Tag Archives: laminate click flooring

Thursday 10th February 2011 – I was going to have an early night …

… seeing as how everyone else has retired, but I wrote up my blog and then the computer crashed before it could be published. But never mind – it can’t be helped.

So we are (or were) off to bed early because we have been busy little beavers today. While Terry was sorting out the electrics in the third bedroom I was filling in holes in the bathroom for Liz (who reminded me a short while ago that I have missed one). And while Liz started off the painting in there I cleaned up the half of the terrace that we stripped of tiles. It’s now ready for tiling when I buy the bitumen underseal.

However there is a change of plans there. So many of the tiles are damaged that it’s not really feasible to reuse them and so I approached the President of the Residents’ Council with the idea that we replace them all with some more of the black tiles that we bought to do the edging. He’s in agreement and so I rang up the tile place to order some more. We must have a half-share in that shop now.

So after I had done that, Terry and I started on the floor-laying in the third bedroom and that took ages. Would you believe that it is the same patented system that I found when I bought the flooring to fit in the attic back at home, and how much anguish did I have with that?

Liz finished the first coat of her painting early and so she took over helping Terry while I piddled off for the tiles and a visit to Brico. I ended up at the Brico at the Place Bockstael where I found everything I needed but there was no place to park and there was no-one to cut the glass.

“Glass?” I hear you say. But yes. We decided that the shower screen that we will be fitting looks so nice that we will fit one on the window side. But as they don’t do one the correct size, we will have to make one out of glass and channelling.

But at Brico I encountered a situation that would have delighted Terry had he been there. An old lady was looking for light bulbs and the server there told her that they were in aisle 21 and she should p155 off and look for herself. Terry is continually being astonished by what passes for customer service here in Belgium. I did warn him about it.

Back home Liz and Terry had finished the flooring and so we started on the skirting board but ran out of time. Now we have 2 finished bedrooms (that I did a few years ago), an almost-finished third bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and toilet ( and they may well be done tomorrow) and which leaves us just the huge living room and the two balconies to do, as well as rewire the main fuse board.

No wonder that we are tired!

Wednesday 4th November 2009 – Well, folks – here it is!

And about time too, I hear you say. One attic duly completed (more or less).

If you look very closely you can see that all of the skirting board is fitted, even in the little cupboard. And the room was emptied and brushed out by 18:15 too.

Tomorrow is going to be cleaning and tidying, and then moving in. And I’m going to have 10 days off and put my feet up to relax.

It goes without saying that a great big thanks is due to Terry, who came along, got me motivated and got me started on the roof back in July.

A big thanks too goes to Liz, who kept me going with supplies of vegan chocolate cake, to Dave who came to join in for a couple of days, and also to Rhys and Krys who kept me at it with loads of virtual cyber-support.

And we really put our backs into it too. It’s very hard to imagine that it was only on the 18th of July that the attic looked like this.

So here’s a little quiz to keep you all going until tomorrow.

I said that tomorrow I’m moving into the attic once I’ve cleaned it. The bed-settee, the desk and the coffee table are already up there. What you have to do is to guess which domestic item is going to be the first to be moved up there from anywhere else. An easy one if you know me – not so easy if you don’t.

As for this evening, we had an exciting jam session in a living room in Montaigut. I took the acoustic bass as I don’t have an amp and speaker for the Gibson but I needn’t have bothered – the living room was like something out of a who stage set, complete with soundproof room for the drums. Michael had only ever played once before with other people – I haven’t played with anyone else for about 30 years, but the drummer would have been out of my league even back in those days. His mane won’t mean anything to you but he was formerly the drummer in Gong – Daevid Allen and Pierre Malherbe’s group from the 1970s. Strangely enough, he’s interested in getting together again so when Michael comes back from the UK I’m going to teach him the basics of 12-bar blues and we’ll take it from there.

Meantime I need to talk to Trixi about some singing lessons. Last time I had to sing in a rock band Sue Willett gave me some lessons and some tips – but I’ve forgotten those.

What a day!

-7

Tuesday 3rd November 2009 – You’re probably looking at this photo and thinking ….

… “what’s going on here? Has he been reading the instructions or something?”

Well, that has been precisely the problem. I HAVE been reading the instructions (or looking at them anyway – it’s a kind-of schematic diagram) and unless there is something wrong with my eyesight, the instructions are totally wrong.

And the benefit of a good sleep and a nice hot mug of coffee is that you can have a really good think.

In the diagram (and I’ll scan it and post it up sometime) it’s quite clear that you lay the lengths down so that the large part of the tongue is flat on the floor, and you insert the small part of the tongue on the next piece into the groove. But, as I found out this morning, if you lay the lengths on the floor so that the small part of the tongue is facing towards you, you can slide the large part of the tongue on the next piece underneath the small part of the tongue on the first piece, and it all clicks together (with some amount of brute force, it has to be said)

And once I threw away the instructions and did it my way I had three-quarters of the floor laid. There’s just five rows left to do and with a bit of luck I might get those done tomorrow morning.

But even so, I’m still glad I’m not fitting this stuff in my flat in Brussels. You still have to nail this stuff to the floor (so it’s a good job I didn’t run the wires underneath the floor) and in Brussels I have concrete floors with water pipes running through them. Give me tongue-and-grooving any time.

In other news, the weather has been atrocious. 13mm of rain, damp and clammy atmosphere, a record low of electricital energy. Winter is finally here. We had a fantastic summer so I suppose I can’t complain.

