Tag Archives: kwikstage

Thursday 9th April 2015 – HOW LONG IS IT …

tabletop washing machine les guis virlet puy de dome france … since you’ve seen this little beast outside and working?

Late 2012 I reckon.

But today, with the outside temperature reaching 29.2°C, a beautiful clear blue sky with aslight breeze, water in the 12-volt home-made immersion heater at 58.5°C that can only mean one thing.

So while the washing was doing, I was sitting outside with my butties, a soft drink and a good book for lunch. And it really was nice too.

Now I know that I have said this before … "and you’ll say it again" – ed …, the mere handful of Euros that I paid for this tabletop washing machine at a brocante all those years ago has been a good investment.

So after an early start, first job was to do something that I don’t like doing, namely to cover a lot of the ground around here in weedkiller. I hate using the stuff and feel that it has no part to play in a rural garden, but I’m overrun with nettles and brambles and have no time to deal with them.

guttering on side of house les guis virlet puy de dome franceBack up on the scaffolding afterwards to finish off the guttering (except for the glueing together of course) and now we have a downpipe onto the roof of the sownhill lean-to.

Don’t be too worried about the fact that the downpipe isn’t vertical. I had to drill into the quarried stone blocks rather than into the fieldstone, and in any case I want the rain to spread right across the roof rather than drop down on one place.

les guis virlet puy de dome franceFinal job was to carry on with the new compost bin. Here’s the first of the layers, and in total I’ve made three altogether. That gives me a working height of about 50cms all told, and I can add extra layers as the heap expands.

Tomorrow i’m going to have to dismantle one of the bins from many years ago and site this bin in the place of the dismantled one. It’s too big to go where I wanted it to be;

Each of the sides is only 75cms, and that’s a lot less than the 133cms that I used to make the others. Height rather than width is what is needed with a good compost heap and my others didn’t go high enough to to any real good.

Once I’ve caught up with all of this, I can turn my attention to clearing out the land where I’m going to put the sunken water tank. I had a look around there this morning too and discovered my trenching spade that I have left outside for I don’t know how many years. I’d completely forgotten about that.

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Wednesday 8th April 2015 – GUESS WHO HAS BEEN A BUSY BOY THEN?

Yes, I’ve accomplished a lot today. It’s really been keeping me out of mischief.

I was up early too for a change. When the alarm went off, I was eating my breakfast. I must have been keen.

varnishing landing floor les guis virlet puy de dome franceFirst job was to varnish the floor and the stairs with the third coat of varnish. I gave it a good wallop and it was all over by 10:30. All it needed to do was to dry and set thoroughly – that’s usually about 48 hours. And then I can fit the skirting.

While that was drying, I went outside and had a look around at what jobs that I can be doing. First job was to start on the compost bin. But I didn’t last long on that as I remembered something else quite important to do.

new wheels summer tyres ford transit caliburn les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd doesn’t Caliburn look nice with his new clean wheels?

Yes, I needed to change his winter tyres and fit the summer tyres. Of course, I have two sets of wheels so I really just change the wheels. And because they have been outside for 4 months, they were pretty grubby and so I gave them a really good clean and polish.

One or two of them have come up really well too, but I’m thinking that I might give all of the wheels a good clean, scrub and coat of paint over the summer. I’ll add that to the thousand other jobs.

Another job that I wanted to do was to fix the guttering on the house. This involved assembling the ladder now that I’ve recovered both the parts, but on my way up to the scaffolding I noticed that I hadn’t painted part of the fascia board where I couldn’t reach off the scaffolding. This meant that I had to reposition the ladder, and then I could deal with that.

While I was waiting for that to dry, I started to cut the lengths of wood that I needed to start to make the compost bin (which was where I started) but in a search for something or other, I started to tidy up the downhill lean-to. And I made some progress too, much to my surprise.

fascia board guttering les guis virlet puy de dome france After lunch, I put the second coat on the fascia board and then started to reassemble the guttering.

I’ve repositioned it slightly because in the past, it drained down to the roof of the verandah and into the water tanks there. Now, I’m having drop onto the roof of the lean-to at the other side, because it’s there that i’ll be digging the hole for the subterranean water tank.

