Tag Archives: Expo

Tuesday 25th January 2011 – We’re cracking on in this apartment.

After a leisurely start Terry and I went down to the garage and brought up the kitchen tiles. And then Terry set off and tiled one of the walls in the kitchen. Just like that! There’s another few places on the other walls to tile, and then it will all need to be grouted, but it was impressive all  the same.

Liz bravely attacked the big bedroom and gave it a thorough cleaning and polishing. I can’t believe how dirty that had become and how much dust there was since I relaid the floor back in 2001.

Me, I emptied the 3rd bedroom of all of the rubbish so that there’s now room to move about in there. That needs some polyfilla in the walls and then a thorough clean before Liz and I can start to decorate it. I’ve also been dismantling the furniture in the hall and I made a start on the cupboard under the stairs.

Another huge pile of rubbish found its way into the skips today. I can’t believe how much stuff has accumulated here since I moved in, in May 2000. I do recall that I moved here with a half-empty Luton Transit. I reckon I’ve thrown that much out in the last couple of days and there is still more to go. But I’m impressed with all of the work so far.

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Monday 24th January 2011 – It’s a shame about the forest.

And I should know. I served on 5 Open University Students Association committees (OUSA Belgium, NERF, the SRG, the Region 9 Regional Committee and the OUSA EC) for about 3 years and I have just thrown all my papers away. And it took three huge Royal Mail sacks to take it all down to the skip here. Heaven knows how many trees that represents but if you calculate the number of people who actually serve on these committees it must be at least something the equivalent of the New Forest.

Yes, the European Paper Mountain indeed.

But at least I can get into my office now which is just as well, for that’s where I’ve been sleeping and so I’ll have room to spread out tonight.

We also have an electric oven and grill. Terry helped me fight my way into the garage that I rent downstairs and we pulled out the fitted oven that I bought a few years ago in a sale. A slightly shopsoiled display unit it was and so reduced from £769 to £307 and so in keeping with my idea of going for quality at a reduced price rather than full-price rubbish, I bought it and stored it in the garage until I was ready for it.

It seems too that the rewiring that I did in the kitchen was rather … errr ….unorthodox and with Terry being a fully-qualified time-served electrician he put that right in no time at all – well, geologically speaking that is.

The cleaning and throwing away of stuff is also continuing and at this rate we’ll have a place to sit down by the weekend.

I’m hoping that we can have the place finished off in a couple of weeks so that I can sell it and have another weight off my shoulders but in a certain respect I shall be sorry to leave here permanently even though it’s been almost four years since I paid it any more than a flying visit.

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Saturday 22nd January 2011 – My first day back in Brussels …

… and it’s really difficult to adapt to the new conditions. Running water, proper bathroom and kitchen, central heating, a comfortable bed. How can I possibly survive?

We have a  proper bathroom and kitchen thanks to Liz who has performed heroics today in making this place fit for heroes. And I also have room to sleep properly, a dining table and chairs and a comfortable sofa thanks to some rather thorough sifting of a huge pile of old and manky paperwork from heaven alone knows when. Terry has been making plans and projects for the work that will be needed, and that resulted in a trip to the shops.

The traffic was difficult to adapt to as well – there isn’t traffic like this in the Auvergne. And there aren’t the queues in the carparks either. And neither are the ridiculous prices. No wonder I moved down there when my income dried up. I could never have survived here.

The tidying has come to something of a halt though – we have filled up all of the containers in the waste room. We shall have to wait for the concierge to start back to work on Monday before we can take any more rubbish downstairs. But not to worry. There’s plenty of other things to be going on with.

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Friday 21st January 2011 – I was right …

.. about blogging from another country. We are actually back in Belgium. In Brussels in fact, and in my apartment here. It’s been sitting doing nothing for a couple of years so we’ve decided that it’s high time we attacked it and got it done.

I say “we” because Liz and Terry are with me. We are going to have a work-in and not leave until the place is finished and up for sale. Liz has already attacked the fridge, and managed to avoid being grabbed by whatever it was that was living in the freezer compartment. She’s also been into the bathroom, which I told her was a silly thing to do just before going to bed. She’ll be having nightmares all night now.

I won’t say it’s warm in here but considering I haven’t been here since September and then for only a day I was expecting it to be much colder than it was. But tomorrow I’ll switch on the heating. That might help. And also tomorrow we’ll have a good look round and make a plan of attack and see where we go from here. I mean – regardless of whatever I could raise by selling it, it’s costing me €200 or so each month to keep it up with the communal charges, electricity and rates and so on and I have much better uses for that money.

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Friday 14th January 2011 – Ouch!

It’s been an expensive day today – and I didn’t go shopping either. GRRRR What did happen was that the postie came by today bearing some major bad news.

Firstly, when the solicitor charged with handling the sale of Reyers was asked to settle all of the outstanding Brussels taxation issues, well, indeed he did. But he did that on the 29th of September, the day that the cheque for the sale was cleared, and of course the property taxes on Expo were due on October 1st. And so I had a red reminder today for €1200 that I had not taken into account in my budget.

