Tag Archives: plasterboard

Monday 15th February 2010 – Well, the Pentax is Kaput!

Or rather, no it isn’t but it very soon will be because I’ve just had the bill for repairing it. FIVE HUNDRED AND TEN EUROS. That’s about as much as it cost new and a new body only in the USA I can buy for FIVE HUNDRED AND FIVE DOLLARS – or less than €400.

Totally ridiculous – and why Pentax couldn’t have pointed this out to me and made me an offer on a new body I just do not know.

But in any case there’s a major sale on in a leading camera supplier in the USA and there is a Canon EOS with lens on offer at $499 (plus VAT when it gets over here) and I’m wondering if that might be the route to go down. They use lithium battery packs instead of AA batteries (and AA batteries was a major selling point) but if I buy a spare and keep it charged up that might be another consideration.

I can then flog all my Pentax gear and use the dosh to buy a decent lens.

The RRP of the Canon is $799 – Body only by the way so this looks like a good price to me

I’m giving this some serious thought.

It was absolutely taters this morning – I dont think that it’s ever been so cold at 09:15 so after breakfast I came back up here and warmed up.

Once I had reached a decent ambient temperature I dressed up – not in fishnets and stockings, basque and high heels Rhys – but in two pairs of trousers, two fleeces, two pairs of socks, my overalls and a coat and then went to seal off the fireplace downstairs so that I can run the woodstove up here.

I had a piece of leftover plasterboard that was a good size and so I trotted off to find the silicone sealant. And you might or might not believe it but it was frozen solid! In a tight-fitting plastic tube. It took ages for it to thaw out.

But it seems to have worked because the small fire that I lit in the stove burnt away to nothing in minutes without the slightest trace of a smell around the house.

I’m going to track down a sack of compressed wood pellets now and see how they burn.

This afternoon I carried on with the battening of the rear wall in the bedroom but the batteries in the power tools kept on going flat so I gave it up in the end. But with the sun shining gloriously and the day warming up (it reached 6.5 degrees in the verandah) and with fully-charged batteries in the house and barn I felt much better.

But once the dusk gathered the temperature plummeted and as I set off for the Anglo-French group it was already minus 4. But still – 18:40 and it was still daylight. So the days are lengthening considerably. It wasn’t so long ago that I was packing up at 16:30.

The roads were gruesome and the return journey was even more gruesome as the temperature has dropped to minus 8. A clear blue sky with thousands of stars and a strong easterly wind. The moment the wind drops the temperature will fall through the floor.

We could well be on course for the coldest night of the year.

And tomorrow we shall all be radio stars!

-4

Friday 12th February 2010 – I’ve not been feeling myself today

plasterboard stud wall bedroom stair cupboard les guis virlet puy de dome france
“Quite right too – filthy habit” – ed. I woke up with a headache and couldn’t get out of bed. And when I finally got up I couldn’t get my breath – even climbing the stairs left me quite exhausted. After breakfast I started on some more plasterboarding but it couldnt make much progress as it was wearing me out.

By 13:30 I had to call it a day and go and lie down. In fact I crashed out for a couple of hours. Liz rang me up to see how I was and Terry battled his way here through the snow (it’s carried on snowing non-stop and I’m up to my waist in it) to pick up some Ford Transit snowchains that are lying around here.

But I’m not moving. I fact I didn’t make myself any tea tonight. I’m going to just stay here and sleep it off.

In other news this webhosting thing isn’t going to die down any time soon and more correspondence has been received.

And as I said elsewhere –
1) having had an “encounter” with this webhosting service my own experience is that despite the manager’s verbal belligerence the truth is somewhat different and it was interesting to see how quickly the manager caved in when OUSA banged the big stick back in April last year. No question about legality, no question about defending customers’ rights and the privilege of free comment despite all of the previous hype from several years ago, OUSA banged the big stick and the manager jumped. And jumped by deleting files from the server, of course, without even notifying the owner of the files that they had been deleted. Now how illegal is that?
Now just imagine the situation where all of the OUSA branch files are in one place on one web server managed by one manager who has “previous” of caving in to OUSA. Any time someone posts something critical of The Powers That Be, all TPTB need to do is to wave the big stick at the manager and the manager is likely to simply remove the files with no warning if past experience is anything to go by. No court order necessary, no solicitors consulted, no right of appeal. Signing up to this offer is effectively giving OUSA the green light to censor all of your websites with no right of appeal. Editorial control of all of your websites in the hands of a OUSA Executive Committee sycophant – it’s an Executive-Committee dream come true.

2) I’ve also been told the price of this contract. It’s a commercial rate of £120. Now I reckon that there are over 200 sites likely to be affected by this – and all for £120. As you can imagine, its something that isn’t sustainable at that price. It won’t even cover the cost of the hard drive let alone the cost of the server and the administration. I give it four weeks at that price.
But on the other hand it could be £120 per site. And that’s not a commercial rate at all! My four sites cost me a total of £178 and two of them, as you know, are huge with tons of traffic. Hostgator will do you a website hosting for $4.95 per month – or about £40 per annum. When I managed OUSA Belgium’s website it was hosted on Bravenet for ZERO pounds per annum if you didn’t mind the odd pop-up every now and again. I don’t call £120 per site a commercial deal by any stretch of the imagination.
But do the maths – about 200 sites each paying £120 – that’s a turnover from OUSA funds of £24000, which is an awful lot of money when your organisation is struggling for cash to the extent of trying to ban disabled people from attending the annual Conference. It’s also a very healthy turnover for any company to show in its books and accounts, even if at the end of the accounting year it plans to hand it all back.

It makes you wonder what the purpose of it all is supposed to be.

-2

Tuesday 9th February 2010 – This radio programme is taking shape

We were out at the SMADC offices today – the SMADC being something like Syndicat Mixte pour l’Amenagement et Developpement des Combrailles – where we discussed our tactics for the radio programme. Christian was there with his floozy and I was there with Liz. I have plenty of ideas and Liz approves of them and as far as the SMADC and the radio station go, then I don’t imagine that they will care less as long as we do it.

Apart from that, this morning I cracked on with my plasterboarding and it’s all but finished now. All I need to do now is to join things up with the tape and then fill over it. Of course I have put my jointing tape somewhere safe – so safe in fact that I can’t find it now. That’s a badger! But as soon as I find it and tape things up I can start to do the ceiling – with tongue-and-grooving. I can do that on my own and I don’t have any inhibitions as to how it’ll look.

And Claude came round. Yesterday finished him off for good and he wants to pause until Monday. He’s getting his son up over the weekend to move the heavy objects ready for us to load on Monday. But on Monday Terry is giving blood, Tuesday Liz and I are in studio and on Wednesday we are all at the bank. This timetable for moving Claude is shrinking rapidly.

-8

Friday 5th February 2010 – Well, we’ve done it now!

This afternoon we signed the compromis for these houses in Montaigut. Mind you, it’s not all plain sailing as you might imagine with anything involving me. Firstly the houses are situated in a historic area (in fact,just round the corner is the blacksmith’s where Joan of Arc had her spurs made) and so the town has the right to match any offer made on any property in that area. Mind you the town is flat broke so that’s unlikely to happen but I bet they’ll soon find the money if they get to hear that there might be a possibility that I might be moving in there.

Secondly the properties have already been sold elsewhere. However the guy can’t get a loan (and looking at them, it’s no surprise) and so he has renounced his offer, but nevertheless he needs to give his formal agreement.

Nothing is ever straightforward, is it?

Completion is set to be the end of April so the major plan currently is
1) finish Terry and Liz’s kitchen on rainy days
2) point the outside wall of their house on dry days
3) change my barn roof
4) go to Brussels and have a blitz on my apartment in Jette and put it on the market.
5) come back and start on these houses

So that’s the plan for the next three months anyway. You can see what I mean about being busy.

les guis virlet puy de dome franceTalking of being busy though, I’ve finished insulating this cupboard space, put the horizontals in and now I’ve started to plasterboard it. It won’t take at all long to finish now and when I’ve done that I can put some shelves in there to store anything that needs to be kept clean and tidy.

And whule we are on the subject, Terry and I have been discussing my lighting. Terry is refusing to get involved in my electricity ( well, he is an electrician and he does have his professional pride) and he is quite impressed with these 12-volt LEDs that I’m using (and they had a few more on sale in LIDL today). So much so that he agrees with me that a mains (230-volt) lighting circuit is pretty redundant. So what am I now going to do with all these light bulbs that I’ve been collecting? But I’m not all that bothered. It’s saved me a lot of work and it is rather unnecessary.