It took a while to do that because I had to work out the levels and cut a few lengths to size. I did as much as I could (I need to check it in the rain and make sure that it works like it should before I glue it together) but when I went to move the ladder round to the side of the house to fix the downpipe, I noticed that it was already 19:20

Doesn’t time fly quickly when you are enjoying yourelf? That was enough for me and I called it a day. I’d earned my rest.

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Wednesday 20th August 2014 – PHEW!

Yes, I’m exhausted. And I’ve only been tidying up the wiring outside underneath the fascia board.

That was meant to be a five-minute task but I’m already on the 3rd day and it’s far from finished. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong.

I started off by disconnecting the wind turbine on the fence – the one that I’ve been using as a test bed. I wanted the timer off it. I then connected two wires to it, and that was where the easy bit ended.

When I dud the roof, I ran some 6mm wire down some conduit from outside under the eaves with theaim of wiring up the wind turbine – the one on the roof – to it, but it never gave any charge and so I ran an outside wire up to the turbine. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I had another go at wiring up this 6mm wire to see where the fault was.

This is where I discovered that the charge controller is built for a maximum of 4mm wire. After hours of fiddling around I had to splice some 2.5mm wire into the 6mm wire to make the good connection. When I wired it all up to the batteries and installed a fuse, I had a bright blue flash right across the living room.

Hmmm. A dead short. THat’s why the wire’s not working.

Back on the scaffolding, I cut down the wire so that there was no excess outside, and then attached a couple of new lengths to the older lengths in order to pull them through. Anyway, that promptly stuck and it took about an hour to pull it all back out.

Next, I tried a cable puller and that became irrevocably stuck and nothing that I could do would shift it. After much binding in the marsh, there was nothing for it but to unpack the corner of the attic where all of the wiring comes through (it’s not sealed off yet) and unstick it from the inside under the eaves. And that took hours and now the attic is on an even worse mess

But I didn’t ‘arf have a surprise when I opened it all. I don’t mean the cable puller – that came out in seconds, but there was a huge pile of wire inside there.

It seems that the wire from the outside is just coiled up behind the plasterboard and isn’t going into the conduit to go downstairs. Furthermore, the two wires that are coming up from downstairs is also coiled up behind the plasterboard and hasn’t been pssed through the conduit to the outside.

I’ve no idea what I must have been thinking when I was doing this wiring back in 2009, but at least it explains why the wind turbine wire wasn’t doing anything back in those days.

It also explains the blue flash downstairs too – that’s because the wires coming upstairs had been taped together so that they wouldn’t separate, and the copper in one wire is touching the copper in the other.

The wire that came through from the outside, I pulled it out, and the one that came from downstairs, I pushed that outside for the wind turbine and at last I’ll have a circuit.

If I had stopped there, it wouldn’t have been quite so bad, but seeing as I’m putting another bank of solar panels on the wall outside and they need a pair of wires, and I had the xall dismantled and a onduit passing through to the outside, I decided to pass the wires through the conduit and inside the house so that they aren’t visible fr – om the outside.

So with 4 strands of 6mm cable trying to fit through a 16mm conduit, it called for some delicate manoeuvre and I’ve never had cable so firmly wedged in conduit before. It was inch-by-inch, on and off the scaffolding to feed it into place and then into the attic to pull it through from outside. And when you need 7.5 metres of cable coming through, you can see how many times I was on and off the scaffolding.

Anyway, I now have 7.5 metres of wire coiled up inside and the next intention was to thread it down the conduit – a 32mm pipe with all kinds of stuff coming up in it. I’ve started to thread the cable puller up from the bottom, but that’s stuck in the conduit for the moment.

So that’s where I’m at at 19:30 in the evening with my little 5-minute job. I’ll be in bed in a moment with no tea because I don’t feel like making any. I’ll have another go at it tomorrow.

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Tuesday 19th August 2014 – WELL I’LL BE …

Yes, absolutely!

Just about to go to fetch some cable trunking out of Caliburn this afternoon when a big red Honda motorcycle pulled up just outside here. A lady descended from the rear and smiled at me, which was a surprise – not something that happens every day – and then the driver came over, shook me warmly by the hand (which was also a surprise – regular readers of this rubbish will remember that most people who come here usually shake me warmly by the throat) and said “Jean-Marc”.

