead leaves inside the tank busily decomposing, and the window needed a really good clean too.

guttering uphill lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceNext job was to fix the guttering on the uphill lean-to. The guttering has become detached because it’s too low and the door into the upstairs but where I keep all of the paint keeps knocking it.

But this wasn’t as easy as it might sound as I needed the folding ladder, and that’s all overgrown with brambles that have grown over the wall from Lieneke’s field and which one of the days we’ll have an accident with 5 litres of diesel.

I had to cut the ladder out of the brambles and that led to a general clearing of the patch of ground in front of the woodshed. Now I need a place where I can have a garden fire to dispose of all of the dead brambles.

So once I’d freed the ladder, I could dismantle the guttering, reposition the brackets and then refix the guttering. Now, not only does it slope all of the right way, but it clears the door too.

I’ve run a mains cable through from the house into the downhill lean-to, via the hole that I drilled through the wall ages ago. And with the electricity now in there, at lunchtime I did another load of washing. That’s come up nicely but there’s still a pile to do. It might not be done this week though as the water level in the water butts is quite low. 5mm of rain would do quite nicely right now to fill the water back up again.

I found 3 centimes in the bottom of the washing machine too. I hope that I’m not going to be done for money laundering.

After sitting outside eating lunch (it was really beautiful today again) and supervising the washing, I went and attacked the shower room and that’s almost empty now. Tomorrow I can start on fitting the shelves in there and the composting toilet.

Finally, the water in the solar heater was at 33.5°C. 5 litres of water at 61°C out of the 12-volt immersion heater soon sorted that out, and I had a really nice outdoor shower, followed by a shave and a change of clothes.

2 showers in 2 consecutive days? Whatever next? I’ll be washing myself away at this rate.

And I was on my travels during the night, working on behalf of the occupying forces during the day but directing resistance activities during the night. Nerina was here in this journey and we were somewhere in the UK in one of these areas with small Victorian detached houses with big gardens. The road to where we lived was a tortuous route though this built-up area but all of a sudden someone had put a direct road through the houses that curved around to where we were.

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