Tag Archives: alpine day

Tuesday 23rd December 2014 – I’VE FINISHED …

stairs up to attic les guis virlet puy de dome france … the stairs up to the attic.

Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t really. All of the wood has been cut and shaped, that’s for sure, but they haven’t been nailed into place. This is because the filler that I used on the screw holes took quite a while to dry. I wanted it to dry before I nailed down the stair treads, because access is so much easier to sand down the filler, paste the wallpaper and paint everywhere when the treads aren’t in place.

Not only that, I can put the varnish on the stair treads and risers before I nail them down too, and that will be another task completed. I’ll have two lovely shelves when they are finished and I can start to stack away the china and so on.

I had plenty of fun cutting the treads though. Two of them had to be cut by trial and error because taking measurements on the slant was not very easy. And much to my surprise, it all fitted where it ought to do.

We also had another Alpine day today and I had almost 60 amps of surplus solar energy today, with the water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump loa reaching 33°C, which is the highest that it’s been for a considerable time.

In other news, you can imagine that with the events of the couple of nights over the weekend, about which I talked at the relevant moment, I’ve been on something of a nostalgia trip, spending a lot of time musing on events that happened, didn’t happen, could have happened, might have happened and what I would have liked to have happened at a certain moment in my life. This wasn’t helped today because the *.mp3 player reached the point where five particular albums suddenly presented themselves, one after the other,

These five albums, Benefit, Aqualung, A Passion Play and Thick as a Brick by Jethro Tull and Nicely Out Of Tune by Lindisfarne, were five albums that were being played non-stop by a certain few of us during this particular 18-month period and it must be something more than just coincidence that they suddenly appeared, one ofter the other, at the time when I have all of this nonsense going on in my head.

It’s all becoming quite eerie.

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Monday 22nd December 2014 – NO WONDER …

blocked chimney les guis virlet puy de dome france … that the fire wasn’t working properly last night. Just have a look at this little lot!

Yes, the chimney was totally blocked and the smoke had no possible way of reaching the outside, except via the door and the air vents of the stove.

I consequently dismantled all of the tubing and spent over an hour cleaning everything out. And it certainly needed it too. In places it was solidly blocked.

The upshot of this all is that the small fire that I had this evening was burnt up in half an hour and the temperature had risen from 14.2°C to … errr … 34°C, and all in half an hour too. The food tonight was cooked in seconds instead of the usual couple of hours.

All in all, it was a very worthwhile exercise, cleaning the chimney. And I’m glad that I did too, because during the night we had a severe frost, the first of the year and the temperature had dropped to minus 2°C outside (lucky that I had plenty of residual heat in here). That also meant that we had one of these Alpine winter days today – not a single cloud in the sky all day. The first day like this for ages and the batteries are now fully charged at last.

fitting stairs les guis virlet puy de dome franceI spent the rest of the working day on the floor. Not horizontally of course, although I did have my moments. I recut some of the horizontals for the stairs on the lower part of the staircase so that they are flush with the uprights of the stud walls. And I am well-impressed with the Ryobi plus one percussion screwdriver. That drove the big long screws home in no time – much better that with the normal screwdriver.

For lunch, I made some hummus again. This time with olives and tomatoes, and a bit more water and oil so that it was a little more damp than before. And it did taste good too.

After that, I fitted the riser for the lowest stair on the staircase, and then fitted the second layer of flooring behind it. Finally, I fitted the two pieces of plasterboard that go there.

Tomorrow, I’ll fill the screwheads in the plasterboards that I fitted today, sand them off and then fit the treads for the stairs. Once they are done, I can varnish the flooring in there and then I’ll have a couple of shelves for storage.

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Tuesday 3rd December 2013 – THIS WOODSHED …

… is coming along in leaps and bounds, and might even be finished tomorrow.

All of the horizontals had their joints cut and then they were screwed to the uprights. That involved a little bit of acrobatics and also a really good search for the LIDL portable work platform-ladder which was lost in the undergrowth.

And once more, I’m impressed with this Ryobi Plus One Impact Bit driver – almost as much as I am impressed with my galvanised steel dustbin.

This afternoon I found some old bits of floorboard and cut them to a length of 1m40. These were screwed aross the top of the uppermost horizontals, and once they were in the correct position I went in search of four decent sheets of corrugated iron that were formerly on the roof of the lean-to.

So having located them, I managed to screw (using the metal-cutting screws that we had for the barn roof) two of them to the bits of floorboard across the top, and there’s half the roof. And had I not lost the light, the roof would have been on today. That will have to wait for tomorrow morning now.