Well I am actually Eric, as most of you realise, but it turns out that the motorcycle rider was called Jean-Marc.

You may remember that several weeks ago on the way back from Munich, I called off at a village called Chasselas, near Macon, a village where I had stayed with a French family in my mid-teens. And now Jean-Marc, the son of the family, had come over to repay the compliment.

Yes, it’s totally astonishing. It’s 44 years since we have seen each other. And it was totally unexpected and I wasn’t in the least prepared, with stuff all over the place here. Good job that it was sunny so that we could sit outside. If it were raining, it would have been very embarrassing.

And sunny too – that’s about three days now that we’ve had some sun and I’ve had hot water. Too late to do much about it now – Jean-Marc was telling me that the grape-harvest in Macon will be a total disaster this year.

But this place is even more of a mess than usual. There’s stuff all over the place while I’m working out what to pack to take with me. And I also forgot to charge up the video camera so I had to do that as well.

I’ve also been trying to download off an old dictaphone some soundbytes – one of a Canadian diesel locomotive and and the other about a peal of bells from a Canadian church. But for some unknown reason, the lead that I have to connect the dictaphone to the computer isn’t picking up the sound. I’ll have to look further into this.

After Jean-Marc and his girlfirend left, I still had time to go up onto the scaffolding and throw piles of stuff off the top. That seems to be the usual practice these days and I was up and down the ladder for most of the evening.

But now, I have outside lights underneath the eaves to light up where I usually fall over everything when I’m out after dark. And they work too, much to my (and everyone else’s surprise). And all of the cables are in trunking made from 32mm water pipe and it all looks quite tidy, which doesn’t ‘arf make a change around here.

And no gardening today as I promised?

No, because Rosemary telephoned me to say that she might be round on Thursday. We can pull up the onions and everything else then.

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Friday 15th August 2014 – YEEUUCCHHH

Yes, it had been another one of those evenings last night. Late last night it started to pour down in spades and at about 06:00 it was so loud that it woke me up. It was unbelievable. Every day I seem to be saying that I’ve never seen anything like it, and every day I’m right because it’s just getting worse and worse.
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It poured down for most of the morning and I did the usual work on the web site. I ended up building a shop as well – I’m slowly changing all of the links on my Canada pages from Amazon.co.uk to Amazon.ca and there’s a shop facility on there.

I need to maximise the income potential on my web pages.

After lunch, I waited until the rain subsided and then went up on the scaffolding to carry on working on the electrics. And I would make much more progress if I could find all of the stuff that I needed without having to spend hours hunting it down, and I knew where all of my tools were. It seems that this tidying up that I did throughout the winter isn’t working out as planned.

I didn’t do much while I as up there either. Despite having planned it all the other day, I’ve changed it a couple of times already this afternoon while I was up there, and it will be changed again before I’ve finished.

Not only that, I was suffering from a bad attack of dropsy. I was dropping everything while I was up on the scaffolding and I had to keep on going down to fetch it – I’ve forgotten how many times I was up and down the ladder. In the end, all that remained to fall off the scaffolding was me and so I called it a day. It’s not the place to be, the scaffolding, when you are having concentration issues.

It was however 19:50 when I knocked off – it shows you haw engrossed I was in what I was doing. And it’s a good job I stopped when I did as about 15 minutes later the heavens opened again.

So let’s see how I can get on on Monday.

– in that I was

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Friday 8th August 2014 – WOW!

What a storm!

It was totally stonishing. About 8mm of rain fell in about 30 minutes round about 22:30. It’s a long time since I’ve seen anything quite like it. I even had to close the roof windows as it was pouring in on me where I was sitting, and that’s not supposed to happen.

Mind you, it had been brewing all day. When the boulangère came by this morning, she mentioned that there might be a storm a little later. And it wasn’t long after that that we had the fist lightning flashes. They kept it up from about 12:00 until about 15:30 so I was pretty reluctant to go up on the scaffolding during that period, otherwise it would have been me frying tonight. That’s the one disadvantage of having metal planks.

