Month: October 2021

For the second day in a row I ended up today totally knackered and running with sweat. Yesterday it was because of my futile attempts to bang a 1 metre long metal rod into my rocky ground but today the reason was quite different and I’ll explain why.

Yesterday I noted that from a distance there was something weird about the ground at the bottom of my land – some raised brown strips that I thought might be piles of leaves or old grass cuttings, but I thought nothing more about them as I was focused on sorting out my caravan’s water supply and fitting out my electrical box. However, when Wim arrived this morning for our usual Sunday morning coffee together he said, ‘I see that you’ve been visited by the sanglier (wild boar)’, and he was right.

A small herd (I think, from the extent of the damage and the hoof marks) had invaded my land a couple of nights ago and wreaked havoc.

As we have seen so many times before on our grass runways here, they love land on which the grass has been cut because it allows them to get to the roots so much quicker than when they have to fight their way through long, thick stems and when they do, they attack the ground with both their snouts and their hooves and cause a lot of destruction in the process. Here are some shots of what my hitherto quite level grass looked like after they had departed.

And these weren’t the worst bits. I didn’t take any more pictures because I wanted to get cracking on reinstating the ground as soon as possible, but in the centre of the largest and most severely damaged area they had dug down over six inches (15 cms) in places and tossed large divots aside for quite a distance. As we were expecting rain (it’s raining now as I type this) I wanted to start repairing the damage as soon as possible as I thought that hopefully the rain would help settle the ground down again, so I got out my trusty rake and set to the job in hand.

It took over two hours of hard work that were thoroughly exhausting and as it was sunny with a temperature of about 16 degrees C, I was soon dripping with sweat. The trouble is, the damage that the boar do is not predictable or consistent. Some of the ground can just be flipped back over again and trodden down, but not that much. The majority of the divots they create are tossed aside from the hole from whence they came so pretty soon you’re into a game of patchwork turfing.

Sure, you want to try to get the land as level as possible but you also want to replace the divots with as much grass showing upwards as possible, so you end up bent over fitting pieces back into the holes by hand like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. However, I eventually did as much as I thought I would today and although the ground really now needs rolling, it didn’t come out too badly as the following shots show.

Indeed, from further up the land near the top, you’d hardly notice any difference.

The question now, of course, is what is the memory-span of a wild boar. I went onto the land below mine and found several large holes that the boar had created before moving up onto mine where presumably the pickings were easier. My problem will be if they remember that and come straight back onto mine and do a repeat job. I’d hate to have to do what I did today all over again… 😐

Since my caravan was connected to its own water supply I’ve noticed that the water has a bit of a nasty smell and it also seems to taste a bit off. I didn’t notice the problem while I was collecting water from my neighbour’s outside tap and if I draw water straight from my own tap it seems to be OK. The obvious conclusion therefore, is that it’s something to do with either the hosepipe that I’ve used to connect the caravan to my tap or the pipework inside the caravan itself.

I doubt that the caravan pipework is to blame because it uses standard domestic plastic tubing that is widely used these days and will also be used in my new house when the time comes, so the finger of suspicion points at the hosepipe I’ve used. It’s my original garden hose from Plazac, which I’ve had now for at least a couple of years.

Brico Marché at Le Bugue is my new ‘Brico’ port of call as it’s far closer than Brico Depot at Trellissac and carries a much wider range of stock than either Bricojem at Rouffignac (I went there this evening to buy a metre of earth cable and they were out of stock…) or Les Briconautes at Montignac, which I think is just a bit further away anyway. I was in there the other day and I thought I’d take a look at what hosepipes they had on offer and I’m glad that I did.

Brico Depot only had the usual coloured plastic pipe in various diametres whereas I was interested to see that as well as all of those, Brico Marché also had some reinforced transparent hosepipes which were marked as being ‘Phthalate Free’. This got me thinking. Phthalates are used as plasticizers and also in hundreds of other products, like shampoos and cosmetics. They have not been identified as being ‘bad’ for you but they are not ‘good’ either, especially for older people among which they have found to be responsible for causing early deaths.