What’s exciting about this woodshed is that apart from the screws, absolutely everything else is “recup” – he French name for “salvaged materials”. There’s not a piece of wood or metal or plastic that hasn’t been used previously in a construction.

And what a day too. Another alpine arctic day, clear blue skies and not a cloud in the sky until the evening. 61 amp-hours in the electricity dump load and water at 40°C. Temperature outside reached 13.5°C too – the highest for a month.

This can’t last though. We’ll be back in the rain by the weekend, just you wait and see.

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Tuesday 30th October 2012 – I LIT THE FIRE …

… tonight too.

Not for any particular reason (it wasn’t all that cold and I wasn’t planning on cooking anything) but it just seemed like a plan.

And it was a glorious day today too – not a cloud in the sky all day.

First job, now that I’m on winter hours, is to cut wood. Some out of the lean-to and some from off this big pile that I’ve been moving around from one place to another.

That took a while, especially as I was interrupted by a phone call from Percy Penguin, who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as she deserves.

But now that I’m a little-better organised … &#34ahem;" – ed … I can spend the usual 15 minutes per day on the wood.

After that, one job I’ve not done for ages is to replace all of the batteries in the ancillary equipment. I put a pile of those on charge and then went round changing everything.

We now have tons of stuff working that wasn’t working before, even including the projector clock.

This afternoon saw me tidying up some stuff (yes, honestly!) and then working on the bank at the back of the hard-standing – pulling out the overhanging rocks.

As for all of the soil, I’ll shovel it into the back of Caliburn one of these days, and move it somewhere.

In the verandah later I made a mega pepper-and-lentil curry, which should keep me going for the next short while.

No more courgettes though – the frost has done for them.  

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Tuesday 13th March 2012 – A FEW MORE …

… records tumbled today.

We had the glorious weather again, so much so that the water that is heated by the surplus energy from the solar panels, the “dump load”, was heated to such an extent that it went off the end of the temperature gauge – ie over 70°C.

That’s the first time this year.

The water in the solar-heated tank (a black plastic box with a glass lid) reached 26.5°C and that’s the highest so far (but still a far cry from the 45°C of midsummer) and if it hadn’t have been so windy, I would have put some of the water out of the dump load into the solar-heated tank to bring the temperature up to about 38°C and I would have had the first solar shower of the year.

But it was far too windy – I would have died of exposure I reckon, and the fact that showering outside in the all-together is the way that it’s done around here, it would have been indecent exposure too.

Talking of the wind, it’s died down now, after the last few days, but once again I had more wind energy created today than the cumulative amount of wind since I installed the power meters 2 weeks or so ago.

Mind you, I don’t think that we will have that again tomorrow.

But here’s an interesting and little-known fact, one that I can now prove. And that is that you can often have more power from a low-powered wind turbine than you can from a high-powered one.

Confused?

Well, let me explain.

Most electric motors, and wind turbines are no exception, have magnets in them and these operate the coils of the motor. Of course, the bigger and more powerful the motor, the bigger and more resistant are the magnets. And so you need more force to overcome the resistance in the magnets.

When you have a low-powered wind it will overcome the resistance in the magnets in a low-powered motor, and make the motor turn. However, there will not be enough force in this low-powered wind to overcome the resistance in a big magnet in a high-powered motor so that this motor won’t turn.

And there I was today, watching the little Rutland 90-watt wind turbine quite happily ticking over and giving me 10 – or 15 watts for much of the day while the big 400-watt wind turbine was doing nothing at all.

And then, all of a sudden there would be a stronger gust of wind and the big Air 403 wind turbine would start to turn, and once it had built up steam it would be there with 50 watts, or 80 watts, or even 113 watts on one occasion, while the smaller wind turbine was giving out 30 or 40 watts.

But be that as it may, the smaller wind turbine chucked out in total three times as much energy as the larger one over the 24-hour period under review. And it’s done that consistently over the last few years.

There are lessons to be learnt here of course – namely a collection of low-powered turbines will do more good than one big one over a continuous period, especially in a place like this.

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Friday 9th March 2012 – WHAT A GLORIOUS DAY TODAY!

Apart from the wind, which had the wind turbines going round for most of the day, we had beautiful blue skies with not even a trace of cloud anywhere.

I’m not sure how much solar energy I received but there was about 55 amps in the barn, with all of the batteries fully-charged – and here in the house when I looked at about 17:00 we had had 250 amp-hours with some more after that.