Secondly, a couple of years ago I went into the taxation office here and asked that the taxes that I am to pay on Les Guis and on Montaigut should be paid by direct debit instead of by demand. I told the tax office that I travel around a great deal and was afraid of missing a payment or two, and the tax office very kindly helped me to complete the forms.

And when I went into the tax office that time, I was brandishing around a tax d’habitation form. And so you can guess what has happened. Just how many brain cells do you need to have, to work out that if someone tells you that he travels around a great deal and is afraid of missing a payment or two, he means ALL HIS TAXES? And so that was another €733 that bit the dust.

While I was out, I reckoned that I may as well go and buy the plank that I need for making my false beam, the one that the electric cables will be running behind. So to St Gervais and the sawmill. And he will cut me a plank of the required width and thickness, but to a maximum of 4.15 metres. That’s no good. The room is 4.47 metres and the plank of course needs to be in one piece – it will look silly as a beam if it is in two pieces.

And so I shot off through the wilds to Montel-de-Gelat and the huge sawmill there. And I arrived about half an hour before closing time. They have planks in stock – 4.50 metres long by 18mm thick. Absolutely ideal for what I want. But the width – 150mm whereas I want 120mm ideally.
“Can you trim one down for me?”
“No”
“No? Why not?”
“Because this is the week when the cutting mill is closed for machine maintenance.We can do it for you next Friday”.

I’m clearly having no luck at all today.

wood pile lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceI said the other day that I would take a photo of the lean-to with all of the wood. It looked like this in November last year, and all through the following 12 months the pile increased in size as I flung more and more bits of wood in there.At one stage in the summer I couldn’t even get into the place. But anyway, you can see that it’s emptying out quite nicely.

The wall on the left is the eastern wall of the house and the kitchen will be built against this wall. The dark grey cylinder is the large gas bottle that will power the gas cooker. I’ll anchor it to the wall and drill through the wall in order to pass a gas pipe through. The other cylindrical object is an old immersion heater that Claude gave me to play with.

In the bedroom I did some more of the tongue-and-grooving but that came to a dead stop too as I ran out of 20mm insulation. I’ll have to go to Brico Depot tomorrow and buy a load of that so that I can carry on next week. There’s not much else I can be doing until I buy my plank.

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Friday 24th September 2010 – PHEW! I’M EXHAUSTED!

And it’s hardly surprising too after what I’ve been doing today!

In order of appearance –
1) I went in person to the Connections office and I’ve booked my flights and car hire. I leave Paris Charles de Gaulle at 11:00 on Wednesday and fly to Zurich where I pick up another flight to Toronto.

Then I have my car for 6 weeks, and then fly back. Total cost, all included, was €2100 which, all things considered, isn’t too bad at all.

Flying from Paris Charles de Gaulle means that I pay maybe €60 more, but I don’t have to go to Brussels, which would probably cost me that much on the train.

The downside is though that I have to hang around through the night on a railway station somewhere in provincial France.

At the moment, Nevers looks a good bet. I can get a train from Riom at 19:36 that gets me there at about 21:00 and there’s a train from there to Paris at 05:00.

Nevers is a draughty railway station but there are cafes and restaurants just over the road where I can loiter for a while and the train starts from there so it is usually backed into the station by the night shift at about 03:30 so I can curl up in a corner.

It arrives in Paris at about 07:30 so there’s plenty of time to get over to Charles de Gaulle.

I was tempted by flying to Charles de Gaulle from Clermont Ferrand on the 07:00 flight but the price €280 has put me off. I could travel there the night before and stay in the Hilton and still have change from that.

2) I visited the IKEA and had some luck too. As you know, with the composting toilet I’m using an aluminium plant pot but it really needs to be something in stainless steel.

And I found some superb waste-bin cum plant-pots there – 25 litre capacity and in stainless steel, for just €14.95. Exactly what I want and so I bought two of those.

3) But the most important thing concerned my property empire.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I first moved to Brussels in 1993 I bought a little studio apartment about 20 minutes walk from work.

A few years later I met Laurence and as she had a little daughter (Roxanne) my studio was too small for us so I rented it out and we rented a larger apartment. When Laurence and I split up and she moved away, I bought the big apartment at Jette.

The little studio remained rented out – the old couple who rented it moved out and they passed it on to their grandson. When he moved away he passed it on to a girl he knew.

And to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … a few months ago, she sent me a mail to say that she reckoned that she ought to move out and find a place of her own to buy instead of renting.

But as she was happy in my place, she wondered on the off-chance whether I had ever thought of selling it.

The property market isn’t as good as it used to be and finding willing buyers is not all that easy. You need estate agents, plenty of time and patience, a good deal of hassle.

And of course there are all these laws now that you need homeowners files, surveys, thermal inspections and everything else and so on.