And who was Joan of Arc? Why of course, she was the wife of Noah.

-10

Wednesday 3rd February 2010 – The really big problem …

… with making offers on properties that are for sale is that when the offer is accepted unconditionally, you always wonder just how low you could have gone. And this was what happened today. So I am now a half-owner of two more houses in the local area – or at least I will be on Friday when the signing takes place. Normally when you sign for a house here you pay a compromis – or deposit and it’s almost always 10%. The estate agents want us to sign on Friday but it’ll take a few days to round up all of the dosh so we suggested we delay the signing for a few days. But ohhh no –
“Could you manage 5%?“
Clearly they aren’t intending to wait until we sober up. It’s either a case of if we wait until Monday to sign, the houses might fall down over the weekend or else the people at the estate agency need to eat this weekend.

Rhys was wondering, with all this talk about letting them, whether we were going to let out the rooms by the hour. I said that if we were to do that he could come and be the receptionist. We would supply the high heels, fishnets and basque but he would have to supply his own whip. There would also be the question of taking the sheep for a walk every morning.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had another really good day of electricity and so I had the electric heater on for three hours. It increased the temperature by 4 degrees and with it being an oil-bath radiator it was still keeping the room something like warm even at 18:00 – three hours after I’d switched it off.

lining wall space blanket insulation les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ve finished lining the walls of this cupboard place with the insulation blanket stuff and I’ve started to fit the plasterboard. Another day would see that all finished but I’m going to be a tiler’s labourer tomorrow. Terry is tiling his kitchen floor and needs to complete one half of it so that he can move the gas oven over. Liz is going out so I got the short straw. What with all of this moving for Claude, signing for houses, preparation for this radio programme we are doing and all of this our plans have become somewhat shaken up.

And if that wasn’t enough I hear on the grapevine that there might be a chauffeur’s job coming up for a couple of months. It’s enough to drive you to drink.

-9

Saturday 23rd January 2010 – I didn’t sleep through the alarm this morning.

I had all three going off in close proximity and that’s enough to awaken the dead – such as the OUSA Executive Committee. It’s well-known that they spend most of their meetings sitting round a table holding hands and trying to contact the living. So much so in fact that Caligula and her horse’s predecessor was once heard to say
“Is there anybody there? Knock once for yes – and twice for no“

So after I heaved myself from my stinking pit I made a coffee and went chaud-pied round to the Intermarche to find out why they hadn’t rung me (or Liz, for that matter) about this famous flight in a chopper.
“We didn’t have time to ring everybody” the manager wailed. And me, having amongst my many and varied talents the ability to read upside-down, noticed that in general all of the people with a French name had been contacted, and none of the people with a foreign name had been contacted.

So we just turn up a l’improviste tomorrow. well, we’ll see.

Then it was off to Montlucon and shopping. Apart from the usual items I bought a pile of plasterboard, a load of wood and some more insulation. I’ll be starting on the cupboard on the first floor next week if it’s too bad to work outside. And learning from the work in the attic, I won’t be wallpapering it. In one of the cheap shops (the VIMA) they were selling indoor crepi (that’s the cement-based paint for brick and stone walls and looks a bit like fine pebble-dash) for €9:00 for 15 litres so I’ll be covering the plasterboard in that.

I also bought 12 x 3-metre lengths of shuttering for concrete. That’s 175mm by 25mm rough-cut and cheap. I’ll be making my raised beds for the new vegetable plots with that. The current raised beds are 1.33 square – these will be 1.50 square and I have enought wood to make 6 of them. I can salvage the others in due course. I like raised-bed gardening.

In the other cheap shop (the NOZ) they were having a DVD clearout with titles as low as €0.78. I spend €20 in there on seven or eight DVDs, including a copy of “the Definitive Barclay James Harvest”.

Now see if you can guess what the first track of this DVD is? Yes, you’re right. It’s “Mockingbird”. Barclay James Harvest is another one of these 1970s groups that lost its way after the first 4 or 5 albums and the early stuff is incredibly good. But no matter how good the group might be, it will always be remembered for “Mockingbird” and that’s one of these tracks a bit like “Hotel California”, “Freebird” , “Stairway to Heaven” and a couple of others. A reasonable example of a group’s output but by no means the best, and totally ruined and spoiled by being played and played and played to death.