That’s a total of something in the region of about 4 KwH and that can’t be much short of a record.

The water temperature in the dump load had reached 63°C as well by 15:30 and so with all of that kind of thing today, there was only one thing to be done. And that was to unearth the little table-top washing machine and do a load of washing – with proper washing powder this time, not those nuts. Nuts to them!

I’m not quite completely up-to-date with it, but there’s not much left to be done.

And if I go to the swimming baths tomorrow (if the good weather keeps up) I’ll treat myself to the luxury of clean bedding tomorrow night.

While the washing was doing, I did some tidying up on the ground floor in here. I did a lot too, as you might expect in 90 minutes, but you can’t see any improvement. There’s that much that needs to be sorted out there. 90 minutes isn’t even chipping away at the edges.

This morning though, after computing, I went back outside and did an hour or so on the wasteland that I started to clear yesterday when I should have been doing the vegetable beds.

That’s much easier to clear than the downstairs of the house and the results are so much more tangible as well. I’ve actually made it to the stone wall at the boundary of my property and that’s astonishing.

The downside of this is that the heap to burn is far too high for safety where it is, and I shall either have to move it elsewhere or else burn it in stages – probably the latter.

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Thursday 12th January 2012 – WHAT A GORGEOUS DAY …

… it was today!

Well, up until about 16:00 anyway.

A heavy frost overnight followed by a glorious alpine blue sky and so much charge in the batteries that I ran the electric heater up here for an hour or so this afternoon.

I never managed that last winter.

aspire recycled plastic roofing slates lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceFirst thing that I did, seeing as how the nice weather was, was to dash outside and take a photo of where I finished in the dark last night.

It’s a highly significant photograph as it shows the first row of recycled plastic slates that I put on there. It’s significant because regular readers of this rubbish will recall all of the vicissitudes that we have had over the last 10 years to reach this point.

This is the climax of the work that I’ve been doing for the last 6 months or so since I was wondering what to do with that left-over bucket of cement in the mixer when we were doing Lieneke’s roof in the summer.

aspire recycled plastic roofing slates lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut returning to our moutons, as they say around here, up on the roof I managed another 7 rows today – that means that I’m about a third of the way up.

But it’ll be slow going from here onwards. It gets harder the higher up you go, as the actress once famously said to the bishop.

Up to now I could manage by leaning on the scaffolding. As of tomorrow I have to do it off a couple of ladders and that’s not easy. But nevertheless, it’s all looking good on the roof.

And so it was until about 16:00, when the temperature plummeted and we had a hanging cloud. It looks like winter has finally arrived and we shall have to see what the weather holds for us now. The weather is going to be deciding where I’m working and what I’m going.

In other news, the 1200-watt digital inverter that I ordered a few weeks ago – that’s finally arrived. I’ve not had time to play with it but I’m quite looking forward to the possibility.

That’s something else I’ll be doing when the weather changes for the worse.

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Sunday 26th December 2010 – AT LONG LAST …

 we’ve had a gorgeous Alpine day – not a cloud in the sky, not even for a minute. And my batteries now have some charge in them – although not a lot.

frozen water butt les guis virlet puy de dome franceMind you, we earned this day today, for last night the temperature fell to the lowest ever figure that I have ever recorded – an unbelievable MINUS 13.5°C and my water butts are frozen absolutely solid.

But I’m glad I decided to sort out a pile of really dry wood from out of the barn. That’s been burning for all of the day and the temperature has been hovering around the 18-19 degree mark which, given the temperature outside, has been pretty impressive and I’m pleased that I have this little stove.

So it’s still holiday time so all I’ve done is to watch some DVDs and to watch some sport on the computer – Boxing Day is all about sport after all. But I didn’t manage an evening meal yet again as it’s absolutely taters in the verandah.

But I’m not complaining as I don’t mind the temperature dropping to -20°C mark as long as I get some sun for my batteries.

So when I’ve finished watching the Houston Texans play the Denver Broncos I’m off to bed. Tomorrow is also a day of rest as I catch up on my Sunday day of rest which I missed due to Boxing Day intervening.

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Saturday 4th December 2010 – IT TOOK ME WELL OVER AN HOUR …

… to dig Caliburn out of a snowdrift this morning. The weather broke and we had a glorious Alpine winter’s day for a change (at least until early afternoon) and seeing as supplies are getting low I decided to go into St Eloy and do some shopping.

But that useless whatever in the snowplough – he’s been down the lane and instead of coming down to me and clearing out, he drove past down the other lane to where there is absolutely no-one at all and left me with a big snowbank across the top of the hill.

So after chopping more wood and so on, clearing snow from the cloches, the heat exchanger, the solar water, the solar lights and the compost heater, I dug Caliburn out and he’s now mobile.

After a wash I limped gingerly into St Eloy (you have no idea how bad the roads are) and not only did I do my shopping I did a pile of washing too in the laundry. Quite a big stack had built up around here and there’s no possibility of doing it myself here in these conditions.

What with one thing and another, though, I was late getting to the shops and so I didn’t have much time to use the dryer there as I wanted to be back before dark and it starting to freeze again. So I have a huge pile of damp washing hanging up in the verandah and I don’t know when it will ever dry.

But back to this Alpine morning. I’ve noticed quite often that once a cloudy day ends and night falls, the weather front shifts by about 50 miles and we have a marvellous Alpine night with millions of stars. And as soon as it dawns the weather front shifts back down again and we are plunged back into doom and gloom.

This morning though the sky stayed clear enough for me to have a decent charge on the batteries for the first time since I don’t know when and tonight is clear again so who knows? We may even have a decent day tomorrow but I am not holding my breath.

In other news, I’ve had another letter from the car hire people. Having given up on the idea of trying to stick me for excess mileage they are now trying to charge me $110 for cleaning Casey, saying that I returned it in a dirty conditions.

casey chrysler PT cruiser trans labrador highway canadaI think that this is outrageous and I have a good mind to write and tell them so. Of course I would never ever hire a car and get in into an appalling state of (lack of) cleanliness. regular readers of these pages will of course be well aware that in matters of tidiness and cleanliness I am second to none.

Of course I’m several thousand miles away from being in a position to dispute the charge so I don’t know what I can do about it. It’s certainly not fair – as if I would ever get a hire car into such a condition.

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Sunday 28th November 2010 – WE DIDN’T HAVE SUCH AN EARLY START THIS MORNING …

… that is, if you don’t count having to get up for a gipsy’s at 07:00. In fact it was after 10:00 when I emerged definitively.

And that was strange too. I’d had an exciting dream beforehand, but when I went back to bed at 07:05 and back to sleep I started on another one ( and I can’t remember a thing about the first one now even though it was so exciting). But in this second one, I’d been stranded on a pier and had to swim for shore and after giving the girl at the reception desk a piece of my mind about telling me to go on it, and then walking through the town, I suddenly realised that I didn’t have my camera with me. I was panicking about this, thinking that I had left it in my car which had now been submerged, and so I remember urging myself to wake up so that I could get back my camera.

And wake up I did – right on cue – and to a gorgeous blue alpine winter’s day – the type that I like to have for recharging my batteries after about 10 days of badger all. But that didn’t last and by early afternoon we were back snowing again.

GRRRRRRR.

But I’ve sorted out my receipts and paperwork from Canada and done a little more desultory tidying up. And that was that. But then again, it is Sunday and I can have a day off once a week.

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Monday 8th March 2010 – I’ve started to move the old Transit …

moving old ford transit garden les guis virlet puy de dome france… as you can see. I’ve managed to get it about 6 feet out from the hedge and it took quite a while for that.
Firstly the front wheels have sunk in quite a depth and accumulated humus from rotting vegetation meant that I had to spend a while digging it out.
Secondly I’ve lent out my good electric winch and the not-so-good electric winch had a few issues about it which mean that it’s not up to all that much – hence I had to resort to the old hand-powered chain winch. But what the heck? hand-powered chain winches have been around for centuries and they worked well enough in those days.
moving old ford transit garden les guis virlet puy de dome franceMind you the first thing that I did was to bend two S-hooks that I was using to make a loop in one of the chains – so I had to go and hunt down a couple of bow shackles. And then I snapped a chain! – Yes, snapped a chain using a hand-powered chain winch! And if that wasn’t enough, I actually stretched the other galvanised steel chain! Yes, stretching a steel chain! It’s a flaming good chain winch this – the power I can get on the lever must be phenomenal!

But anyway, the Transit together with its load of one-and-a-half Passats is on its way across the field, and that’s certainly something to celebrate.

This morning was another bright sunny alpine day with quite a wind – just the job for a washday and so while I was doing the washing I was also unloading all of Saturday’s shopping from Caliburn. The solar energy was such that I ran the upstairs heater for 5 hours – another day with 240 amp-hours (almost 3KwH) of sun and I’m thinking seriously about the idea of resurrecting my mains automatic washing machine. I’ve also had some sales material about some fridges that use about 0.5kWH (about 43amp-hours) of energy per day. Energy consumption for electrical appliances is plummeting and it won’t be long before I can have a real fridge here too.