So I thought that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to swap my old hosepipe for a new ‘phthalate free’ transparent one and I did it today, having had to make a return journey to Le Bugue because I found that my current fittings weren’t compatible. So here’s what my caravan water supply now looks like (sorry for my phone camera deciding to play silly out-of-focus games today).

And what’s my conclusion? The water does now seem to have lost its odour and bad taste, but as phthalates are odourless and tasteless, it may not be because of the different type of plastic that I’m now using. It’s more likely that as my old hosepipe has been standing open to the air with ‘old’ water in it, internally it has taken on some of the characteristics of stagnant water and needs some kind of clean-through to be suitable for carrying drinking water again. However, I won’t bother doing that now I have my new hosepipe as the old one will in future only be used in its normal role as a garden hose.

But anyway, I count that as a win… it’s nice to be able to make a lovely, fresh tasting pot of tea again that doesn’t smell and taste as though it’s been made from water that someone’s washed their feet in!

The other project that I was working on today was the box housing the components for my temporary electricity supply. I still have no news on when Enedis will be turning up to connect me up but I decided that I wanted to be all ready in advance of the event so there will be no delay and it will be a simple matter of plugging my caravan into the box as soon as it’s made live.

In order to do that, I needed to mount a couple of waterproof sockets onto the outside of the box (other people have put a single socket inside but I didn’t want to do that) connected via a couple of circuit breakers as I want one for myself and a spare for eg the building contractors or, indeed, just washing my car say, and I don’t want whatever happens with the second one to affect the supply to my caravan. And the last thing that you must do here in France is provide an approved earth for the system in the form of a metre metal rod banged into the ground.

Here’s a shot of the inside of the box after I’d made the two connections (line and neutral) to the main system earth-leak detector (‘disjoncteur’) on the left to the two circuit breakers for my two sockets on the right. The black cables on the right hand wall of the box are the two separate supplies to the external sockets.

Here’s a shot of the two external sockets. As can be seen in the image, I’ve also waterproofed the joint between the box and the housing in which the sockets are mounted.

The two external sockets are of the usual French design.

The two sockets have a common earth and the connection to the system earth is by a simple connector in the bottom of the box.

It’s a simple matter to make a connection to the heavy system earth cable which I’ve passed through the bottom of the box contained in a concertina plastic tube known here is a ‘gaine’. But it’s then that the problems start. The other end of the system earth cable has to be connected to the earth rod, in my case a heavy copper one of nearly 1.5 cm diameter, driven a metre into the ground. Here’s a shot of what I’m talking about.

Seems simple enough, so what’s the problem? The problem is that the ground here is so rocky that the rod won’t go down any deeper than 40 cm, which is not enough for an approved earth. How can you get round that? You either have to use a more robust method of banging the rod into the ground (I’ve been using a club hammer and I’ll probably have to get my huge sledge hammer out of storage) or you can use multiple earths. The problem with that is it’s a bit hit-and miss. I could, for example, cut my meter rod in two and bang each half 50 cm into the ground and then link both as a single earth for the system.

The trouble is that you then have to start taking some careful resistance measurements to ensure that the arrangement works properly and, more importantly, safely. I think that I’ll go the sledge hammer route first and see how I do with that before starting to get in more deeply 😉

There’s barely a day goes by at the moment without there being some kind of news. Firstly, the new Malbec web site. As I mentioned in my last post, a week or so ago we lost the original web site that I created for Malbec airfield. I received no notification that it was going to happen, but to be fair, some months ago I also lost the free email address that I’d used when I set the site up and they probably sent me a message on that that I wouldn’t have received to tell me that it was going to happen.

Anyway, I’ve worked pretty solidly over the past few days and the week-end to create a replacement using another free web-site service (yes, they do exist, you just have to compromise a bit over the domain name) and ended up working into the early hours of this morning to finish it off. In fact I’ve created two replacements in that time. The first one turned out to be incredibly slow and kept throwing up database connection errors. This was probably because it was on an Indian web host’s servers where local demand is very high, although to a point I was prepared to live with that.