BJH has done much better stuff that “Mockingbird” and thankfully “Medicine Man” is on the album. But where is “Galadriel” ? And where is “For No-one”? And about half a dozen others that I can think of? This is going to be some “definitive Barclay James Harvest” but at least it only cost me €1:99.

On the way back I noticed that is was 17:00 just as I was passing through Neris-les-Bains. So I went for an hour in the swimming baths. Twice in 8 days! I’ll wash myself away at this rate.

-14

Friday 15th January 2010 – Liz rang me up this morning for a chat.

intermarche pionst puy de dome franceThe new Intermarche at Pionsat opened its doors on Wednesday and yesterday Liz went there for a look round. She was ever so excited – they had some kind of prize draw there, and she had won a flight in a helicopter!

Anyway, I reckoned that seeing as how I had to go into Pionsat yesterday anyway, I’d go and have a nosey around in there. First thing I did was have a go at the prize draw but of course my usual luck held out and I won b*gg*r all.

Never mind, I went for a wander around and I was quite impressed. They are clearly “mindful” of the large “Alternative” community that exists round here. Tons of pulses, dried herbs, infusions, all that kind of thing (and at a price too, though, it has to be said) and a really good “bio” selection. They are also just as clearly “mindful” of the large British community living round here. Heinz Baked Beans and Typhoo tea bags were just two of the dozens of traditional British products on sale. They even had Hartley’s Jelly, something that I have never ever seen anywhere this side of the Channel.

And of course that reminds me. I worked in Brussels for several years and one day one of my Belgian colleagues came up to me. “What do you call that dessert that you Brits eat and it goes ‘brrrrrrrr’ when a lorry drives past?“

Another exciting thing about the Intermarche was some publicity from the local taxi company offfering some kind of limited stage carriage service from the local area into Pionsat and from Pionsat to Clermont Ferrand and Montlucon. They even advertised a shopping service – you phone up the shop and place your order, they go round and pick it up and bring it to you, for €5:00. It’s not quite “Tesco at Home” but it’s still some kind of gesture to the 21st Century.

And seeing that advert prompted me to do something that I vowed that I would never ever do even if I was dying of hunger and the bailiffs were hammering at the door, having spent 25 years of my life doing it. I went round to the taxi company’s office and, mindful of the fact that they were advertising a whole host of new services, I suggested to them that they might feel the need to engage extra drivers and if so I was available on an occasional basis. So I now have to fill in a CV and a letter of motivation and we’ll see what happens.

I must be off my head.

But the most exciting thing occurred as I was wandering around the Intermarche. The woman from Luxembourg who lives up the road a way from here and uses my e-mail address when she needs to order anything – she was in there and she came over to me saying “here – have this!” And it was A RIDE IN A HELICOPTER. She had won it and she had absolutely no intention of doing anything that involved taking more than one foot off the ground. All in favour of terra firma – the more firma, the less terra. I was ever so impressed, and ever so grateful.

And I’m still in great demand here. Apart from Liz on the phone I had one of these cold calling canvassers. By the time we finished our call I had the latter cursing and swearing at me down the telephone. Serve them right – I hate them. And not only that I had a visit from the mayor’s office. Firstly about the census and would I like to participate by filling in a form. And secondly it was a fact-finding mission as there appears to be some confusion about the land that I want to buy from the commune. One of the councillors wanted to see precisely what it was that I was wanting.

With all of that, I haven’t done much here. I have an “outside wall” in the stairwell where I wasn’t able to put any insulation to stop the heat leaving the attic. I found some thick corrugated cardboard boxes and flattened them out to use. If homeless people can live in them then they must be some good at insulating and it does seem to work. It’s quite cosy in here even without the heating on.

But I did fit the vertical that I cut yesterday. I also trimmed it to take the horizontal battens that will support the plasterboards. And I’ve made a start on the next one. While I was looking for a suitable chevron I came across some stuff such as guitar leads that I’d been looking for for a while.

All in all, on balance I’ve had a really good day today.

-14

Tuesday 15th December 2009 – Today was one of those days …

… where nothing seemed to go right. it was freezing cold this morning and I was absolutely right about the weather – totally grey and overcast and only 4.5 amp-hours in total.

I don’t know why anyone pays any attention to the weather forecast around here – it’s so easy. All you need to do is to look out of the window. If you can’t see across the valley then it’s raining. If you can see across the valley then it’s going to rain.

