Tag Archives: concreting

Friday 31st October 2014 – THE TIDYING UP …

… didn’t happen today. I’ve been doing much more interesting things instead.

I actually started on some more tidying up but it didn’t last long as Terry and Rob put in an appearance at the door. It seems that they had finished a contract a day earlier and so with a free day they had come to concrete the rest of the hardstanding where we had run out of ready-mix in the summer. This was to be Rob’s payment for me having gone to pick up his car from Rouen in August.

And so I dropped everything and went to give them a hand. And it was just as well that I did as we had a whole succession of equipment failure. Although we are having a dramatic late summer here, there wasn’t enough power to run Terry’s big cement mixer (my small one needs some attention at the moment) and so Terry had brought his big generator. After about an hour, that gave up the ghost. I couldn’t start my ancient generator (it’s not been run since 2000) and we couldn’t get to the huge diesel one that I have hidden away in the back of the Luton Transit.

Next step was to repair my cement mixer so we could use that. That worked for a while and then packed up again. It’s thrown the Woodruffe key out of the pulley on the crankshaft. In the end we found a bolt and squared it off on the angle grinder and then hammered it it. That seemed to hold and so we could progress – until the sun started to go down and the sunlight went off the solar panels.

It was then that I had a brainwave.

I have some heavy-duty plugs and sockets, the kind that fit on flying leads and I’ve been using them here and there around here, mostly to plug in the power board with the electric meter and the 600-watt inverter in various places around the barn. What I did was to wire up one of the sockets to the battery on the Kubota B1220 (that’ll be useful for the electric winch and all kinds of other things too) and plug the power board into the circuit. And much to everyone’s surprise, at 2500 rpm the Kubota produced enough power to run the inverter to power my small cement mixer, and it worked an absolute treat.

concreting car park area les guis virlet puy de dome franceHere we are. The finished product. That’s the last of the cementing for this year, I reckon. And it’s a good job too.

Unfortunately we ran out of material yet again which means that it’s about an inch lower than it should be, but that can’t be helped and it doesn’t seem to be worth getting another small load just to skim the top. It’s not as if anything really heavy is going to be driving up and down on it.

I was thoroughly exhausted after all of that – completely unexpected but welcome nevertheless – concreting session. I struggled off to the Intermarche at Pionsat nevertheless and bumped into Nan on the car park, so we had a long chat. I treated myself to a sorbet at the Intermarché – I felt that I’d earned it – and then came back here to crash out. I was in bed by 22:30 and I’m not surprised. All of the alarms are disconnected and I’ll sleep for a week.

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Saturday 21st June 2014 – SOMETIMES I HAVE DAYS …

… when I stare at the computer for hours on end, wondering what on earth I am going to write. And on other days the stuff seems to pour out without me even touching the keyboard. Today was one of the latter.

Despite having a little lie-in this morning recovering from the after-effects of an attack of cramp, I was at the computer early enough. And by the time that I had finished early this evening, I’d done another programme for the rock show, including engineering the live concert and making up a sound string, and I’d written three texts for the current affairs programmes, on senior citizens, medical care abroad and on French legal aid, 28kbs of notes.

There’s nothing like cracking on with things when one is in the mood.

For shopping, I went to the Intermarché at Pionsat. Things are slightly dearer there but it saves me about €3:00 i diesel and it has everything that I really need, especially as I’ve been doing a few major shopping trips to Montlucon just recently.

concreting car park hardstanding les guis virlet puy de dome franceI checked over the concrete too and it seemed to be drying rather quickly, so I connected up the pump and pumped the water out of the pit onto the concrete to moisten it.

It’s a shame that we were in such a rush to do the job, but it’s still looking quite impressive and when it has its stone wall all around it it will make a world of difference here.

Tomorrow I’m getting back into my old habits now that the pressure of work is off for now, so I’ll be having a lie-in and a leisurely morning. We’re recording on Monday so tomorrow evening I’ll be round at Liz and Terry’s, rehearsing.

And I might be off to Munich next weekend. Won’t that be exciting?

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Friday 20th June 2014 – WE FINISHED THIS CONCRETING TODAY

Or was it the concrete that finished us? One of the other anyway.

concreting car park hardstanding les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut in fact the concreting isn’t finished because, strange as it is to relate it, we ended up not having enough. There was 60m² of surface area at 150mm depth, which relates to not quite 9 cubic metres. Take off the surface area of the pit but add on the depths at the side of the pit, I calculated about 10 cubic metres. And as a result, se are about 1.5 cubic metres short.

And it doesn’t look very pretty either. But there’s a reason for this. I planned to have 2 lorry-loads, one coming at 14:00 and the other one oming later in the day, each one having 5 cubic metres of concrete. And so when we finished the shuttering and fitting the grillage at about 13:30, Terry suggested that I went and made my butty.

concreting car park hardstanding les guis virlet puy de dome franceMy reply was, of course, based on past experience, that the moment I turned my back the concrete lorry would pull up.