However, the deal-breaker (if you can call signing up for a free service a ‘deal’) came when I couldn’t get email to work. The Malbec web site, like My Trike, has a ‘Contact’ facility with a pre-defined form that uses a special server email function. This can have two problems. Firstly, if the server is recognised by recipient email servers (like Gmail and MS Outlook) as having a reputation for spam, then any messages generated by the form will be filtered out and deleted before they get to their destinations even though they are not spam. The second problem is that if the web server is overloaded and running slowly, its email function will time-out and the messages will never actually be sent.

I think that my first choice of a replacement free web site service suffered fom both of those problems because although in testing a very few messages did get through, the majority didn’t and none were delivered to Gmail and Outlook addresses, which have strong spam filters. So I was forced to look for yet another replacement and actually this did me a huge favour because although I wasted a lot of time signing up for several free services that I then immediately rejected, either because I didn’t like the style of the free domain names that were on offer or because only after signing up did I find that email was a ‘paid-for’ extra, I eventually came across an amazing free service offered by x10hosting.com.

This has turned out to be unbelievably good, although not for the inexperienced as they don’t offer much in the way of basic help. They expect you to know what you’re doing, which suits me as I guess that that discourages them from being swamped by newbies clogging up their servers and slowing them down. As a result, the new Malbec web site has turned out to be much better than the old one that was lost, much faster and with all of the facilities that I needed for it to do what I wanted it to. Here’s a shot of the finished home page which if clicked on will take you through to the actual Malbec web site itself.

So that has been a big win. The next thing that happened today was a car drew up on the roadside outside my caravan and a lady got out clutching several sheets of paper and a map. It turned out that she was a surveyor, on behalf of EDF, Enedis or SDE24 I didn’t quite catch, although I think the latter, and her job was to get the new electric cable that was laid last week permanently marked on the map. She said that I will be connected up very soon now, but experience tells me that there’s a large discrepancy between the French idea of ‘soon’ and my own, so I’ll just go on waiting… patiently… NOT 😐

I finished off my last post talking about acorns and how I’ve been plagued by them dropping everywhere and on my caravan roof. Today I’ve suffered from another plague – ladybirds! We had a cold night last night and I had to get up and put more covers on my bed, but this morning it turned out to be somewhet weirdly quite warm but foggy. The fog burnt off and we’ve had a gorgeous warm, sunny afternoon and I’ve been going out and about in just a tee shirt (you know what I mean… ).

I don’t know where they all came from, but by the early afternoon the air was full of millions of ladybirds, most of whom it seemed wanted to join me in my caravan. As fast as I could catch and throw one out, two or more would come flying in and in the late afternoon as the sun was beginning to dip below the trees on the other side of the road, you could see millions of tiny ladybird wings shimmering in its rays.

I threw dozens out but quite a few are still with me in the caravan. Sadly, you can’t convince them that they belong outside and experience tells you that they will end up as tiny, brightly coloured, dry, shrivelled husks on the windowsills and elsewhere. Nature, I guess, has always been thus… 🙁

When I came to France over 9 years ago, I brought with me an old generator that I’d used when I was working on MYRO on the airfield and needed power. It only had a power rating of about 2.2 kW but I used it while I was waiting for electricity to be connected here in France at my old house and a few more times when we had power cuts. After that, for most of the time it stayed neglected and unused in my workshop.

I needed it again though, when I moved out of my old house and into the caravan on the land on which my new house is going to be built. The trouble was that as you’d expect, it wouldn’t start. My friend Victor then breathed his magic on it and got it starting and running like a Swiss watch, and it did so for a week or so before something happened to a switch on its panel causing it to disintegrate and short between its high (220 V) and low (110 V) settings and the generator to stop charging.

So I had to replace it at very short notice, on a week-end with no shops open, in the height and heat of the summer before everything in my fridge started to perish and I did so with one I found on Le Bon Coin, the French small ads web site. I chose it because it had a fairly high output of around 4.5 kW that would allow me to run my fridge, kettle, fan, laptop and microwave and charge my phone all at the same time. It was also quite economically priced at only 200€.