So Terry came and the sink wasn’t any use for him but he did help me to move the plasterboard and I forgot the gas bottle. After that I finished cutting the lets in the verticals, in the pitch dark because it’s impossible to see anything in the gloom. After lunch I fitted one of the verticals and it took me hours. It’s not very-well done but I was freezing cold and fed up. I drilled right through the join and into the wall so I could fit an anchor bolt that would tighten everything together and hold it to the wall but the bolt stuck and wouldn’t go right in – and then I couldn’t get it out either. Trying to lever it out with a crowbar and I dropped the nut and I can’t find that now.

Then I fitted the battens and the insulation but by now (like 15:10) it was far too dark to properly fit the counter-battens. Dark at 15:10 – it’s depressing – so I did a bit of tidying up and then smashed my way through the ice in the water butt to get some water.

It was 6 degrees in my attic – which might not sound a lot but it was minus 5 outside and getting colder by the minute. And it’s still grey and miserable outside. We are stuck in this deep westerly depression which is a very rare phenomenon. It’s almost as deep as the depression I am stuck in. At least if it was an easterly depression we were stuck in there would be some sunlight.

-1

Tuesday 13th October 2009 – There’s some disappointing news for Krys tonight.

I don’t have a photo of today’s work in the attic. That’s because you can’t really see what I’ve been doing.

In fact I’ve been doing some of the finicky work up there. I put on the plasterboard cladding around the door pillar (I forgot that last night) and then cladded all the exposed ends of plasterboard with plywood. I know that you are really supposed to put plasterboard across all the ends and then join them together with this “L” profile strip, but Terry and I talked about this last night and he mentioned that four-letter word “skim”.

Now my plastering technique is awful so skimming anything is out of the question, but wood is quite nice and I can do that.

After that I built the window inset for the hole in the wall that I made yesterday and then cut the perspex to fit. And it looks quite nice too.

Once I’d finished that I boxed in the window at the end of the room near where the woodstove is going to be installed. And talking of the woodstove, Liz and I unpacked it this afternoon (Liz came round to visit and to borrow a spare telephone as hers has stopped working for some reason). The stove is ever so dinky and even though I chopped up the wood into small 30cm (12 inch) lengths, I can see me having to cut it up smaller.

And the stove needs to be run in, too. You have to light a small paper fire and gradually increase the heat – gradually as in something like 20 days. It’s quite a task.

But I’ll be needing the heat very soon. The temperature outside dropped to 4.4 degrees last night and in the heat exchanger it dropped to 1 degree. Winter is here. In fact I nearly had the heater on in here tonight but I put a fleece on instead. I’m going to have to sort my nightie out if the temperature drops any lower.

-2

Monday 12th October 2009 – Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat

Read all about it here. Fiddling your expenses is one thing, as many British Members of Parliament have found just recently. But having to pay back over £12,000 – that must be something of a record. And Gordon Clown, having made members of his own party stand down over 4 or 5 grand – what do you think might happen to him? Watch out for a “Hypocrite Of The Year” award nomination in a couple of months time.

plasterboard stud wall atticIn other news, my attic is advancing, and I now have the plasterboarding on over the timber framework that is the head of the stairs.

You can see what I’m going to do with the plastic that I bought. That corner is where my desk is going to be, and there is a good view out of the window in the side wall over to the range of hills on the skyline 4 or 5 kms away. If I put a solid wall there I won’t get the view and it seems a shame to waste it, so a little window is called for so I can look outside when I’m working.

You can also see the little cupboard that I’ve made. All the odds and ends will be put in the boxes I bought at IKEA and will be stacked in there.

But it’s all going so perishingly slowly and I just don’t understand it. I’m working constantly and don’t notice the time. And when I do glance at the clock thinking that it’s about 12:30 and there’s still 90 minutes to lunch, it’s in actual fact 14:30. I just don’t understand it. So I’ve no idea when I’m going to be finished and I’ve given up planning.

And just in case you are wondering, but I’m sure you are not, the number of “extra” members of the Anglo-French Conversation Group, those who crawled out of the woodwork on Friday to appear on the televised version, who appeared at the “regular” untelevised version tonight, was … errrrrr … ZERO.

But there again, you guessed that already, didn’t you? Or is it just me who is the only cynic around here?

