Tag Archives: cement mixer

Friday 20th August 2010 – I’ve had a TV …

… on in here this evening.

Even though I keep on telling people that I don’t have one, there actually is one here in the corner. And even though I keep on telling people that I don’t watch it, I did today.

But it’s not an ordinary TV. Dave who follows this blog (are you over there or over here, mate?) will remember it because I was with him at Hexham market when I bought it.

It’s a little portable TV that works off 12-volts and what is so important about it is that it has a built-in VHS player. It cost me all of, would you believe, £15.

Now I have tons of VHS videos stretching back for almost 30 years and for the last heaven-knows how long I’ve been looking for a 12-volt player to watch them on, so this TV thingy was the answer. And when I was in Brussels back in April I brought some of my cassettes back here. Tonight I sat back and watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

roofing lean to lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceMind you, the reason why I spent the evening doing just that was because once again I’m completely worn out. We have now formally finished the roof and it doesn’t half look impressive as you can see in this photo.

The part from the right of the roof light on the main roof, where the moss has been cleared off, has been stripped, extended and refitted – and the chimney has been re-pointed and sealed at the base.

pent roofing lean to lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd then the lean-to, which formerly had a flat roof, now has a pent roof – we raised that up at the back and fitted new tiles. It’s been finished off today with the edging tiles that protect the woodwork from the elements.

All in all we can be well-pleased with all of the work that we have done. I have to say that I think that our stonework is magnificent, especially when you consider that we’ve never done anything like this before!

pent roofing lean to lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceThere is some pointing that needs doing on the side wall of the house. Some of the stones are quite loose and it might be that one might fall out and drop on the roof that we have done and we don’t want that to happen. There’s some pointing that needs doing round about where the flashing is too – just above the top row of roofing tiles.

I’m not sure how we are going to do the pointing though – I’m not standing on a ladder that’s canting right over the lean’to onto the side wall of the house, so there!

rebuilding stone wall collapsed lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceAs usual there was some mix left and so I added wome water and a huge bucket-full of gravel and then tipped it into my wall. You can see how much the wall has grown by just looking at this pic and comparing it with the earlier ones.

There’s still quite a bit to do yet and it’s going to need pointing when the levels have been built back up, but it’s still impressive.

And after a shower (summer is back again) I came up here and watched a video. And why not? It’s the weekend. Shopping tomorrow, relaxing on Sunday and then what may well be the final week at Lieneke’s as we get cracking on the bathroom. That shouldn’t take long and then I will be back working properly on here again.

And about time too. I have tons of work that needs doing.

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Wednesday 18th August 2010 – First pic today …

roofing tiles stone cladding wall lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome france… features the roof of the lean-to. Terry went and fetched some more tiles this morning and while he was away Simon and I finished up building one of the side walls.

You’ve seen the breeze-block version of this photo a couple of days ago – that’s what it looks like inside. What we have done since then is to clad the wall with stones.

It looks quite impressive and from a distance you would never ever guess that it isn’t a real, traditional stone wall. Mind you, the pointing might give the game away. I bet that you have never seen pointing this good on a traditional stone wall.

So now that all of the tiles are on, what’s needed is to put the flashing at the top against the wall and then to do the edging tiles.

stripping plasterboard bathroom lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd we would have finished that today too except that this afternoon we had an almost-continual downpour. But now that we are authorised to do some work inside the house we cracked on with that instead.

What we did was to rip off all of the old plasterboard off the wall of the bathroom. Now that we have effectively redesigned the bathroom we need to rearrange the plasterboard in there and the easiest was yo do that is to start with virgin walls.

But it was cold, wet and miserable today. I was hard-pressed to point my walls with the leavings in the mixer, but it was a shame to leave it so I wasn’t going to let it all go to waste.

And tomorrow morning I have to go round to near Menat and rescue the scaffolding. The hire period is now up and there’s a customer waiting.

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Tuesday 17th August 2010 – Tomorrow the World!

gherkin plant greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceDo you remember that plant that I showed you a photograph of the other day – the one that had taken over the greenhouse? It’s actually a gherkin plant and here you can see it leaving the greenhouse and setting out for Montlucon.

At the rate that it’s going, it’ll get there before any UK Council Worker or British Rail porter will, that’s for sure, and who knows where it will head for next?

I’ve been gardening again today. Or at least, this afternoon.

stone cladding breeze block wall lieneke roof les guis virlet puy de dome franceWe had done as much as we could on the roof today. The cement on the stone cladding on the side of the house hadn’t quite set and you can’t put too many stones on a cladded wall like this in one go, and the tiles that we had ordered for the roof hadn’t arrived.

We hadn’t had instructions from Lieneke about the inside of the lean-to either, and with Terry and Simon needing to price up some more material, we decided on a half-day on the roof.