When i considered it safe to do so, I went up there. Well, not quite – I had to round up all of the tools and fittings that I needed for the job. And that took several attempts to make sure that i had everything up there that I wanted. I drilled the hole, a 16mm hole, with the Hitachi battery-powered SDS drill and that went into the stone like a knife through butter. It’s a shame that the batteries are becoming tired in it now, because it really is one of the most useful tools that I have around here. I must sort out some new batteries for it.

Fitting my home-made eye wall anchor was straightforward – with a little persuasion from a hammer it went into the hole that I had drilled, but tightening it up was something else. With a little too much force, I reckon, I sheared off the wedge that splits the interior of the anchor. Then of course I couldn’t extract the broken one, and so I had to drill another hole and start again. This time I didn’t use quite so much force when tightening it, so I managed not to break it.

Fitting the turnbuckle was straightforward, but then actually fastening the guy wire was almost impossible as the length of the turnbuckle put it too far away from the scaffolding for me to reach it properly. I was lucky that the wire was quite long, as I was able to put a loop in the far end, pass the wire around the hook on the turnbuckle and then around a pivot (the framework upon which the wind turbine is mounted) and with a rope in the loop that I made, pull it back towards me again.

With it securely tied around the scaffolding, I could perform a major feat of gymnastics, balanced right on the edge of the scaffolding on the toes of one foot, and reach right out to the wire to fasten the wire rope ties (three of them) to hold the wire together.

Then dismantling the temporary fittings that I had made, I could tighten up the turnbuckle. And to my surprise, it pulled the wind turbine perfectly vertical instead of leaning over about 5° to the north.

All of this took me until about 18:20 and so for the remaining 40 minutes I did some (but not much) weeding in the vegetable plots. And as I knocked off, it started to rain. “Perfect timing!” I said to myself. And then we got the lot a few hours later.

i’m glad that I’ve fastened the wind turbine with a second guy wire. With just one, it was pulling it out of the vertical and of course, one isn’t very secure. Ideally it needs four and while I can think of a way to do the third one (and i might even do it some day) the fourth will be difficult. Nevertheless, progress has been made.

On Monday, I’ll start to attack all of the rest of the jobs that need to be done while I’m up there. Let’s see how long it takes me to finish them.

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Tuesday 5th August 2014 -I’VE PUT UP …

kwikstage scaffolding front of house les guis virlet puy de dome france… the scaffolding at the front of the house. It took quite a while because it’s not easy to do it on your own and it becomes more difficult the higher up you go.

Not only that, it was quite hot today and so I was melting away in my overalls while I was up there.

However, by 18:00 it was all compleded and I accomplished my first task, namely to take off the shutters that I fitted in 2000 and which have slowly fallen to bits ever since.

This morning, after a decent night’s sleep for a change I was up early and working on the website as usual. But I’d been on my travels during the night again. I’d been selling all of my furniture at an auction including the valuable stuff that’s stored in the barn. Someone who had belped me considerably was really interested in the big dining room table but couldn’t afford however much it was going to be, and I was certain that it would fetch a substantial sum. However, seeing as how this person had helped me so much, I asked how much she could afford. She showed me her chips (it was as if we were doing this in a casino) so I resolved to push the price right up until any other bidder dropped out and take whatever money that this girl had.

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Monday 4th August 2014 – I HAD A …

… bad night last night.

Whether it was the two cups of coffee that I had yesterday late afternoon, I don’t know but I was still tossing and turning in bed as the dawn was breaking. I managed to be out of bed at the usual time and I had breakfast, but I don’t remember too much about the rest of the morning. I didn’t make much progress on the website.

After lunch I went outside and, for the first time in 5 years, I cleaned out all of the stuff that was in front of the house. And there was a load of rubbish too. When I finally get round to doing it and finally have the time, there will be tons of stuff going down to the dechetterie.

That took ages to do, as you might expect. But once everything was moved out of the way, I started to fetch the scaffolding round from the farmer’s field. I’ve now started to put it up, and it’s not easy when you are on your own. It takes ages to start it off as you need to make sure that all four sides are perfectly level by adjusting the feet, and then you need to make sure that both pairs of sides are perfectly parallel.