And so as I turned my back, the concrtee lorry did indeed turn up, and there was just Terry and me to receive it. Rob turned up shortly after and we were shovelling and barrowing like mad. 7.5 cubic metres on this load instead of the 5 that I asked for, so we had to move quickly. And even more so when the lorry came back, just 15 minutes later with the second load.


Hottest day for a couple of weeks to and so it was drying before we could lay it properly. And so with all of this, it’s no wonder that the job doesn’t look very pretty. Still, it’s down and that is what counts. I’ll have to finish it off some other time – probably with the cement mixer.

The water in the solar heat exchanger was a healthy 35°C and so I took the opportunity to have a nice warmish shower. So now, just for a change, I’m all clean and dry. I came up here and crashed straight out. And I’m hardly surprised.

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Wednesday 18th June 2014 – THE WEATHER BROKE TODAY …

… and we had the first serious rain today since I don’t know when. Round about 15:00 the heavens opened and that was that. No point in working outside in this weather so Terry called it a day – and I can’t say that I blamed him.

This morning though we cracked on and the pit is finished now. 6 rows of breeze blocks means that it’s about 1.30m high and that’s plenty for me to sit down comfortably and work underneath a car. And you’ve no idea how much I’m looking forward to not having to lie on my back on a cold concrete floor.I’ve been doing that for 45 years and I’m fed up.

We’ve cracked on with the shuttering too and that’s not far off being finished. We would have done that too had it not been for the rainstorm. I carried on doing a little bit of it during a break in the weather, and one thing that I forgot was how slippery plastic is when it’s wet. So slippery in fact that when I stepped back to check the level of the shuttering that I had just installed, I ended up half-in the pit. And I have the scratches to prove it.

Another thing that I learnt today was that after a heavy rainstorm there’s about 20 litres of water on the roof of the digger. And when you put the digger in forward motion, the water cascades down onto your lap.

Anyway, I’ve been in major discussion with the concrete company and they can fit me in on Friday afternoon at their convenience. Two loads of … gulp … 10 cubic metres of concrete in total. I didn’t realise that I had over 60M² to cover and I don’t have enough grillage for that. Consequently I need to nip into Montlucon early tomorrow morning for some more.

I saw the old woman, the mother of the Parisian who has a holiday home here. She parks her car sometimes where the cement mixer has to turn round so I warned her about his visit, and had the usual mouthful of abuse in exchange. All I can say is that it’s no wonder her two sons are so miserable if they’ve had to put up with her for 60 years. She gets right on my mammary glands as it is. Her husband died quite early, apparently, and I’m not surprised. Probably grateful for the peace and quiet. If I had been married to her, she would have had a smack in the mouth a long time ago.

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Thursday 5th June 2014 – WHAT A SHOCK!

Yes, there I was in the middle of the night at Dorval ready to pick up mu hire car when the company told me that it no longer had any Dodge Grand Caravans. The last one had been sold in the middle of the week, and there was now no longer ay car to offer me. Consequently they offered me a refund but that was no use whatever to me. I wanted a car and I would never have one over the counter at the ame price that I could book one in advance on the internet.

I was all of a clammy sweat when the alarm went off.

Rob turned up at about 08:45 (I’d alrzady been out working for 20 minutes) and Terry turned up at 09:00. By 09:30 we were sitting there waiting for the cement mixer which, true to form, didn’t turn up until 11:15.

It wasn’t anything like easy to come down here in reverse in his lorry but he managed it and 20 minutes later he had gone, minus 5 cubic metres of concrete.

ready mixed concrete car park les guis virlet puy de dome franceTerry and Rob had left by 13:00 by which time we had done all we could. We were about half a dozen shovelfuls of concrete short.

Nevertheless we had the first row of breeze blocks of the retaining wall in poqition, the first row of concrete pillars and all of the reinforcing pylons in position.

This was a work and a half though and I’m pleased that I had two good friends to help me do all of this.

Hottest day of the year too (the water in the dump load was boiling) and I had a solar shower – I needed it too, especially after spending a couple of hours in the garden planting my aubergines and weeding the onions.

Now I’m having an early night as I’m having an early start tomorrow.

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Monday 2nd June 2014 – WE PRESSED ON …

concrete shuttering grillage les guis virlet puy de dome france… with the work today.

While I was waiting for Terry I moved as much as I could of the stone pile that was in the way. There’s certainly enough stones in there now to build a decent wall now. And when Terry arrived, we moved the big ones with the digger.

Once they were out of the way we smoothed off the surface and flattened it down, and then fitted the shuttering, because if you haven’t already guessed, Terry and I are going to be concreting the car park. I need a proper flat surface to work on.

