Tag Archives: stone wall

Saturday 4th September 2010 – We are back where we left off in May.

But never mind the footy for the moment – just look at the picture.

It’s not just streets ahead of what the old Pentax K100D could do – it’s on a totally different planet. ISO 3200 setting on RAW data with a shutter speed of 400 and automatic exposure and then the image reduced from 4200×3000 to 800×533 and it can churn out stuff like this.

This is definitely the way forward and as I said the other day, a decent (read “expensive”) lens makes a whole new world of difference. I’ll settle for this quality.

Remember that the floodlights are only cheap basic stuff, probably not even 250LUX. A proper professional football ground has a light output of 750LUX and that would give almost daylight-quality.

As for the match itself, this is Pionsat’s 3rd XI playing St Angel, and they started off the season with a 2-1 win. There were a couple of new lads playing for the side and they looked the business.

But before anyone gets too excited, the 2nd XI don’t have a game this weekend. Next weekend when all three teams are out you’ll see a different 3rd XI on the field and we’ll be back to the motley. But get the points in while you can.

At the moment the 3rd XI are top of the league, and that really is a moment to savour.

Today I’ve been working – in the morning on my Virlet website and later pointing the eastern wall. Three buckets of mortar went into it today. And I now know which are the animals that live in the holes in that wall. I threw a paintbrush full of water into one of the holes to flush out some loose sand and I flushed out a rather indignant bat. I’m not sure who was more surprised, me or him, but I threw another brush-load of water at him, he took the hint and piddled off, and I quickly filled in the hole before he came back.

But this pointing is ever so slow – it’s going to take me for ever.

Does anyone remember those green fruits on the tree in my garden – I posted an image of them a few months back. They are in fact damsons and so seeing as I didn’t have any strawberries to eat with my plain soya dessert this evening, I grabbed a handful and boiled them in some sugar and water and made a kind of syrup. I added some of that to the soya and it tasted really good. I like this idea of profiting as much as possible from what is available to eat here.

And in other news, talking football again, I see that next Sunday afternoon the referee for the 2nd Division match between Pontaumur and Chapdes Beaufort is a Mr E Hall of Pionsat.

God help them!

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Thursday 2nd September 2010 – I had a little fun today …

… with the Nikon. As you know, I’ve started to work on a little website about Virlet, and the major claim to fame of the village is the Dominican Abbey of Bellaigue.

You can see it from the end of my lane, way down in the valley below and so I took a pic of it. And considering that it’s about 6 km away it’s come out rather well.

The camera by the way is set to images of 4200×3000 or something like that, and the quality of the image is set to HIGH.

What I have done with it though is to reduce it to 800×533 and set the quality to 42% – what I always do for images that I’m posting to the web.

The next bit was the exciting part. What I have done is cropped out a section that is just 350 x 220 or thereabouts and blown it up to 800×533. I had to sharpen the image a little but I reckon that this has come out superbly.

Like I said, it’s 6 kilometres away from where I took the pic. Spending that money on that 105mm (3xzoom) lens has been well-spent if you ask me.

>Now despite what I said yesterday, I didn’t go to Clermont Ferrand today. I made it as far as the mairie but the secretary was involved with some complicated with someone and it took 40 minutes while I was there! So by the time I had my paperwork and had reached Clermont Ferrand, it would have been lunchtime and I would have been hanging around for a couple of hours.

But she had given me a list of doctors authorised to give medicals for truck and bus drivers, so I rang them to see about an appointment for me. The first one said “mid-October” – the second one said the same. And none of this surprised me. Long-term followers of my outpourings will remember all of this from before.

The next doctor I tried said “Friday 18:00”.
“Like tomorrow?” I asked with disbelief
“Yes, tomorrow” he confirmed.

So badger going to Clermont Ferrand this afternoon and trying to blag my way around getting my commercial licenses somehow. I can go on Monday with all of the paperwork properly complete. I worked hard to get my commercial licenses so I’m not going to surrender them lightly, that’s for sure.

So this afternoon I added a couple more buckets of mortar to the wall. And ended the day with a solar shower. Only 35.5°C so it was rather cool, but welcome nevertheless.

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Tuesday 31st August 2010 – I’ve been out and about …

… for part of the day today.

One of the places that I visited today was Virlet, the village that is my postal address. And while I was there I went to take a few photographs.

Now that my website is practically up-to-date I’ve started on doing some new stuff and one of the things I’m working on is a page about the village. There’s nothing at all in English about it.

While I was there for the brocante I took a few pics but I really wanted one of the church. There has never been a decent one because it’s surrounded by clutter – a stone wall, trees, the village hall etc.

So I had this idea of driving right across to the other side of the valley, using the 105mm (3x) zoom, doing a nice long-hop (it’s over a mile away across there) and then cropping the church out of the photo.

And do you know, it’s come out rather well. It really is the only position where you can see it to its best advantage , and in fact I’ve never seen a photo of the church taken from this position. I’m well-pleased with this.