Once the first row of the first bay is up (which is where I reached at 19:10), starting off the second bay and then building upwards is pretty straightforward even if it takes a great deal of effort. I’m hoping that I can finish erecting it tomorrow and make a good start on the things that I need to do.

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Wednesday 30th July 2014 – THIS MORNING WAS THE FOURTH TIME THIS SUMMER …

… that I’ve disconnected the fridge as there has been insufficient power this last 24 hours for it to function adequately. I recall having done that twice in summers in the past since the current set-up was established in August 2009, but four times from May to the end of July (and this is before we talk about August and September) is verging on the absurd.

Last night too I closed all the windows in the attic and I was sitting up there in a sweater. That’s the second time that this has happened this summer. All in all, it just shows you how depressing this summer has been so far

There was a similar summer to this once when I was living in Brussels. Everyone who went away in July came back drowned, many of them long before their holidays were over. Together with the wet, mild winter that we had, this is probably one of the worst years that I can remember so far.

Going downstairs to make breakfast there was a big hanging cloud everywhere again and we were totally stuck in it – hence the decision to unplug the fridge.

However as the morning went on this strange orange thing in the sky did put in an appearance and by the time I made it outside there were even some bits of blue sky visible. That was the cue to put a great big bucket-load of lime mortar into the cracks in the wall on the lean-to. That took me until 14:25 when I knocked off for a rather late lunch.

After lunch I dismantled the scaffolding as I no longer need it. Everything else that needs doing I can reach from the floor. It’s not as easy as you might think dismantling a scaffolding on your own and I nearly dropped part of it on my head.

I spent the rest of the afternoon digging roots out of the main wall of the house. The stinging nettle and thistle roots came out fairly easily but the bramble roots are proving to be difficult and the two big tree trunks that represent the base of the ivy
are proving to be almost impossible. I’ve made some progress, but only with the help of an axe, a couple of masonry chisels and a large crowbar.

If the weather is fine, I’ll carry on chiseling out the tree roots. Then I can fill in the gaps with a load of lime mortar. Hopefully whatever tree roots still in the wall would be killed off by the lime mortar and I shan’t be troubled by ivy again.

But with the blue sky and the sun that came out, I plugged the fridge back in. Now I can unplug it again next time we have a spell of a couple of days of hanging cloud

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Monday 28th July 2014 – NOW HERE’S ANOTHER THING

Yes, when I knocked off working this evening it was 19:40. Much later than my usual time of course and that’s not something that happens all that often. My excuse was that I had been up on the scaffolding redoing some of the mortar that I did on the lean-to in 2012.

Three buckets-full went into it today and it took ages as I had to rake out all of the loose stuff. As well as that, I had to adjust the scaffolding. Another level has been demolished meaning that there’s only one level left to do.

The night as interesting too.

I didn’t go to bed particularly early, and I was awoken at about 05:00 by the most tremendous rainstorm – by far the best of the rainstorms that we’ve been having this year and, of course, the problem with living in the attic is that I can hear every drop of rain that falls.

And it was a shame that I was awoken because I was in Sheffield watching “Yes” on tour. Every one of the spectators was hovering in the air looking down on the performers who were all illuminated with LEDs and spotlights and the stage setting was magnificent. I was of course focusing on Chris Squire the bassist who, despite being one of the best bassists in the world, lets himself down by over-elaborating – playing 10 notes where three or four would be much more effective (but isn’t that the story of “Yes”?) and he was in some kind of well or pulpit fashioned out of a couple of giant-sized bass guitars and it was ever so spectacular.

But anyway, I struggled out og bed at about 07:50 for breakfast and while the kettle was boiling (not enough solar energy for the percolator in this weather of course) I went to look at my guttering. That was quite rewarding – the rain cascading down the roof into the guttering and then cascading out of the downpipe onto the lean-to roof and down the downpipe off there to where the underground water tank will be. I’m glad that that works, anyway.

I carried on with the website this morning and after the rain stopped, I went outside and started the cementing.

This evening, I’d just settled down with a good film, only for Rosemary to ring me up. It was well after 22:00 when she hung up so I just made a quick tea.