I dug up the garlic and weeded the onion bed – that was the first thing. Strangely, only half the garlic had taken and the other half was in its single clove. The latter I replanted in one of the herb troughs to see what happens. But there’s nothing like enough garlic – I’ll need to bear that in mind.

And while weeding, I noticed the onions. Nothing like enough of them either but they are there all right.

I also tidied up all of the wood at the front of the barn – the left-over new stuff at least. I need a rainy day so that I can have the time to stack it correctly inside without having to worry about working on Lieneke’s roof. In fact I have tons of jobs to do really – let’s hope that this week will see us finish the roof.

collapsed stone wall rebuilding lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceYou’ll notice a couple of little changes in the lean-to too. I’ve moved a couple of sheets of iron and now the end wall is totally exposed. I’ve fitted (at the top, at least) two demi-chevrons that will guide me in forming the top of the long wall.

There was a full drum of waste in the mixer when we knocked off and it was a lovely chalky mix and so I did a pile of pointing, including that corner of the other lean-to where I lived for a while and which was getting damp.

I cleaned out the mixer with stones again. built a couple of thin walls and poured the mixture in between. I hadn’t quite sealed the wall as you can see and so some of the stuff leaked out, but it’s progress all the same.

A solar shower (the summer sort-of came back today) and that was my lot.

The automatic water-heater switched on too – and a temperature of 45.5 degrees. This is looking quite optimistic.

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Friday 13th August 2010 – When we knocked off this evening ….

rebuilding stone wall collapsed lean to les guis virlet puy de dome france… there were still two buckets full of mortar left in the cement mixer.

And so “waste not, want not”, I took it round to my house and built up some of the wall of this lean-to that I have been slowly repairing.

You can see that I’ve built up around the central beam of the roof.

But I had an idea about this. Building with stone uses a lot of cement and you always end up with a filthy mixer full of dried cement and the like so I heaved a bucketful of gravel and a bucketful of water into the mixer to clean it. The gravel will scour the drum and the water will move it round.

rebuilding stone wall collapsed lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceI built a very narrow wall on the outside of the wall and a very narrow wall on the inside of the wall, with a large gap in between them. And when I finished and went back to the mixer the drum was quite clean with a load of what looked like very liquid concrete swilling around in it.

I tipped that into a bucket leaving the mixer nice and clean, and took the bucket down to my lean-to and poured the concrete solution into the gap. All nice and runny and you could hear it slurping its way down the fissures in the rocks and soaking into all the dry joints. It’ll take a while to set but when it does it will have done wonders for my stone wall. I shall be cleaning out the mixer like this every night.

roofing chevrons lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceAs far as the house roof goes, we are making enormous progress and if things hold out we may well be finished on schedule – and won’t that be a first?

You can see in the pic that we have built up all of the walls so that they are of the right height and all of the carpentry is now on. It won’t be long before the roof is finished, and then we will need to build up the outsides of the walls with a stone facing. Once that’s complete we will need to seal the top of the roof into the wall of the house and then just a few more small jobs will finish it off.

Mind you I didn’t want to get up this morning. I had slept through the alarm and was having a very pleasant dream for a change when Terry rang me to make sure I was awake. It’s sad when you have dreams like that – you don’t ever want them to end.

But it’s the weekend and I’m having a weekend off. I reckon that tomorrow I’ll go shopping in Commentry and then for a swim at Neris. The warm weather has let me down for the last few days and I haven’t been able to have a solar shower. If I’m not careful I’ll be picked up on radar soon.

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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 18th November 2009 – At least I know now …

stone wall no mortar damp ingress… why it is that my little room is getting so damp. I moved a pile of wood and the evidence is right before my eyes.

The soil has once more banked itself up against the kitchen wall (I keep digging it out every couple of years) and also, some of the pointing has fallen out and water is infiltrating between the stones.

I’m glad that I’m going round to Terry’s tomorrow morning to have a pointing lesson with Mark. I can see me putting this to use in a very short space of time.

In other news, I’m still tidying up the garden, albeit in a rather desultory fashion. Most of what I’ve been doing is to sort out the scrap wood into what is useable elsewhere and what is only fit for burning. I’m also pulling up brambles and nettles in a sort-of tidying up of the scrub for I need a place to put the compost bin that I bought a couple of weeks ago and everywhere else is full up.

And what else? Ahh yes. I’ve dug over the carrot patch and the potato patch and rescued some veg. I fact I had home-grown potatoes and carrots for tea just now. I’ve also tidied up Caliburn’s cab and cleaned the inside of the windscreen which was all greased over and filthy. We’re off to Liz and Terry’s tomorrow and Strawberry Moose has been promised a huge hug from Liz. He’s quite looking forward to it.

And in other news, Rhys and I have been looking at cement mixers on the internet – Rhys has to lay a concrete foundation for his new shed. But never mind the cement mixer, Harbour Freight has a heavy duty concrete vibrator for just €99. Now isn’t that right up Lee “I’m a potty-mouth” Prostitute’s alley?