-4

Wednesday 30th September 2009 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

plasterboard attic wall les guis virlet puy de dome france… here’s a photo of the room taken in the other direction. You can see that the plasterboards have been strapped together and I’ve filled over the joins. I’m not going to go a-poncing just yet, though. I’m going to leave it awhile to set thoroughly and for tomorrow and Friday I’ll be putting the tongue and grooving up on the ceiling.

That’ll take me quite nicely through to the weekend when I will be buying the plain plasterboard and a sheet of 10mm hardboard, and that will be everything for the room, I reckon.

I was under the impression that this strapping that you use for binding the plasterboards together was adhesive – that’s what it says on the label. But it certainly wasn’t as far as I am concerned. It would have been much easier had it so been.

And in other news, just look at this. I’ve been out of education for a year now and I’m feeling rather bored. I could do with some mental stimulation. Many of you know that I have something of an interest in the Dark Ages (although that era wasn’t as dark as you have been led to believe) and although I’m a proto-Briton, I could well be interested in this course. I have already put enquiries into motion. I’m really looking forward to the fieldwork too. It’s a long time since I’ve been involved in any raping, looting and pillaging …“you graduated from the Open University in 2008”- ed

But never mind the fact that it’s studying with Oxford University, have you seen the price? An equivalent course with the OU would cost the best part of £500 these days and so £180 has to be good value in anybody’s money.

And I’ll tell you another thing too – have you noticed the pricing structure? It makes a total mockery of the OU’s system and shows up the OU for what it stands for – simply treating EU students as cash cows and milking them of however much money they can get.

European students have been deserting the OU by the thousand since the new pricing structure came into force. I certainly can’t afford to continue my studies there. But at this price, if it sustains I’ll be here at Oxford with a vengeance.

-3

Tuesday 29th September 2009 – I’VE FINISHED PLASTERBOARDING …

insulation plasterboard attic les guis virlet puy de dome france… the outside walls to my room now. Even the two patches around the far window have been done.

Well, not quite. There’s a sliver of an offcut needed for one corner but I have that ready, and then there’s the corner that you can see, where I need to think about the cabling.

One thing I didn’t think about though was the wiring at this end of the room. I forgot to make allowances for where it has to go. But never mind, there’s another option or two about that and I’ll just have to use one of those.

That cassette player I bought on Saturday – it’s been filed under “B”. The reason is that it’s playing slow. Not by much, but by sufficient to annoy me. What I’ve done for now is to bring into the house the hi-fi from the barn. This consists of a cheap mp3 player and a pair of computer speakers and it’s quite adequate for my needs. I can’t work without music – it makes the time go quicker and helps me to relax.

The only drawback is that the speakers are 9-volt. I’m trying my best to standardise everything and if I can’t run things on 12 volt I want to run them on 6-volt. I have a set of 6-volt speakers but only one channel is working. I’ll have to see if I can fix it, or else look for another pair of 6-volt speakers at a brocante.

But I think that I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact that audio cassettes is a dying technology, and I shall have to move with the times.

insulation plasterboard stud wall attic les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis is the pic that you should have seen yesterday. You can see the stud wall that I’ve finished off now, and all of the plasterboard done down in that corner (except for the tiny sliver that is missing).

Tomorrow I’ll be starting to filling and taping the gaps between all of the boards. I want to do this as quickly as possible as I’m dying to get poncing. When that’s done I can set about fitting the tongue-and-grooving.

In other news, the Open University Students Association Executive Committee has been stung into action by my justified criticism the other day. Members of that august body, in an effort to engage with a much wider audience, have been taking part in some of these reality TV programmes. Andy Pandy, having been well-coached by his friend Teddy, has entered “Come Dancing” as he is one of the few people who can actually do that, but it all went horribly wrong when Pol Pot’s Sibling (who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as he or she deserves) was eaten by the other contestants during the “Bush Tucker Challenge”.

-3

Monday 28th September 2009 – WE HAD TECHNICAL ISSUES …

… with tonight’s image otherwise you would have seen that I now have plasterboarding on three quarters of the walls of the attic.

You would also have seen some extra wooden battens in the corner of the room opposite where my desk is going to be. That’s because I’m going to build a cupboard in there. I’m going to miss my target of the end of the month – I’m about two weeks behind – so I may as well do this kind of work while I’m at it as it won’t make much difference to my schedule.