Tomorrow, I’ll carry on with the cementing. It won’t take much longer to finish off, but I’ve said this kind of thing before, haven’t I?

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Friday 25th July 2014 – WELL TODAY DIDN’T GO ACCORDING TO PLAN

With the late finish last night it was something of a later-than-usual start.And this was interrupted by the boulangère with today’s bread. She’s going to be spending the weekend making jam and so seeing as how she seems to know what she is talking about, I took her to show her a tree and some fruit growing thereupon. She considers that it’s small plums and there’s no reason why I can’t make jam with them – but not for a while yet until they are ripe.

Back here I was sidetracked again with some research and so it was quite late by the time I made it outside. First job was to pick up all of the scaffolding that I’d dismantled yesterday and stick it over the fence into my garden.

Once I’d done that, I went up on the scaffolding and attacked the woodwork, putting the second coat of preservative on where I’d done the first coat yesterday.

I also attacked the bolts on the Sankey trailer with the angle grinder but this was where things went wrong and I ended up spending the rest of the day dismantling the angle grinder to find out why it keeps on stopping. It’s not been right for a while.

The brushes were worn and there’s a wire with a bad connection, as I discovered after I dismantled it. And I hadn’t finished it (and not by a long way either) at knocking-off time.

Up here later, I fell asleep watching The Naked Gun. I’ll see it again tomorrow and fall asleep in a different bit.

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Thursday 24th July 2014 – SO DESPITE THE LATE NIGHT …

… last night, I was still up at something like the correct time. And we had the usual procedure this morning of breakfast and then work on my website until midday. It was interrupted by a phone call from Rosemary – it’s nice to have phone calls from friends.

When I went outside, I went up onto the scaffolding in the beautiful weather and sloshed a pile of wood preservative onto the wood in the roof – the bits where I did the first coat yesterday.

While I was up on the scaffolding I untangled the mooring wires for the wind turbine. There’s only one attached to the wall at the moment and over the passage of time the other three have become tangled. It was a complicated manoeuvre involving a 4-metre lath of wood and a garden rake.

kwikstage scaffolding rear of house les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis afternoon I started checking over the rear wall of the house, slowly making my way down the scaffolding, dismantling it as I descended. I’ve arrived at the level of the roof of the lean-to and so I sloshed a pile of wood preservative on that too and I’ll do the second coat tomorrow.

I’m at the stage where I need a couple of buckets of mortar for the wall of the lean-to – some of the mortar that i did in the summer of 2012 needs some attention.

That’s tomorrow’s job and I finished off my working on the Sankey trailer. Of course, with it being ex-British-Army from the 1950S and 60s it’s a mixture of AF and Whitworth nuts and bolts. I have all my AF spanners but I’ve no idea where my Whitworth stuff is and so it wasn’t easy. I’ll have to use the angle grinder tomorrow on that. But the chassis isn’t as bad as I thought and even a manual wire brush cleaned it off quite well. I’ll still get the wire brush on the angle grinder to do it properly.

After knocking off, I watched The Spy Who Shagged Me, the same film that I tried to watch last night. And tonight I fell asleep in a different place and woke up in a different place too.

One day I might get to see all of it.

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Wednesday 23rd July 2014 – IT’S 02:40 …

… and I’m still awake. Serve me right for crashing out for an hour after I finished work earlier this evening. And that’s something of a surprise as I was in bed well before midnight too.

No rain or anything to wake me up so I slept right through and after breakfast I carried on with my journey around Lac St Jean and the Saguenay Fjord.

guttering down pipe rear of houseles guis virlet puy de dome franceOutside later, I finished off the guttering.

It was too much like hard work to set up the big electric SDS drill, and so I had a good go with the bigger Ryobi Plus One drill. I was quite impressed because once I put a new battery in it, the Ryobi did the job quite well. So that enabled me to fit the brackets for the downpipe and then fit the downpipe.

It’s all now glued into position and quite solid too as you can see.

kwikstage scaffolding rear of house les guis virlet puy de dome france
With having the scaffolding in place where I want it, I put in a higher row of planks so that I can reach up along the chevron on the outer edge and I put a couple of coats of wood preservative on there and also on the end of one of the roof beams. I’ll wallop some more on there tomorrow too.