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Tuesday 22nd September 2009 – I SPENT MOST OF THE MORNING …

fitting load spreading joists in attic floor les guis virlet puy de dome france… putting these two crossbeams in. This is where the door into the room will be.

You can see that the old beam in centre-pic is pretty well eaten. I can’t rely on that supporting the weight of people continually coming and going, especially when I knock down the wall underneath it in the very near future, and so it needs plenty of reinforcement to spread the load.

fitting new joists attic floor les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut these beams have to go in exactly right if they are to do any good. Millimetre-perfect is almost essential so you have to cut the lets undersize and the beams oversize and file them down until they fit. That’s what takes the time.

This afternoon I was interrupted by a couple of visitors. Firstly, Terry and Liz turned up, to borrow back their cement mixer. Terry, keen reader of my blog that he is, has suggested that I go with him tomorrow late afternoon to collect a ton of gravel and take it to his house.
“You have to say the magic words” I said.
“Liz is baking” he replied.

After Terry and Liz left I carried on and fitted some more flooring and tried out Rhys’ idea of screwing the plasterboard. Lucky I bought a pile of 4×60 screws. And with the drill on the lowest speed setting and with a low torque setting it drove the screws up nicely. I’ll try some more of this.

But I wasn’t at all in the mood for carrying on working as my second group of visitors brought me some news that has left me numb. Followers of my blog from its previous home will recall that back in early spring I had an “interaction” with a local farmer that got rather out of hand and attracted the attention and involvement of the local gendarmes.

Criminal charges were preferred and a summons was issued, and when the gendarmes went to serve it on the aforementioned farmer, I very much regret to say that they discovered him no longer in a position to receive it.

I’m totally devastated by this as I’m sure everyone else in the locality is. I don’t hate anyone at all so much that I wish them dead. This guy, much as he was a thoroughly obnoxious character, was quite simply a guy living a traditional French peasant lifestyle and caught up in a changing world with which he was in no condition to cope.

I just hope that wherever he has ended up, he is happier there than he clearly was round here.

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Saturday 18th July 2009 – TERRY AND LIZ HAVE THIS WHACKING GREAT BARN …

owl barn liz terry messenger sauret besserve puy de dome france… and it’s home to a couple of owls. Whenever you open the barn door first thing in the morning they fly out of the air vent. And after a couple of days trying, I finally managed to snap one as it fled.

You’ve no idea just how impressive it is to see them take to the air.

Terry came up in his own car this morning as he wanted to leave at lunchtime. Unfortunately the days when you were allowed to chain your workforce to the workplace are long gone and so I had little say in the matter.

Whatever happened to the days when employees were happy to work 24 hours per day seven days per week with just a crust of bread to keep them going? A sign of the times, I’m afraid.

concreting roof joints les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut we managed to do all of the concreting and cementing none the less and that was a good sign.

An even better sign was that the batteries and the rainwater held out. We used 5 bags of cement, about 120 litres of gravel and about half the sand, which shows you how much we saved by mixing the concrete ourselves, and we even repaired the chimney.

wood treatment roof les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfter Terry went I had a pause for a couple of hours and then painted all of the old woodwork on the roof and then started to tidy up the barn.

I’m feeling a bit homesick so I’m staying here tonight even though I don’t have any electricity to speak of as we took down the wind turbine and the solar panels on the house and I forgot about that. I’d better hurry up and finish my posting before the battery on my laptop goes flat and I run out of

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Thursday 16th July 2009 – I TELL YOU WHAT ….

…. I’m ever so impressed with my electrical set-up.

We had four bags of concrete mix today and a 375-watt cement mixer. And it mixed all of the concrete using the power off the batteries in the barn. Admittedly there was bright sunlight pushing up the amps but nevertheless it was impressive. Just as impressive was that all of the concrete was mixed using rainwater out of the water butts.

But it was hard work today. The heat was unbearable. The morning was bad enough as Terry was painting and I was shuttering in between the rafters and infilling with stones. In the afternoon it was even worse, and I was climbing up the ladders to the top of the scaffolding carrying bricks, stones, buckets of concrete and the like. It’s just as well that we ran out of concrete (we’re going shopping tomorrow for more) because we couldn’t carry on like that in that heat.

I also dropped off Caliburn’s temporary registration at the bank so they can change the insurance over, and the postie came, bringing Caliburn’s permanent log book. She said that there would be a very violent storm at 19:00 tonight so I told her that when she’s finished her round she can get up on the roof with us and help us do the slating.

She never turned up though, and she was wrong about the storm. At about 21:00 the clouds closed in and we had some rain and there was thunder rumbling away in the distance. Right now, it’s P155ing down outside but nothing like what she promised us. We’ll have to see what tomorrow brings.

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