Tag Archives: suspended ceiling

Wednesday 22nd July 2015 – I DIDN’T MANAGE …

… to beat the alarm clock this morning. It was a little more difficult to crawl out of my stinking pit this morning.

Still, I had breakfast and had the usual several hours on the computer sorting out a few things that have been hanging around for a few years. I also had one of these telesales people on the phone trying to sell me window shutters and I kept him on the telephone for 30 minutes.

After lunch, I attacked the bathroom ceiling and I can now say with complete assurance that it’s all finished. It didn’t seen too much trimming either, much to my surprise. Just a case of nipping off a couple of edges with a mallet and chisel.

I was half-expecting to have to trim down a full length of board, so no-one was more surprised than I was about how good the fit was. I couldn’t have done it better had I measured it up purposely.

The bathroom ceiling is lower than the ceiling on the landing so it needed an end-piece. A rummage around in the barn produced an offcut length of floorboarding that was soon cut down to size (I’m as impressed with this new circular saw as I was with my galvanised steel dustbin) and trimmed to fit, and then sanded off with the belt sander. And it’s come up a treat, that’s for sure, fits quite nicely and looks quite good as well.

I finished off the afternoon by tidying up in the bathroom and that’s almost completed. If I can finish that off tomorrow and do the masking off, I can start to varnish the ceiling. 3 coats of that and I’ll be ready to do the tiling.

For tea tonight I made a mega-red-pepper-and-lentil curry to keep me going for the next four days, and I’ve noticed that I seem to be overrun with ants in the verandah and the downhill lean-to. Where have all of these come from? Is it a coincidence that we had another brief shower of rain earlier in the evening?

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Monday 20th July 2015 – I HAVE NEVER FELT …

… so bad as I felt this morning.

There was no alarm call in the room this morning so I was quite surprised to be awake and sitting up on the edge of the bed at 07:40. But never mind getting up – the way that I was feeling, I was ready to crawl straight into the grave and I wouldn’t have cared at all. You would never ever have thought that I had had a really early night either.

Mind you, I had been on my travels during the night. Back in Brussels in fact, and I was back working at the EU which had somehow managed to transport its offices to Boulevard Reyers. I had a ground-floor two-bedroom flat somewhere in a traditional built-up area such as that on the bottom end of the Avenue Molière. Two-bedroom, it was, and a typical 1920s “3 pièces en enfilade”, but tidy as it might have been, the two bedrooms were under renovation so I had my double bed in the kitchen. This was rather inconvenient when I invited a young lady from the office back to my apartment to stay the night, but nevertheless, she came and stayed, and I was quite happy. Next morning, who should I bump into but Nina, a girlfriend from way back in the early 1970s. She grabbed me and said something along the lines of “now that I’ve got you, I’m not ever going to let you go again” – rather inconvenient seeing as how I’d invited the other girl to a rock concert that night. So I asked Nina if she fancied going to the rock concert, to which she replied “no”, which took a weight off my mind so that I could carry on with my plans, but Nina then said “but we can do something else instead” – and that threw me back into an even more confusing situation.

So with all of that, it’s no surprise that I was thoroughly out of sorts this morning.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … after having an agonising couple of hours, I made a pot of coffee and drank it. And then I do have to say that I’ve never felt better after that. In fact I attacked a few things that had been built up for a while and dealt with them with gusto.

After lunch, I attacked the ceiling in the shower room, now that I have bought the tongue and grooving. And I was glad that I had had that coffee, because it was a struggle. I had to –

  • cut a few pieces with some fancy, intricate cuts
  • drill a large 60mm hole in one plank for the recessed light up at that end
  • rewire all of the lights
  • fit a batten to the beams under the suspended ceiling to attach (with some very long screws) the light cord switch
  • reroute a great deal of the wiring
  • wire in the 12-volt extension to the circuit that runs to the back of the wardrobe in the bedroom

And then I could start to fit the rest of the planks of tongue and groove.

Two more to fit and the ceiling will be finished, and even so, it was 19:25 by the time that I knocked off.

I’ll have to have a good pot of coffee tomorrow. I need to tidy up here because Rosemary is coming for an inspection, and she phoned me tonight to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten.

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Friday 3rd July 2015 – THIS MUST BE SOME KIND OF A RECORD

Today’s temperature outside reached a massive 39.4°C and that can’t be far short of a record. No wonder I had a hard time starting work today.