OK, it was a bit scruffy but it started and performed well, the downside being that its quite large motor had shocking running costs of around 500€ per month. So the electricity it produced was very expensive, considerably more so than my original generator, but in the absence of an alternative I had no choice but to go along with it.

However, the alternative came after 2 or 3 weeks when my neighbour kindly agreed for me to connect my caravan to their house’s supply, a common thing it turns out in France where getting a new supply connected can take a long time, as I’ve found out to my own cost. However, once my caravan was connected to my neighbour’s house, all was well despite the heavy drop in power due to the length (150 metres) of the cable. That was up until we had a power cut a few weeks ago and I found that something had gone wrong with the generator’s motor, like a dropped valve or broken piston ring, and it wouldn’t turn over, rendering the machine useless.

I’ve made some excellent purchases from Le Bon Coin, the concrete mixer that I recently bought and mentioned in a recent post being one of them, but unfortunately, that generator can’t be included in that category. The seller couldn’t have known what was about to happen and the experience can only go down as bad luck – like it says in the heading, you win some, you lose some. But that didn’t matter as I was plugged into my neighbour’s house.

However, that changed unexpectedly yesterday, not forever but for the next few days. For reasons that I won’t go into I have to disconnect my cable from my neighbour’s house, from today until Monday afternoon, so as of yesterday I needed to find another generator yet again at very short notice. Fortunately, Le Bon Coin again came to the rescue and I found one that looked ideal with an output of 3.5 kW, so probably less expensive to run than the last one, and with wheels again to make it easy to move around. It looked very clean in the ad and the seller assured me that it was in very good condition, and with an asking price of only 100€ the fact that it was located down in the Landes meant that it would still be overall an economic buy.

And so it proved when I turned up at the seller’s home in Mont-de-Marsan yesterday afternoon. The machine started immediately and ran without making any nasty noises or smoke, so I was happy to hand over the cash and bring it back to Fleurac. Here are some shots that I took of it running earlier this afternoon.

It’s running as I type this and unlike the big old machine that it replaces, I can hardly hear it at all from my caravan, so that will please my neighbours I’m sure. I was also delighted to find that my kettle boils quite quickly again and my microwave is back to its full power. I’ve bought two jerricans of fuel to tide me over for the week-end and I’ll have to see in due course whether its running costs are also lower than those of the machine it replaces. So for the moment, it looks as though this machine is a ‘win’. I hope I’ll still be thinking the same in a few days time.

Now on to something completely different that I’ve also lost within the last few days. Back in 2016 I think it was, I created a web site for our home airfield, Chateau Malbec. I used a free web site service, which meant that it had a slightly weird domain name (http://malbec-ulm.rf.gd) but it otherwise looked great and performed as well as any ‘paid-for’ service. That was until a week or so ago, when I aimlessly tried to log on and found that it had a database connection error.

To cut a long story short, it appears that with no notification, the service provider decided to cancel its free service and go exclusively for paid-for web site hosting. When I initially set the web site up, I’d kept copies of the coding for all of its pages on my home computer together with a back-up of the data on the hosting server. Unfortunately, however, my home PC suffered a computer hard drive crash not long after I’d created the web site and I lost an enormous amount of irreplaceable personal and other data, including those back-ups.

This wouldn’t have mattered if I’d then downloaded new back-ups of the Malbec site from the hosting server, but stupidly I didn’t. Now I’m paying the price as I’ve had to start building a new replacement Malbec web site from scratch using another free web site service. It won’t be easy because the old web site was all in French (naturally) and it had been meticulousy checked by a native French speaker, which may be difficult to achieve again to the same standard as before.

However, we’ll see how things go, and there is still a long way to go. For anyone wanting to watch progress, you can click on the image of the new home page below to see the current state of play.

And finally, something about acorns. I’ve mentioned previously how I’m currently being plagued by acorns. They have been falling like rain from the trees under which my caravan is positioned to the extent that they’ve often sounded like gunfire when they’ve been hitting the roof. Quite often it’s been hard getting to sleep or I’ve been woken up in the night when I have managed to drop off but the situation came to a head the other evening when we had a bit of a storm pass through with some high-ish winds.

For an hour or so it sounded as though I was under attack as so many were dislodged and came tumbling down and I dread what my caravan’s roof might now look like. Wim assured me that they sound much worse than they really are and it’s unlikely that the roof will have been damaged, but I won’t relax until I can get hold of a ladder and see for myself. But to show the extent of the problem, here are a couple of shots showing the state of the new concrete base that was laid last week and the ground around it.

Walking over the ground is like walking on sea shells as they crackle and break underfoot – in a way it’s quite disconcerting. However, although there’s the odd latecomer, there can’t be many more left to drop so maybe things will become a bit more peaceful around here. And I’ll start getting some better nights’ sleep 😐

After a certain amount of everyone, including the mayor, standing around talking, which seems ‘de rigueur’ in France, engines were started earlier this morning and work began on connecting me up to electricity. It didn’t take long before the chap operating the ‘mini pelle’ (small excavator) had uncovered the empty plastic tube (‘gaine’) that was buried a few years ago and runs up from the corner of my land to the ‘coffre’ (electric box) 80 or 90 metres away on the other side of the road.

They have a ‘cable snake’, a long stiffish cable on a spool, which presumably they intend to shove up the ‘gaine’ until it emerges at the other end and which they’ll then withdraw with a strong cord attached to it (I saw this happening when they were laying cables in the ground at my old house just before I moved). They’ll then attach the cord to the electrical cable and pull that through until it is inside the ‘gaine’ and sticking out at both ends, ready to be connected at the ‘coffre’ on the other side of the road and a new ‘coffre’ that will be the source of supply on my land.

I don’t think that I’ll be getting connected up today – I think that all they’ll do is get the cable in place, although I’m not sure – but at least everything is now getting underway and it must surely happen quite soon. Mustn’t it?

FOOTNOTE

It’s just after 4.00 pm as I type this and the small team has now finished, cleared away and left for the day. As I expected, they’ve only extended the main supply cable down to my land and put a box (‘coffre principal’) into place ready for either Enedis or a contractor to come along and actually make the necessary connections to make it live. Here are the results of their handiwork.

So although it’s a big advance, the project is far from finished. The big question now is, ‘When will my connection actually be made?’ This is an imponderable. It’s not unusual to see boxes like this standing untouched for many weeks – the new boxes that were put in outside my old house that I left at the end of June still haven’t been connected up. I guess that I’ll just have to wait patiently for a bit longer to find out 😐

Mr Bouet, the mayor of Fleurac who has been fighting my case with the water and electricity suppliers, originally told me that the workmen would be along yesterday to do the necessary work to connect me up to electricity. I wasn’t too surprised when they didn’t show up but continud to live in hope.

He dropped by again today to tell me that he had just approved a request to dig up the road opposite my land and that they would definitely be along tomorrow. I said that I’d be very happy if they did their stuff any time this week.

Towards the end of the afternoon a hirsute young man with a full bushy beard together with another more earnest looking young man clutching a photocopied map pulled up in a work van on the road just outside my caravan. After a brief conversation we shook hands and he said that they’ll be along tomorrow mornng at about 9.30 am to do the job.

Here’s what I found parked up near the ‘poubelles’ (waste bins) a few minutes ago when I popped out to Rouffignac to pick up a few things.

Hurrah! And it shows that Mr Bouet’s efforts bore results because originally SDE24, the organisation responsible, originally said that the work was scheduled for week 47, mid-November. It helps to have powerful friends with contacts in France 😉

I started later in the afternoon than I’d have liked but I did succeed yesterday in making the move back up from the bottom to the top of my land. There are still one or two things left down there to be moved up later or disposed of but they can wait for a day or two as I didn’t finish until after dark and the move took quite a lot of effort. However, I was pleased that I shifted the caravan and its contents with no disasters, moved everything under cover that I needed to and and got the interior of the caravan back into some sort of order after having removed quite a bit of heavy stuff for the move and moved other items around inside so they couldn’t be damaged.

Here are some shots taken this morning. The caravan is a bit closer to the road than I would have liked but I’m happy with how it’s turned out as at least it’s very level and stable with very little step up into the doorway.

Its positioning vis a vis the trees has worked out pretty well as it’s not too close to them and I’ve got a fair sized clear area between the caravan and the trees where I can keep things out of view from the road.

It’s closer to the water tap than I anticipated but one positive outcome of that is that I was able to extend the paved area that I placed around the tap to give me a flagstone right outside the caravan’s door. Much better than stepping out onto grass or mud plus it’s the height of luxury now having running water in the caravan, even if it is just cold for the time being!

Here’s one final shot from the road end showing the clear space behind the caravan that I mentioned above. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to get even my small trailer up there but I’ll have to wait and see. I hope that I will.

A huge up-side of the move is that I’m now back with a super, south-facing view from my caravan door.

However, there is one down-side. I had a small problem with acorns falling onto its roof when the caravan was down at the bottom, but now it’s far, far worse. Up-top they are falling like rain and sometimes it’s like a fusillade when several fall simultaneously and all pound on the roof together. In fact, some are so loud that they almost sound like rocks hitting the roof and not only do I fear for the caravan’s plastic roof vents but I also hope that its roof is not being dented by them. Wim tells me that this year is a year of abundance for acorns, which go in a two-year cycle, so next year there will probably be very few of them. All I hope is that this will only last for a week or so more because getting to sleep is difficult when just as you’re dropping off there’s a sound like a couple of gun shots when two of the ruddy things hit the roof!

Hmmm… I don’t know yet. My plan for today is (was?) to move my caravan from the bottom of my land back up to the top nearer to the road. The guys who laid the concrete base for my new tool store also did a bit of levelling of the ground up there with their tractor and shovel, both for the base and the adjacent area where I intend to site the caravan, and afterwards I spent an hour or so levelling it up a bit more and tidying it up by hand in readiness. However, this is the sight greeting me looking out of my caravan door this morning.

Looking towards the south.

Looking towards the west, towards the top of my land.

Looking north-ish.

So we’ve got a very thick mist but even worse, we had a very heavy dew last night and everything outside is soaking wet, including the grass, which looks as though it’s been quite heavily rained on. And wet grass and muddy ground was just what I was looking to avoid by moving my caravan up the slope while we were still enjoying ‘good’ weather. But it looks, for the moment at least, as though the weather may have thwarted those plans, although not for certain. The weather forecast is for sunshine and a high of about 19 degrees Celsius later this aftenoon, so with a bit of luck everything may have dried out by then and the move will be possible, but I’ll just have to wait and see.

On a much more optimistic note, I had a fantastic meeting with my builders, Batim of Terrasson, yesterday afternoon and came away with a hugely positive feeling for my new house project and how they are dealing with it. Yesterday we went through the technical layout, plumbing and electrical services mainly, and materials and colours. I created my house design on my computer using an architect’s software suite and although it wasn’t up to full professional standard, it was pretty good. They, however, have taken it upon themselves to go to the next level and reproduce my model in much greater detail on their own professional system.

The results are similar to my own but to a much higher standard. By doing what they’ve done, Thomas, their technical guy who I worked with yesterday, had got to intimately know my model and had developed his own uncanny understanding of what I was aiming for. Therefore he knew all of the right questions to ask knowing that I would have all of the answers he needed to button the project up, which I did. So after just under two hours I came away with two detailed technical drawings of my new house and all of its internal and external systems and he was in a position on behalf of Batim to officially get the project underway.

The general layout and floorplan.

The technical layout for the electrical and plumbing services.

The only problem I have is with the lighting. I queried the kind of fittings that they intend to use and Thomas said that they’d be using what are described as ‘DCL’. He showed me a picture on his computer and I said that I had reservations and would have to look them up on the internet. In fact I will have to reject them because (a) I said that I want to have no hanging light fittings anywhere in the house and (b) I want the lighting in the living room and corridor to be LED inset into the ceiling and the other to be flush ceiling mounted. Here’s what ‘DCL’ looks like.

It has a socket for a light bulb (5) that plugs straight into a ceiling fitting or alternatively the ceiling fitting accepts a plug into which a hanging light cord is connected which is then suspended on a ghastly hook (7), for goodness sake, exactly what I’m not looking for. I think I’ll have to have a word with Thomas.

I asked when exactly he thought that work would begin and his reply was that they are waiting on their own detailed soil study to allow them to exactly design the groundwork and footings of the house. This is because of the clay content in the ground and as it’s obviously in my interests for them to do the job right, I’ll be patient. However, he estimates that they should come onto site to begin work sometime around mid-end of November, which I’m pretty satisfied with. All-in-all, I’m very impressed with how they’re handling things so far and if their final build results are on the same level of their project planning, which I think they will be, I’ll have no hesitation in recommending Batim to anyone at any time.

Chilly start this morning but we’re expecting another sunny, warm (for the time of year) day today. The guys laying the concrete base for my new tool store had a slight setback yesterday when the chain drive of their tractor-mounted concrete mixer broke, but they got it welded and running again after about an hour or so and the job was completed by the early evening.

As expected, the main problem came from the constantly falling acorns. They couldn’t be prevented so I’ve just had to accept that there will be marks in the floor where acorns dropped on it while the concrete was still soft. I guess that won’t be a problem however, once the floor has had stuff like my ride-on mower and concrete mixer on it for a while and the building has been used as a workshop a few times. And I describe it as a ‘building’ because now that it’s finished, you can see that it will be quite large, with the footprint of a single garage.

Today I’ve got a little bit of shopping to do but after that I’ll put on my working togs and get onto hand-levelling the area for the caravan. I doubt that I’ll move the caravan up there either today or tomorrow as the meeting with my builder will be in the afternoon, but my plan will be to do the move on Saturday. And what a relief that will be. It was very noticeable this morning how much colder it was down where the caravan currently is compared to up-top where it will be. So hopefully that will make things a bit more confortable when I get out of bed each morning, because it’s certainly now beginning to get a bit nippy. And I’ll also have running water. What luxury 🙂

At last! Yesterday the guys came in and made a great start on the base for my new tool store as well as an area for me to position the caravan on when I move it back up to the top of my land. I’m really pleased because as well as knowing that the weather will be favourable while the base is being laid, from the current forecast, it’ll also be fine when I can eventually move the caravan. I’d hate to have to move it on upward sloping muddy ground and wet grass which could always be a possibilty now that the year is advancing towards autumn and winter.

Here are some shots that I took this morning before work started again.

The guys arrived about half an hour ago and as I type this they are already pouring concrete. The biggest problem today will be falling acorns. Earlier on I cleared away all of the acorns that had fallen overnight but after they arrived there was already a fair sized new crop on the black plastic membrane that we laid on the earth under the reinforcing steel. We’ll just have to hope that the ones that fall before the concrete starts to harden can be cleared off, after which it shouldn’t matter how many more fall onto it.

The good news is that as soon as the base has been laid I’ll be able to move the caravan up top, which is what I intend to do this week-end. I’ll not wait until my own electricity supply has been connected as there’s a possibility that the weather might have changed by then. In the meantime I’ll just have to live with a connection to my neighbour’s house that’s 50% longer than at present. It worked before and hopefully it shouldn’t be for too long anyway. But at last I can see some evidence of progress on the ground, and that’s where it matters 😉

Yesterday I was thinking about where exactly I should position my proposed new tool store-cum-workshop. It’s a bit tricky. It needs to be in front of the house, but not so close to it as to detract from the look of the house itself while still being close enough to be easily accessible for eg electricity. It mustn’t be so close to the road as to be obtrusive while on the other hand, it mustn’t be so close to the planned position of the house as to interfere with construction. So not an easy one.