So someone ready willing and able to proceed is something that should not be discarded lightly, especially as the price that was offered was – well – I could have got more for it, but then I would have had to pay estate agents, etc etc.

And so I am now 1 property lighter in my portfolio.

But what I have lost in rental income has been more than made up by the fact that I have now reimbursed the outstanding mortgage on the apartment at Jette and the difference between the two figures means that I have more than doubled my disposable income.

There’s also a lump sum left over of an amount not to be sniffed at, and Terry, Simon and I are going to be having a little chat about how this lump sum can be made to work.

I know that if I just leave it lying around it will slowly melt away into nothing.

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Thursday 23rd September 2010 – THE JOURNEY …

… to Brussels on Thursday went fine until a few miles north of Moulins when the heavens opened.

And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen rain like that. After a couple of hours it calmed down a little but I still arrived back in Brussels resembling something rather like a drowned rat.

And I must have been in a dismal humour when I left there back last April.

The computer was still on, the door onto the balcony was open and generally speaking the place was in something of disarray. I didn’t really fancy that at 02:30 in the morning after having just driven 8.5 hours.

It took me a while to tidy up some space and it was not unti 04:00 that I finally went to bed.

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Friday23rd April 2010 – I’ll be back …

… on the road in about 10 minutes. And I’ll be very late getting away tonight, much later than I wanted to be, but then again, a lot has happened.

Firstly we had yet another “end of an era”. Long-time followers of this organ will recall the white LDV that I bought in 2002 and which ran for ever once we put a new engine into it but which was defeated by rust and lack of spare parts. It’s been sitting outside the apartment at “Expo” for three years since Caliburn came along and everyone was moaning about it, so I had someone come along and take it away.

A vehicle dismantler in Brussels has an LDV and he can’t find spares for it either so he gave me €100 for it, which I reckoned was excellent value.

Cleaning it out discovered hordes of goodies that I had forgotten all about too as well as a full set of tools, so it was quite profitable all told.

After that I went for lunch with Mike, who is doing my old job as chair of the Open University Student Association’s North European Revolutionary Forces. And I had quite a laugh as on the way there I saw a billboard saying “You have won the lottery. Where will you be dining now?” Well, I had effectively won the lottery with disposing of the LDV and I was taking Mike to a fritkot. My generosity knows no bounds.

And so, after paying all of the bills and so forth, I cleaned up Expo just a little bit, loaded up Caliburn, and hit the road.

I also found some time to call in at the IKEA Anderlecht (where I was one of several persons involved in an argument on the car park) for one or two things that I need at home.

And so, all in all, it is going to be a very late departure and I’m not planning on making it all the way home in one go. After all, I’ve had quite a busy day.

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Thursday 22nd April 2010 – I can’t be doing …

… with this tidying up nonsense

I’ve been at it for most of the day and don’t seem to have made any progress at all. But then again I’ve taken 6 full bin liners down to the dustbins, packed up another three ready to donate to the clothes collection, and I’ve also done four washing-machine loads.

But you can’t really notice any difference and anyone who comes here and recalls this posting will wonder what on earth the place looked like before I started to tidy it up.

Having said that though, it IS three years since I’ve lived here and so there’s bound to be piles of dust and the like, and with renovations going on simultaneously in two rooms (long-term readers of this blog in its previous guises will recall all about that) it’s hardly surprising that things got just a little out of control.

Tomorrow I have some bills to pay and then I need to load up Caliburn with stuff. That’ll empty the place somewhat and it will make moving around so much easier. I still haven’t worked out where I’m going to put everything when I finally empty out the place (I’m just bringing stuff that can be left outside) so it seems to me that my priorities need to be to finish the bedroom back at the farm when I return and get that emptied out of tools and slates and the like. That’ll give me somewhere dry to keep everything while I have a good ponder.

But there’s some kind of plan simmering around underneath the surface for this place too, but more of this anon.

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Tuesday 20th April 2010 – AND RIGHT NOW …

… I’m in Expo, my apartment in Brussels.

As I said yesterday (or to be more precise, first thing this morning) I’ve had to rush back here as a matter of urgency as there are a couple of things that need my urgent attention.

There are a few other things that I would like to do too. Not that these are important, but I can combine all of these things together and that’s a few more issues solved too.

But back in Brussels I was almost run down on a zebra crossing as soon as I got out of Caliburn, and then I was involved in the Great Brussels paperchase.

And that includes the fact that my Brussels id card is out of date and not accepted in the bank, but my driving licence, issued on the same day and with the same photograph, is accepted.

And then being stuck in the Brussels rush-hour traffic that I had forgotten all about for hours, watching a motorist deliberately ram her old and rusting Opel into someone’s big and spanking-new BMW.

To think that I used to work amongst this for 10 years.

And then finally getting back here (having done first everything that was important just in case I was overwhelmed by the excitement of it all) and walking right into the middle of a raging controversy.

I am not glad to be back and I can’t wait for Friday night when I can come home. I’ve only been here for a few hours and I’m fed up already.

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