I spent a delightful hour or so tidying up the concrete hardstanding, stacking everything neatly where it should be, so now there is plenty of room to move about there too without tripping over anything.

rotten chassis sankey trailer les guis virlet puy de dome franceNext, and as it happened, the last job for today was to look at the Sankey Trailer. I ripped out the flooring and ripped out the electric wiring so that I could have a good look at the chassis.

It’s not actually as bad as I thought it was. What I’ve been mistaking for rot on the chassis is about 10 layers of flaking paint. I reckon that if I attack it with the wire brush on the angle grinder and remove all of the loose paint and the loose rust, I can get down to the bare metal. I’ve a pile of dark brown metal paint that is suitable for painting over rust so a couple of coats of that should sort out the chassis and the inside of the trailer body. For the outside I have some yellow hammerite-type paint to match Caliburn.

For the flooring, there’s all of that that we fitted on a caravan chassis all those years ago – some heavy-duty 30mm planking. That should make a really good floor for that.


Once I’ve fixed that, I can go and collect some concrete from the quarry to finish off the job here.

And we finished the day in sunshine too. Even better, there’s a bright clear sky tonight with not a cloud in sight. Is summer coming back?

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Tuesday 22nd July 2014 – DESPITE THE LACK OF RAIN …

… during the night, it was still 04:00 when I went to bed this morning. I’ve no idea why I’ve been having trouble sleeping this last couple of days. I even managed to raise myself in the middle of the night to visit the beichstuhl as well so I ended up with even less sleep. Perhaps it’s old age – I dunno.

After breakfast I carried on with the website until midday and despite not feeling particularly up to it, I had a really good morning’s work. I’m half-way up to the head of Lac St Jean at the moment.

kwikstage scaffolding les guis virlet puy de dome franceOutside, I dismantled half of the scaffolding from the uphill end of the house and re-erected it on the downhill side.

Dismantling it was somewhat problematic because the part that remained erect wasn’t particularly stable once the whole of the other bay had been dismantled. It would have been much easier had I had another pair of feet so that I could have erected the downhill side of the scaffolding as I dismantled the uphill side. I’m sure that I bought 8 feet just so that I could do this, but despite an exhaustive search I could only find 7. I’ve no idea what has happened here. I can’t think where that one has gone to.

Anyway, now it’s up, and quite stable too, and I’ve started to glue the top end of the downpipe into position.

Tomorrow, I’ll be drilling the wall for the mounting screws for the downpipe brackets and then I can glue all of that in place. This will be the guttering finished.

There are a few other things that I can do while I’m up there and I can look at all of that tomorrow too. I may as well make the most of having the scaffolding up there because I don’t want to put it un there again.

Not until I can find my missing foot anyway.

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Friday 18th July 2014 – I DIDN’T GET OUTSIDE …

… to work until 16:30 this afternoon, and there was a very good reason for this. That is that when I went outside at 11:30 to pay the boulangère, it was already 31°C and continued to rise during lunchtime to over 34°C.

Working up on the scaffolding would have been impossible in that – just being outside was exhausting.

Even with the fan on here (and I had it running all through the night) the temperature still reached 32.3°C but at least in front of the fan it was reasonably comfortable after a fashion.

When I finally did make it outside and up on the scaffolding, I found to my dismay that sometile during the last four Years Brico Depot has changed its supplier of plastic rainwater goods. The new guttering brackets don’t fit on the metal supports that were left over from when I did the barn in 2010. Furthermore, the guttering ends that I bought the other day don’t fit in the gutters that were left over from the barn.

THat led to a session of mix-and-match with whatever was lying around and what I could safely replace from elsewhere, and now there are 5 of the 8 guttering brackets fitted and one of the gutters, complete with an end. I’ll be shopping tomorrow for the rest.

There’s also another added complication in that I can’t reach the end wall of the house from the scaffolding – the scaffolding that I have isn’t long enough. Therefore when I’ve finished fitting the gutters, I’m going to have to dismantle part of the scaffolding and re-erect it on the other side of the bay that I’ll be leaving in position – always provided that it doesn’t fall down.

But it looks as if another trip to Liverpool is on the cards

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