Tag Archives: stainless steel

Tuesday 17th May 2011 – I now have a new beichstuhl

beichstuhl home made composting toilet les guis virlet puy de dome franceand here’s a photo of it in ill its glory – minus the tongue-and-grooved cladding of course.

Did I mention that when I was at Les Bonnes Affaires the other day they had a couple of 20-litre aluminium casseroles? And just €9:99 too. I thought that I would try one because being a casserole it would be watertight, it has a tight-fitting lid and it shouldn’t be prone to rusting.

That so-called stainless steel bin that I bought from IKEA is rusty already and leaking, after less that a year and so it needed to be changed. At least this gives me an opportunity to redesign it.

It isn’t finished because I can’t find the hinges for the top part, and I can’t find the clips to hold the seat on, but they’ll turn up somewhere sometime.

Such delightful things that I talk about on my blog.

I started that after I’d been working on my voyage around Cape Breton Island, but I didn’t get a head start on it like I wanted. Another succession of cold canvassers, and the guy from Pionsat Patrimoine who doesn’t understand the meaning of the sentence “I’m busy and I don’t have time to deal with these photos right now” – mind you, the time it took him on the phone, I could have done it.

Tomorrow I’m going to strip out Caliburn, including removing the seats, and see what’s in there, and see if I can’t find that SatNav (although I’m not optimistic about that). I need to get ready to go to the UK.

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Thursday 21st April 2011 – I’ve dealt with the question of the water butts today.

rainwater harvesting water butts guttering les guis virlet puy de dome france>But it isn’t how I want it, and I’m going to have to do it again.

I took down the guttering on the verandah, scrubbed it all out because it was filthy, reset the supports and then rehung it all, nice and clean. I then ripped out the old piping to the butts to deal with all of that.

You’ll notice that I’ve put back the sump – just in front of the verandah window. That was my first idea and I replaced it because the first of the grey bulges in the pipework, that is in fact a sump, and the idea was that every few months I’d dismantle the filters, empty and clean them, and put them back. But that never happened and there was all kinds of stuff in there. And so the sump went back in. Just unscrewing the blanking plug at the end will empty that out.

Next task was to clean out the water butts. Using all of the 4 kettles, a saucepan and two 25-litre containers, I managed to save all of the water. There wasn’t much in it. But the water containers are out of the way in the dark to keep them fresh and I’ll be drawing on them for now. The butts needed cleaning as you might expect – it’s been a couple of years since they were last done – but the home-made puzzolane filter (the second grey bulge) is surprisingly effective. You can tell that by looking at the inside of the pipe in (a muddy brown) and the inside of the pipe out (a dusty light grey) and I’m glad that it works fine. But one major surprise is that the IKEA “stainless steel” mesh from an old strainer – it isn’t stainless at all and all the mesh filters that I made from that have rusted. That’s a disappointment.

From here on in it was just a list of problems. I can’t find the bits that I put on one side to make the replacement sump and the replacement filter. I searched as much as I could but no luck – not that it is surprising around here of course. I can’t find anything. And so I’ve had to put the old ones back.

But at least I can get to them. The new tap that I was going to fit in the butt to replace the broken plastic one – that isn’t going to work. And after ages of scratching around I’ve found an old one and some bulkhead fitting that might do the job. The hole needed to be filled after all. I’ll have to organise another tap at the weekend and hope that it isn’t too late.

I say too late because now that everything is clean and proper and ready, all I need is a torrential rainstorm. And I hope that it comes soon.

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Friday 24th September 2010 – PHEW! I’M EXHAUSTED!

And it’s hardly surprising too after what I’ve been doing today!

In order of appearance –
1) I went in person to the Connections office and I’ve booked my flights and car hire. I leave Paris Charles de Gaulle at 11:00 on Wednesday and fly to Zurich where I pick up another flight to Toronto.

Then I have my car for 6 weeks, and then fly back. Total cost, all included, was €2100 which, all things considered, isn’t too bad at all.

Flying from Paris Charles de Gaulle means that I pay maybe €60 more, but I don’t have to go to Brussels, which would probably cost me that much on the train.

The downside is though that I have to hang around through the night on a railway station somewhere in provincial France.

At the moment, Nevers looks a good bet. I can get a train from Riom at 19:36 that gets me there at about 21:00 and there’s a train from there to Paris at 05:00.

Nevers is a draughty railway station but there are cafes and restaurants just over the road where I can loiter for a while and the train starts from there so it is usually backed into the station by the night shift at about 03:30 so I can curl up in a corner.

It arrives in Paris at about 07:30 so there’s plenty of time to get over to Charles de Gaulle.

I was tempted by flying to Charles de Gaulle from Clermont Ferrand on the 07:00 flight but the price €280 has put me off. I could travel there the night before and stay in the Hilton and still have change from that.

2) I visited the IKEA and had some luck too. As you know, with the composting toilet I’m using an aluminium plant pot but it really needs to be something in stainless steel.

And I found some superb waste-bin cum plant-pots there – 25 litre capacity and in stainless steel, for just €14.95. Exactly what I want and so I bought two of those.

3) But the most important thing concerned my property empire.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I first moved to Brussels in 1993 I bought a little studio apartment about 20 minutes walk from work.

A few years later I met Laurence and as she had a little daughter (Roxanne) my studio was too small for us so I rented it out and we rented a larger apartment. When Laurence and I split up and she moved away, I bought the big apartment at Jette.

The little studio remained rented out – the old couple who rented it moved out and they passed it on to their grandson. When he moved away he passed it on to a girl he knew.

And to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … a few months ago, she sent me a mail to say that she reckoned that she ought to move out and find a place of her own to buy instead of renting.

But as she was happy in my place, she wondered on the off-chance whether I had ever thought of selling it.

The property market isn’t as good as it used to be and finding willing buyers is not all that easy. You need estate agents, plenty of time and patience, a good deal of hassle.

And of course there are all these laws now that you need homeowners files, surveys, thermal inspections and everything else and so on.

So someone ready willing and able to proceed is something that should not be discarded lightly, especially as the price that was offered was – well – I could have got more for it, but then I would have had to pay estate agents, etc etc.

And so I am now 1 property lighter in my portfolio.

But what I have lost in rental income has been more than made up by the fact that I have now reimbursed the outstanding mortgage on the apartment at Jette and the difference between the two figures means that I have more than doubled my disposable income.

There’s also a lump sum left over of an amount not to be sniffed at, and Terry, Simon and I are going to be having a little chat about how this lump sum can be made to work.

I know that if I just leave it lying around it will slowly melt away into nothing.

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