And in other other news, Manure Knighted struggle to a draw against CSKA Moscow tomight. Their equalising goal is scored “deep into injury time”. By that, do they mean “injury time”, “mystery time”, or “Manure Knighted time”? it’s all becoming a bit of a joke at Old Trafford where games always seem to be played out long after the 90 minutes whenever Manure are losing – to give them a chance to pull back an equaliser. You’d have had your shirt on it tonight.

-4

Monday 2nd November 2009 – This perishing flooring …

… is getting on my wick.

I know now why it was reduced for sale at Brico Depot and why there was so much of it. Most flooring is just plain good old ordinary tongue and grooving and it slots together quite nicely. This stuff has “our special patented interlocking system” and that should have set the alarm bells ringing in my head. There’s nothing wrong with tongue and grooving and there isn’t any point changing it, especially for “our patented” system which, as far as I can see, doesn’t work.

It clicks together nicely on the shortest ends – on the longest sides it’s quite a struggle even with Ashley, my super-heavy-duty mallet; but you try to do both together. It’s now four times that I’ve had this floor restarted in an attempt to get it fitted properly. I’ve now resorted to cutting off the ends of the clips, nailing it to the floor on one side and twisting it in on the other. It sort-of fits but it looks untidy but I’ve got to the stage that I knew that I would reach sooner or later, namely that I can’t be bothered to waste any more time and I just want to be in there and settled down no matter what.

And who can blame ne with this weather? It’s pouring down with rain tonight.we’ve had 13.5mm of rain so far this evening and my water butts are overflowing. A far cry from the end of September when we went something like 15 days without any rain.

At the Anglo French group tonight no-one could remember whose turn it was to animate the evening so I had everyone playing charades, miming the use of tools used in DiY. Everyone entered into the spirit of things although Gilles did get carried away with his impression of a chainsaw – cutting Mark’s hand off was going a bit too far, I thought

-4

Sunday 1st November 2009 – I’ve finished the painting …

…and I’ve even started to lay the flooring. So much for my Sunday day of rest.

But the flooring needs to come up again. I was under the impression that there were only two different patterns in each packet but there are in fact four, so I need to re-plan how I’m going to lay them.

There was some paint left over to do the final wall, but I wasn’t sure whether there would be enough. So I added a cup-full of white paint and stirred it in. It didn’t go much lighter and it seemed to spread much easier too, so I wish I had done that from the very beginning. And when I finished, there was a cup-full of paint left over. And moving-in day looks much closer and I can’t wait.

The paint was described as “odourless” but it flaming well isn’t. The fumes have given me a headache which doesn’t seem to want to go and I’m off to bed in a minute.

But not before I tell you that I’m meeting this drummer on Wednesday.

-3

Saturday 5th September 2009 – LAST SATURDAY, FROM MY…

… €400 budget for my attic, I spent €354

Mind you, that didn’t include the shower base that never made it as far as the cash desk so that’s about quits.

Today, out of my €400 budget, I spent …. er …. €578.

I did get the shower base though, so you can knock €38 off that total, but I also made an unexpected expenditure of €170 while I was at Brico Depot.

I’m intending to put down on the floor some of this tongue-and-grooved laminated flooring and I had my eye on some at €5.74 per square metre, of which I shall be wanting about 28. But today, in the clearance lot was some at €3.67 per square metre. And not a miserable 4mm thickness or even a decent 6mm, but a whacking great 7mm.

Now I don’t think much of the style or the colour but there’s absolutely no dispute about the quality of the stuff. And I have to do what I can to get my budget back under some sort of control, so I can live with the colour and style at this kind of price and this kind of quality. I wasn’t going to miss out.

I also have the bathroom to do eventually and I was planning on tiling it, which would cost an arm and a leg. So when I saw some of this plastic tongue-and-grooving on special offer – just enough to do the bathroom and for just €56, then again in the interests of expediency and budget I wasn’t going to miss out.

I don’t like the stuff, especially as it’s pink marble, and the bathroom will probably end up looking like a tart’s boudoir, but it’s not as if I’ll be spending much time in there and it will do the job as well as anything else, especially at that price.

I ended up with 18mm OSB for the attic floor. That was the thickest they had and they seem to think that it will be perfect for the job. The reason why I went for OSB over chipboard is because having done the barn floor in chipboard and remembering how heavy the 2.8 x 1.4 sheets were and how I’m going to have to maul them up a ladder, the smaller and lighter 1.7 x 0.65 sheets will be much easier to handle.

I made three trips around Brico Depot today – a record. On the third trip through the checkout the young girl on duty there asked me if I had a lorry.

They ask you for your postcode when you go through the checkout and while I agree with Dave that it’s an invasion of privacy, it it helps bring a branch of Brico Depot closer to me then I’m all for it. The checkout girl was quite cute and when she asked me for my postcose I told her that she could have my address as long as she came round to help me fit it all. Ahh well, I have to keep trying … “You’re certainly very trying” – ed.

When I finished loading up Caliburn I went back inside the shop to get a coffee. She saw me coming back and hid behind her till. Serve her right.

I also spent a few bob in LIDL. I popped into the one by the bridge over the Cher at Montlucon, and they still had 7 of the 12-volt LEDs. Not any more, they don’t.

And in other more ominous news, the temperature in the heat exchanger dropped to 3 degrees last night. Winter is acumen in.

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EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality