Day: May 29, 2021

I made another early start and spent another full day working on the caravan’s ‘salle d’eau’. To say that I’m fed up to the back teeth of it is an understatement but at least at long last I’ve now finished the unit I’ve been building to house the Porta-Potti chemical toilet. It isn’t the thing of beauty that I hoped it would be but at least it should be functional with its built-in locker to house the toilet’s chemicals.

Here’s a closer view of the locker. I’m very disappointed because I had a terrible time fitting the lid. The screws that came with the small brass hinges that I bought the other day in Bricomarché in Sarlat were so tiny that the heads mashed up while I was trying to attach the lid to the main body. The problem was that I couldn’t see what I was doing due to access problems and I ended up having to throw them away and grind down the heads of some large screws that I could screw in using a normal size phillips screwdriver.

The other problem is that because I didn’t cut my straight lines straight enough and because I made the lid from a different sheet of plywood from the main unit, which was slightly warped, even though I’ve eased it as much as I can, the lid is staying slightly open. I think that I’ll probably have to fit a magnetic latch as the pressure needed to get it to sit down is only very small and leaving it the way it is will annoy me. The other side is just blanked off to make the space into which the Porta-Potti slides but even that took me most of the day to complete.

Now the money shots with the Porta-Potti in place.

I’ve still got the sealing to do – the whole ‘salle d’eau’ as well as the unit itself, to make sure that no water can get where it shouldn’t – plus I’ll need to install a shower curtain arrangement as I described in my previous post. And I’m still waiting for my electric water heater to arrive that I’ll need to fit to make the whole thing viable.

The unit will do its job but what disappoints me is how long the job has taken. One of the main contributory problems is that the caravan is in the far corner of my garden and getting to it from my workshop involves a round trip of about 100 metres. Not only is this time-consuming and tiring, it’s also very tedious when I have forgotten something and have had to go the whole way back to my workshop to get it and then walk back again to the caravan.

I’ve just this evening spotted another newer, larger Fendt in my price range on Le Bon Coin. However, although I think that the caravan I’ve got was definitely a mistake, I think that I’m now too far into it to take a different direction. I’ve just received the material to do a repair on the door and I’ve also ordered a new 220v fridge and common sense tells me that it would be too much given the time that’s now available to take on anything else, given that I’ve still not started to make the necessary preparations to leave my house and arrange for someone to do what’s necessary on my land to site the caravan – ground clearing and levelling and connections for electricity and water. There’s much still to do and time is ticking away.