But the insulation is certainly doing its job up there. 2 degrees warmer than in my room and at one stage I had to open all of the windows in there as it was so warm. It’s going to be interesting in there in the winter. Especially as Simon has now returned and he has my woodstove with him. I must go and rescue it this weekend.

It’s just as well I spent the last winter cutting down all of those trees, and this stove will also give me an incentive to do some more woodcutting this winter too.

But talking of timber, I’ve been putting together a project for a Dutch mushroom farmer whom I met at the timber yard when I was there with Liz. He wants 3.5Kw of electricity each day – that’s quite a lot, and so a 12-volt system is quite out of the question. Imagine all of the heat in the cables.

I’ll have to develop the 48-volt system and run on mains power with a really decent inverter. That should be exciting.

Back in the attic, tomorrow I’ll be finishing off the plasterboarding, except for one small corner. That’s where the cables are that run from the solar panels through where the bathroom will be and down to the control panel.

They need to be disconnected and run through some kind of trunking and that requires some careful thought as it’s fraught with all kinds of problems such as short circuits and the like. It’s the kind of thing that needs to be done at night when there is no current in the cables but I don’t think clearly enough after 19:00 at night.

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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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Wednesday 16th September 2009 – WE ARE GOING TO …

… have a major change of plan.

plasterboard wall ceiling attic les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis morning despite the torrential downpour and Novemberish weather I finished off the plasterboarding as far as I could on the walls. I’ve done exactly one half of it – one complete end (save for 2 places around the window that just require small offcuts from somewhere else) and half of each of the side walls.

I can’t do the rest of the side walls until I lay the flooring there and I can’t do that until I reposition the floor beams.

But you will notice that the ceiling has grown some battens and some of the chevrons have now been covered in white stuff.

What on earth is going on?<

les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfter doing the walls, I cut the first piece of plasterboard to do the ceiling. Not too big – not too heavy. But it was too heavy to hold with one hand while nailing it to the chevrons.

And when I finally managed to attach it (after much manoeuvering and bad language) the weight of the plasterboard pulled it out through the nails. I even invented a kind-of tracking to run it along so that I could glue it in place and then nail it and I was struggling along with that.

90 minutes passed and I still hadn’t done it and then I have another 30 or so to do afterwards. I could clearly see that I would have a major sense of humour failure long before I finished. So it was time for a coffee and a pause for thought

This has led to a major change in direction which will be greeted with hoots of derision from many lurkers to this blog but ask me if I care.

I have a theory in life that I learnt from a very early age due to the family that I had at the time, and that is that if you can’t do a job on your own then you do something else that you can do on your own.

And that is why the idea of plasterboarding the ceiling has now been consigned to the dustbin of history (good job I only bought half the load) and the ceiling is going to be tongue-and-grooved whether I like it or not.

So I spent the remainder of the afternoon fitting battens on the ceiling and putting up between the chevrons the rest of the polystyrene that I didn’t use.

On Saturday I’ll be buying another 35 square metres of insulation and 40 square metres of tongue-and-groove. I can fit that quite easily on my own … “famous last words” – ed.

I also had a very bad attack of nostalgia too. Playing all of these ancient cassette tapes at random, suddenly Camel appeared on the scene with Rain Dances and Mirage.

I was immediately transported back to 1975, the lagoon-blue Ford Cortina PMB270D and Jackie Marshall.

She was still at school but worked on Saturdays in Nantwich library and each weekshe would surf through the new records that they obtained. “Eric would like that” – and smuggle it out for me to tape and then smuggle back in afterwards.

And it looks like I’ve now hit 1975 and so there will be heaps of Caravan, Hawkwind and all other exciting stuff from Nantwich library hitting the airwaves in the attic in the next few days – all groups that she and I used to go and see back in those days.

I wonder whatever happened to her? She was quite cute and sweet but her parents hated me with a vengeance and our relationship was destined not to last.

One day while I was driving for Shearings I stopped off in Whitchurch (Shropshire) to get some cash out of Barclay’s Bank and who should be working behind the counter? We had a brief chat but you can’t spend too much time with a queue of people behind you and I never saw her again after that.

I dunno. What with piles of Marillion and the ghost of Jackie Marshall up there in the attic, it’s a good job there isn’t any Leonard Cohen. If I don’t blog any more after this entry, it’s because I will have found a copy of Ralph McTell’s “Streets of London” and strung myself up in the beichstuhl.

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