This afternoon I put all of the plasterboard (all 16 sheets of it) upstairs. You’ve no idea how heavy that stuff can be when you are mauling it up by hand. And then I tackled the Transit.

Tomorrow we are recording the second instalment of our radio programme. I hope they don’t lose this tape!

And in other news, you may remember that the other day I spent an hour in the torrential rain moving a car for Bill. Tonight at the Anglo-French group he very kindly gave me a box of vegan biscuits for my trouble. “I felt embarrassed when I saw the state you were in” he said. But as I said at the time, I was quite happy doing it – it brought back many happy memories of when I had my taxi business and the state I was in the other day was the state in which I lived for eight years, so it was no trouble at all. But it was still very kind of Bill to give me the biscuits and I am very grateful. After all, one might say that the efforts that I went through for him – they really took the biscuit!

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Sunday 31st January 2010 – Absolutely shocking!

Yes! You may or may not believe this but I have had some electric heating on in the attic this afternoon.

This morning was the day I’ve been waiting since November to have – a real Alpine winter’s day with brilliant blue skies and a hard crispy frost. Despite not going to bed until 03:00 I was up and about at 09:30 with the sunlight streaming in through the windows. First job was to get on the roof and shovel the snow off the solar panels. And that’s a job I won’t be doing much longer as I’ve found a place that does 12-volt trace heating especially for this kind of thing. As you might expect, it’s nowhere near Europe and it isn’t in the USA either but in Canada. They are used to this kind of thing. 5 watts per foot and I need about 35 feet of it so that’s about 175 watts in total. 5 minutes of that will shift as much snow as you like and I’ll get my charge back in no time.

After breakfast it was round to Claude’s to do another van load but he reckoned that the roads are impassable and in any case just a quick glance at him told me that yesterday finished him off for good. He won’t be lifting another box of belongings and so he needs to think again. I’ve made a suggestion to him but it’s up to him if he accepts it. It’s still amazing though, with everything that he has done for everyone else in the past for everyone in Virlet and when he needs help they just totally ignore him.

So back home to find that the batteries in the house and in the barn are fully charged and it’s only lunchtime. Shame to waste the surplus solar energy so I dug up an old oil-filled 400-watt electric radiator and plugged it in – and had the pleasure of watching the temperature in the attic rise by 5 degrees while I caught up with more correspondence.

Yesterday in LIDL I bought one of those plug-in wattmeters for mains current – the type that you plug into a mains plug and you plug the appliance into it and it tells you how many watts and amps the appliance draws. They are of course much more versatile than that and I have lots of plans for it so I took it apart for a nosey. And as I thought, it’s an interated circuit with two wires in and two wires out. So I just cut the wires off the plug and socket bits and then I can hard-wire it into my circuit. It makes data recording much easier.

In other news, the UK is now officially out of recession. At long last – the last “major” western economy to do so. The value of the Pound Sterling is steadily rising in world stockmarkets too. Earlier this afternoon one Pound reached 2.3 Maldive Island Seashells and 1.9 Zimbabwean Bongo Beads.

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Tuesday 12th January 2010 – Well, the weather man got it right today.

It was bound to happen sooner or later – the law of averages is bound to match a wild guess with an actuality sooner or later.

In fact I couldn’t believe it – at first I thought that he had mixed up today with yesterday as the morning was magnificent – a proper Alpine winter day and the solar controllers were ticking over the charge like nobody’s business. I carried on insulating the floor this morning. And it seems to be working too. The early morning average difference between in here and in the lean-to is usually about 7 degrees. Today it was almost 10 degrees. That can’t be coincidence.

I didn’t get much of a chance to do much work though – I had a phone call that involved me doing quite a few other things instead. And seeing as it was a nice morning I had the computer on and started to catch up with a whole pile of messages that have been outstanding. I must have sent out about 30 e-mails to people and they are all going to get a surprise when they try to reply to me, as my web site is down again.

It appears that my web host has closed its doors rather … errr …. suddenly. Not that I’m surprised about this as a phrase involving booze-ups and breweries springs to mind whenever I think of this organisation. What with crashed servers that they couldn’t fix, lost data in e-mail accounts, disappearing files due to fits of pique, a whole host of other things as well that regular readers of these pages will be well aware, I’m surprised that they managed to stagger on to this extent before finally rolling over. There’s a lot more to running a professional and ethical organisation involving hi-tec equipment than you will ever learn by studying an Open University course. But then again most normal people would realise that.