We went off to the quarry after lunch to arrange the concrete delivery, but it won’t be here until Thursday morning so we came back and fitted the reinforcing grillage. That’s necessary with a 150mm thickness of concrete. Terry then went off nd I carried on ripping out the weeds from where the towing dolly is kept.

I had to nip into Pionsat and the Intermarche and I’ll tell you something – for a small-town supermarket in a small town like Pionsat, the place was packed. Three tills were open and there was queueing in all parts. A few people were doing a mega-shop there, a sure sign that the place is certainly having a great success and that it isn’t just people who might have forgotten something at the weekend

I was on my travels last night too. I was in the police force and I’d stopped a Moroccan because of an offence that he had committed with his trailer and i’d discovered that the trailer’s controle technique was out of date by a day. And so I’d gone and given everything else a full inspection and found loads of other faults too.

A few hours later I found him in a telephone box filling in a huge lengthy form about this controle technique issue. He’d been seeking legal advice and filling in this form was something that some solicitor had told him to do. He told me that he was quite confident that he would be let off a penalty and so I helped him fill in the form, all the while thinking to myself “just wait until he receives the summons in respect of everything else that I’d found”.

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Thursday 22nd May 2014 – I’VE BEEN OUTSIDE …

… in the garden again today.

Despite another late night, I was up at the usual time this morning and it was once more difficult to concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing. I must do something about this and learn to discipline myself better, especially as I can no longer afford that woman in Soho …

Outside though, first job was to empty the beichstuhl. And it needed doing too. That’s all in the compost now, quietly festering away, and there’s a nice, clean beichstuhl ready for the morning. That will be a delight.

Afterwards I went in search of scrap wood. I needed some old laths, of which there are plenty around – it’s just a case of finding them and that took me hours as well.

During the lunch break, the weather broke and we had another torrential rainstorm. After my butty, I ended up in the lean-to doing a little tidying up and then did some concreting in the living room. Years ago I dug out a hole in the floor so as to take the batteries that I use. Once I’d done that, all nicely made-to-measure, they discontinued the model that I’ve bee using and so I have some larger ones. And so I need a larger battery box, hence the concreting.

The rain eventually stopped and so I went back outside. And with the old laths that I had gathered and some fencing that I had bought, I made two bean frames. They are now planted in the garden and all of the peas have been sown, as well as the very first double-row of beans.

I’ll be making some more bean frames tomorrow and sowing another load of beans. They seem to do fine in my garden so I need to encourage them.

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Thursday 20th August 2009 – AFTER WORKING ALL DAY ALMOST NON-STOP ….

base of battery box les guis virlet puy de dome france … I’ve finished the first part of the base of the battery box, as you can see.

The floor in the house is dreadful, full of cracks that let in the damp (a piece of wood that I laid on the floor across a crack rotted to nothing in 6 months) so I started years ago to dig it up.

Earlier followers of my organ will recall me pulling up a chicken that had been cast into the original concrete floor (such pagan rites were apparently practised here in comparatively recent times) but I abandoned the demolition of the floor for another idea.

The ceiling is pretty high and there is a large step uo into the kitchen, so I’m going to put in a suspended floor and seal in the old concrete with bitumen. This will give me enough headroom to put the batteries under the floor in the entrance hall where they will keep nice and warm, and the gases can vent out via a pipe laid to the outside passing underneath the false floor.< So the first job this morning was to rearrange everything in the living room so that I had the space to work. And as the fridge is just 50cms wide and the door to the verandah is 54cms past the obstructions, I made an extended worktop in the verandah and I now have the fridge right next to where I'm cooking.

battery box sand damp proof membrane les guis virlet puy de dome franceThen I had to dig down a little further, lay a layer of sand to cover up any sharp bits that might puncture the damp-proof course, build a framework, line it with a plastic sheet as a damp-proof course, lay more sand to protect the integrity of the damp-proof course, heap a pile of rubble inside the framework and then cover with a layer of concrete.

That took me until 19:00 and then I had to go to Claude and Francoise’s. Claude has given his old caravan to his son but the electrics aren’t working and he has to tow it to near Marseilles (it’s not moved under its own steam for 20 years and the tyres are totally perished – just like the rest of the caravan).

After what seemed like hours , and me tearing my trousers on a nail that was being used to hold up the jockey wheel, I noticed that someone had wired the trailer plug up wrongly. I fixed that and after another few hours I managed to get an indicator light working.

The whole electrical circuit on this caravan is shot to pieces and the light units have all short-circuited. Pascal is going to buy some more stuff tomorrow and wants to know if I can rewire the caravan on Friday evening.

Ahhh well.

After all these exertions I’m off to have an early night. I’m totally worn out right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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