So why was I in Virlet today?

Two reasons really. Firstly to obtain an attestation that I am a resident in the area and secondly to have a copy of the list that gives the names and addresses of doctors who are authorised to give medical examinations for commercial driving licences. If I’m changing my driving licence for a new one I may as well change my truck and bus (and taxi) licences too while I’m at it. You never know what might happen.

But of course, as you would expect, it wasn’t all plain sailing. The mayor’s secretary is away today and he doesn’t have a clue what to do. So I’ll have to go back on Thursday. You’ve never ever seen anything like this place for chaos. But at least the guy at the Driving Licence centre answered his phone this morning and he was even helpful. I don’t have much time to apply for this licence so I need to put my skates on. I’ll go down to Clermont Ferrand on Thursday when I have my attestation.

So this afternoon I carried on with the pointing and it doesn’t half take ages to do. You can see just how far I’ve done today – the grey-mortared bit at the lower edge of the wall. That’s about one-sixteenth of the wall done. At this rate it will take for ever but I’ll keep on plugging away at it as long as the weather lets me.

And that might not be for long – last night the temperature fell to 7.2°C, the lowest so far. I ahve all the windows closed up here and I’m wearing a jacket – in August.

And in other news, Terry and I are now the owners of an Ifor Williams 2.5-tonne trailer. Fed-up of messing about with old trailers that won’t even carry a set of scaffolding when they are working properly, we have bitten the bullet and paid up. It’ll move the scaffolding and Terry’s tractor quite nicely, help me fetch all my cars down here, and we can hire it out as well to make a little bit on the side, like we do with the scaffolding.

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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.

Mind 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.

And 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!

There 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!

As 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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Thursday 19th August 2010 – There’s no photo this evening, people.

The truth is that I was rather carried away with things and ran out of time.

It was 19:42 in fact when I knocked off. And that was after an early start too. Terry rang me as usual only today it was to St Gervais d’Auvergne to meet up, and then off to Blot l’Eglise to rescue the scaffolding. And was it heck dismantled – the people who had hired it were still using it. So we turfed them off, dismantled it and then loaded up the vans. Back to Terry’s to unload and then it was lunchtime already. But at least moving the scaffolding in two vans was a workable option after all of the excitement with the trailers we have been using.

This afternoon I was labouring for Terry who was on the roof and for Simon who was building framework and fitting plasterboards in the bathroom. It’s a good job that I suffer from schizophrenia so that both of me can manage with tasks like this.

And we didn’t finish there until 17:30 either, and with a full bucket-load of mortar I set off to attack my wall. It took ages of course, much of which time was spent hunting suitable rocks, but half of that wall has now been built up to the level of the chevrons, which is exciting news. A nice bucket of sloppy liquid gravelly concrete went on there a treat. For that half of the wall it’s now mostly a case of infilling with whatever rocks I can find and then concreting them into position.

And that took me until 19:42, as I said. And when I’ve been working like that I don’t feel like much else. But tomorrow is another day – in fact, it’s POETS day.

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Wednesday 18th August 2010 – First pic today …

… 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.

And 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!

Do 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.

We 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.

You’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 ….

… 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.

I 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.

As 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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Tuesday 10th August 2010 – Awwwwwwww Bambi!

Keen readers of my outpourings will know that I have something of an interest in the local wildlfe. There’s such a lot of it about of course, and examples thereof feature in these pages at regular intervals.

You might remember the fox that I featured on here a week or two ago, but anyway here’s a deer that I noticed down across the fields about 400 metres away as I was tidying up after finishing work this evening.

I thought at first that it might be Bambi but judging by those antlers, maybe not and he would probably be quite offended at the thought. He’s maybe come to challenge Strawberry Moose
for possession of the local herd but Strawberry Moose would soon see him off.

Anyway, he’s cute (I hope that it’s a “he” anyway) and I’m glad that I have a high-quality lens on the new Nikon D5000. He certainly merits a photograph or two on my blog.

In other news, we are making progress on the roof of this lean-to.

The front part of the wall has all been built up level, inside and outside, and we’ve put the horizontal wooden beam in position, embedding it into the cement and packing behind it with stones and cement.

The wooden beam is important because first of all it gives us a nice straight level and secondly, we’ll be fixing chevrons and laths to it in the long run so it needs to be good.

We have also been making good progress with the inner lining of the far wall. We are lining it in breeze blocks, and you can see the slope that we are starting to put into it. When the breeze blocks are all in place we’ll be putting a cladding of stones on the outside.

Terry and Simon have been doing the masonry work and I’ve been spending most of the day mixing the cement and doing all of the fetching and carrying.

It’s wearing me out but it’s clearly doing me some good. It’s been a long time since I felt as exhausted and I’m going to bed just now before I fall …..