And there you are, trying to be loyal and supportive of people that you like and people who are making an effort to carve out a living for themselves against all the odds and all the rubbish that life has heaped upon them, and it all falls to pieces anyway. “There’s no sentiment in business” I keep on being told, and it’s high time I learnt the lesson. Trying to be nice to people and giving them a helping hand just causes me more problems than it’s worth. I should have been much more ruthless and kicked this shambles into touch the first time they let me down.

I’ve been approached by a “successor” who wants to have my business and we are trying to salvage what we can from the wreckage of dazzling incompetence.
“I’ll match the terms and conditions that my predecessors offered” he announced. So I told him what the terms and conditions were – and his jaw hit the floor.
“They told me you paid …(almost twice as much)” he stuttered
“Well I have the invoice, the bank statement and the cancelled cheque here if you would like to see them“
Someone is speaking with forked tongue, and I know that it isn’t me. And as for the motives – well, just lets say that “it’s fun to speculate”.

Meanwhile, if you want to mail me and the e-mail bounces, wait for a couple of days and resend it.

So after all of these shenanigans, the weather dramatically warmed up and we had a torrential downpour. And about 10 tonnes of snow slid of the roof just three or four feet above my head, and crashed to the ground with the roar of an express train. It put the wind up me for a minute. Rather like the man who gave his pitbull terrier a bicycle pump. “That’ll put the wind up the postman!”.

I was talking to Alexi on a chat program earlier. We were discussing cars and driving tests and she was telling me about hers – which she took in Zambia, where she was living at the time. She had to reverse between two bollards and then drive the examiner to the post office – and that was that. I told her about the Libyan driving test where you have to reverse between two palm trees -which are about 5 miles apart.

And I did hear about a driving test in the Spanish Sahara or the Central African Republic or somewhere like that. The pupil was involved in quite a serious collision in which the examiner was killed. As they pulled him from the wreckage the pupil shouted “did I pass? Did I pass?”
“Wait a minute” shouted one of the policemen at the scene. “We haven’t found the examiner’s clipboard yet!”

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Saturday 2nd January 2010 – Well…

…I’ve finally had the day that I have been waiting for – a long cold Arctic sunny day. There were still plenty of clouds around but I managed 135 amp-hours of electricity in the house and 37.4 in the barn. That figure for the house – it’s the highest since 20th November and it’s cheered me up a little.

So this morning I had a really good clean and tidy up. I threw out tons of stuff and there’s another huge pile for burning. I may well do that tomorrow and cook some potatoes while I’m at it, to eat tomorrow night with the pizza. I’ve found some more pine shelving and I took that upstairs and now that’s all full of folders documents and magazines. The place looks pretty impressive and that’s just as well for Terry and Liz came round this evening. And that reminds me – I must fix up a proper doorbell now that I’m more likely to have visitors. I can’t have my guests banging on the door for ages while I have the music going full-tilt.

This afternoon I went into Pionsat to swap a bottle of gas at the garage. I like to support local commerces if it’s just for this kind of thing. It’s cheaper than going to St Eloy even if the gas is cheaper there – 10kms instead of 35 and much less chance of being sidetracked by LIDL. But despite the garage having a notice saying “Ferme les dimanche ainsi que les jours feries” it was closed, despite it being neither a Sunday nor a Public Holiday. I don’t know what’s the matter with these places in Pionsat – they don’t want to earn any money and I had to go to St Eloy instead. Yes, the long-range weather forecast warns us of MINUS 13 on Tuesday night, MINUS 14 on Thursday night and MINUS 6 during Friday DAYTIME. I don’t want to be stuck without heating in these conditions.

And I’m having serious second thoughts about my kitchen. I have to bring the water pipe all the way across the house to the far corner of the attic and then drop the water down below to the bathroom but run a hot water pipe right the way back across the house to the lean-to where I’ll be putting the kitchen. Meanwhile directly under the stairs on the ground floor and right underneath the bathroom will be a load of dead space. And today I’ve been thinking about putting an open kitchen there. It’ll narrow the room quite a bit (from 5.2 metres to about 3.6) and the kitchen will be quite small but then again I’m not using half of this attic and there is only me to think about. It’ll make the plumbing so much easier too.

What do you think? All comments hints and suggestions are welcome.

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