This morning I wasn’t as bright and breezy as yesterday, even though I had the Dawn Chorus again giving me a helping hand. After breakfast I mooched around for a little and then plucked up the courage to attack the radio programmes.The second lot for Radio Arverne are now half-completed and should be done by Sunday, and I have to check over the rock programmes for Radio Tartasse because they are being recorded on Monday.

When I finally managed to attack the bathroom, it was really slow progress. I’ve only done the first three rows of the ceiling, but then again each one had to be cut and shaped by hand so it isn’t surprising. In fact, because of the way that I’ve done everything, there’s going to be a lot of the ceiling that’s going to have to be cut and shaped by hand.

I’ve also had to fit a supporting strut in the ceiling. There’s going to be a flying shelf in the bathroom and the brackets to hang it from the ceiling have to be fitted, and that’s why I needed the supporting strut.

Apart from that, I had to unload Caliburn ready for my trip to Montlucon tomorrow and you’ve no idea how much I didn’t want to do that in the heat that we were having. But at least the water in the solar shower was 39.0°C so that I could have a really good soak.

Now here’s a thing.

Apparently in the UK, there’s been a minute’s silence in memory of those who were killed in Tunisia. Now – can you remember if we ever had a minute’s silence in memory of anyone who was killed by an IRA terrorist?

This is an old Nazi trick and the Nazis used it to perfection. Whenever an “atrocity” was committed by a hated enemy, they would have these ceremonial minutes’ silence, parade funerals, eulogies and all that kind of thing. They whip up the emotions and subsequently the hatred, and then the Government can go ahead and invade another country to “revenge these dreadful deaths” and the public will be so whipped up by hatred that they can’t see what’s going on. And when you see the outpourings of the Tory Government, that echo the comments that the Nazis made about a death in Danzig or the Sudetenland, you realise just how much the Tories have learned from the Nazis and how much of it they have put into practice.

When it came to whipping up hatred against the Irish Republic or the Vatican over the deaths and other atrocities committed by the IRA, the Government was strangely silent. But when it comes to doing it against brown-skinned people, all of the gloves are off. This tells you all that you need to know about the British Government’s racist policies.

And don’t forget that it was the West that declared war on Islam, with the bushbaby’s “crusade” speech. And just who is so naive to believe that when you declare war on someone and start to fight them, they are not going to fight back?

You couldn’t make that up could you? It just shows you the depths to which the intellectual capacity of the Western world has sunk.

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23rd June 2015 – WE ARE RADIOING …

… next Monday. I had completely forgotten about it and so I need to get a wiggle on. It’s a good job that I had a few days on it earlier in the month in order to get ahead, otherwise I would be starting to struggle right now.

Consequently this mornng, I sat down and dashed off another 2000 words for our next hot topic. That makes about 25kb, which is about 5,000 words and at about 3kb per 5-minute segment, this is enough for 8 weeks. There’s plenty more where this came from too so with a bit of luck, God’s help and a Bobby, this might do until I return from Canada, with what is already in the pipeline. It means that I just have to do the additional notes and the dialogue for the rock music programmes.

At midday I reckoned that I had done enough for today and so I went into the shower room and measured up the inserts of the window frame in order to cut some plasterboarding. That wasn’t as straightforward as it might have been either. I mentioned the other day that with the house being an old fieldstone house, nothing is plumb and the walls are not parallel. It’s all kinds of shapes and so was this plasterboard that I had to cut. And I didn’t have any pieces long enough so I’ve had to join a couple of offcuts on either side;

I fitted a 20mm batten on one wall, a thickness that last night was perfectly correct. Through the night however, the wall has expanded and so the plasterboard is proud of the piece against which it is supposed to abut. I had a dsperate hunt around in the shed and in the end came across a length of 10mm hardboard from when we did the roof here in 2009. That needed drilling, shaping and fixing to the wall instead of the 20mm batten.

dot and db plasterboard wedged counter battens les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfter lunch, during which I treated myself to yet another electric coffee, I fitted the plasterboarding to the walls. It’s screwed at one end to the battens and at the other end (ap against the window) it’s been “dot-and-dabbed”. I managed to find my plasterboarding cement after all. The glued ends are wedged up to the walls with counter-battens which will give it an “incentive” to stick. It needs to stick well because it’s going to have tiles fastened to it and “dot-and-dab” isn’t the strongest method of fastening it.

Still plenty of time left and so I’ve been fitting the roof rails for the suspended ceiling. I’ve even put an extra longitudinal support in pace because, even though it’s only lightweight tongue-and-grooving that I’ll be using, a span of 1450mm is too long, especially in humid conditions, and the ceiling might warp.

And tomorrow? I really WILL start on this door frame. I promise.

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