ZZZZZZZZZZ

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Thursday 15th July 2010 – After about almost a year …

… of waiting to fix that downpipe on the side of the house and it being in position for just a couple of weeks, I took it down today.

There were two reasons for that –
firstly – all of the rainwater from the house and the lean-to are just running off down the lane and turning the place into a quagmire
secondly – the water situation is starting to become a little tight- I reckon I have about 150 litres or so left.
And when it rains, the 6.5 sq.m of verandah roof doesn’t catch all that much – 100 litres of water is about 15mm of rain. But add to that the footprint of the lean-to – 5m x 1.8m, or 9 sq.m, then the 100 litres of water becomes 6mm of rain. And then add that to the side of the house roof – with its footprint of 5.3m x 3.5m or just over 18.5 sq m then the 100 litres of water becomes just under 3mm of rain.

Sitting here the other day watching the rain filling up that water butt by the barn with all of the water off the barn roof has given me some new ideas which I put into action.

What I did was to rip off all of the guttering on the lean-to and to replace it so that it slopes to the right rather than the left. The guttering now captures all of the water off the lean-to and now I can replenish my water supply more quickly – always of course assuming that it’s ever going to rain again.

This morning though I removed all of the wood from off the old vegetable patch at the side of the barn – all that we ripped off the one side of the roof. 3 of the beams are useless and will have to be cut up for firewood but of the others some of the wood can be salvaged and I might start shortly on the greenhouse, using the old beams as a frame.

While I was at it, and with the old vegetable patch now being clear of wood, I set to work on that with a vengeance.

I spent a pleasant hour or two pulling out all of the weeds that were growing over the stone wall and now you can actually see it, for the first time since I don’t know when. This place is starting to tidy itself up a bit and that’s a pleasant change.

The automatic electric water heater is working too. It ran for almost three hours today and I put a thermometer in to see what the temperature was doing. 37°C the water reached in that time so not much danger of the sytem melting down, although if I make a sealed circuit with a smaller tank I shall either fit a thermal cut-out of have an expansion tank of some description. But it’s still impressive all the same.

Ironically the water in the solar water heater reached a lovely 44°C this evening and so I had a nice steamy shower.

What with one thing and another things are starting to get quite luxurious around here!

Saturday 28th November 2009 – I had a nice surprise this evening.

Not quite as nice as the surprise Pierre had, but nice enough none-the-less.

There I was, quietly watching the football like I do, when Elodie (the young girl who works at Auchan and who persons the Pie Hut at the football ground) whispered in my little pointy ear “it’s Pierre (the footballer who works at Brico Depot)’s 21st birthday today and we’re having a surprise party for him after the game. Would you like to come?”

Now I don’t do social occasions as you know but firstly Elodie invited me and I think she’s cute. I have a little soft spot for her (her mother has a soft spot for me as well – in her case it’s the Goodwin Sands but I digress) and secondly it’s nice to be invited to close social arrangements in the village such as this. It’s not quite “come to my house and sleep with my daughter” but that will surely come. Give me another 50 years or so.

We were about 10 or 12 at Liz and Terry’s and did quite a bit of pointing although we didn’t go up to the top of the scaffolding – not with this howling gale that was blowing around. I spent most of the day pulling a primeval forest out of the cracks in the stonework.

We did tons of work – mostly in the morning. In the afternoon things went slower due to the extra weight that we were carrying. The food was gorgeous as usual.

And as suspected, no-one said anything to me at all about “witness X”. Isn’t that a surprise?

Talking of the football, I remember saying that Pionsat’s 2nd XI wouldn’t find it so easy in the 2nd Division as they did in the 3rd last season and the thrashing that they received on the opening day of the season went to reinforce that opinion. But tonight I have seen the worst team that I have seen for a while (anything in Division 4 excepted) and how Pionsat only scored 5 and how they let Charensat score 2 is a mystery that will stay with me for ever.

The 1st XI played hated local rivals St Gervais and drew 4-4 in a match that was filled with scandal, controversy, dubious tactics, dubious decisions and a sending-off for a headbutt. It was freezing cold all evening with this piercing wind
(“what did you say?” – ed)
(“piercing – what did you think I said?”)
but the action on the pitch warmed up the pretty large and voiciferous crowd, and of course a good time was had by all. Nothing like a bit of excitement and controversy to liven up a freezing cold Saturday evening.

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EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: stone wall

Saturday 4th September 2010 – We are back where we left off in May.

Thursday 2nd September 2010 – I had a little fun today …

Tuesday 31st August 2010 – I’ve been out and about …

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

Thursday 19th August 2010 – There’s no photo this evening, people.

Wednesday 18th August 2010 – First pic today …

Tuesday 17th August 2010 – Tomorrow the World!

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

Tuesday 10th August 2010 – Awwwwwwww Bambi!

Thursday 15th July 2010 – After about almost a year …

Saturday 28th November 2009 – I had a nice surprise this evening.

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