However, I came up with what I think is the best compromise and today I marked it out. Shown below is my basic plan based on the contractor’s accurate ‘implantation’ (positioning) of the house.

The position is not exactly as shown above but it’s near enough – a bit closer to the road than shown but not by enough to worry about. The angle (rotated ant-clockwise 45° from due-north) is important, though, because I want the tool store to form the missing branch of the ‘Y’ shape on which the shape of my house is based. This will not only be more easy on the eye but will also give me the future option of extending the tool store into a larger detached double garage-cum-workshop with a design that matches the style of the house. I know from my computer-aided design work that that should be the ultimate objective.

Here are some shots of the marked-out area.

What has come as some surprise to me is just how large the area is. OK, the tool store will measure 4.1m x 3.1m and the area I’ve marked out is 4.8m x 3.6m in order to give me a border all around the store itself with a larger area of hard-standing, if you like, outside the entrance. But the differences in dimensions are not that great. I keep saying that it will only make for a ‘small’ workshop, which may be so, but I think that it will be fairly adequate for the sorts of jobs that I’ll be doing in it.

In view of the size of the job, I’m now trying to line up some help as I think that it’ll be a bit too much for me alone. I’ve just received a message that Wednesday will definitely be on and even possibly tomorrow. I replied that ‘the sooner the better’ suits me fine. I also think that the amount of levelling to accomodate the caravan up there will be much less than I originally thought, though, and that it will be possible to make up the level differences using the earth dug out for the concrete base, possibly with some left over even. I can’t wait now to see things starting to happen 🙂

I heard from ‘an independent third-party source’ yesterday that whereas SDE24 originally said that the extension of the electrical network onto my land was programmed for ‘week 47’ ie mid November, I can now actually expect a contractor to come on site to carry out the work on 18th October. This is very good news as I installed my ‘coffre de chantier’ (my own temporary electrical box and meter) some weeks ago and the road and the position of the new permanent ‘coffre’ to which my ‘coffre de chantier’ will be connected have been marked out since the first week of August.

So now I already have water on site together with the materials to lay the base for my proposed new store in which to keep my ride-on mower and other tools and which I’ll also be able to use as a workshop, albeit a small one, as it will measure 4.1m x 3.1m when completed. The weather forecast is still very favourable and hopefully it will be possible to get the base laid by the end of this coming week.

And talking about the end of this coming week, on Friday I have a meeting scheduled with my house builder. I’m hoping that this will be to finalise where I want to position services, electrical sockets and the like, to identify a date on which work will commence and for me to hand over an initial cheque to get work underway. If that is so, I really will be able to see a light getting brighter at the end of what has been quite a long tunnel.

My theory was correct and my idea worked like a charm. In my first trip to Brico Depot today I ordered four sheets of reinforcing steel (panneaux de dallage) and a big-bag of ‘mélange’ (ballast, a mixture of sand and aggregate).

I realised immediately as soon as I saw it that the concrete reinforcing steel that I had originally intended to buy was far too flimsy either for reinforcing a concrete slab or for supporting a big-bag on my trailer’s damaged floor. I ended up going for four sheets of the proper stuff, which was nearly five times more expensive than I’d expected (gulp!) The upside, though, is whereas I’d expected to order a total of eight sheets of 2m x 1m metal, I would only need six sheets of the proper steel as it comes in sheets measuring 2.4m x 1.2m.

Here are some shots of my first order of today loaded up in the Brico Depot yard and ready to be paid for and whisked off home.

I’ve also now learned that trying to manhandle a big-bag off the trailer is a foolish endeavour. The best method is to shovel its contents while it’s still on the trailer into another empty big-bag standing next to the trailer on the ground. It doesn’t take long, doesn’t take a lot of effort and you lose hardly any of the material in the process.

So that’s what I did – actually I offloaded some of the ballast into the Leroy Merlin giant big-bag that was already half full of ballast from earlier on and the remainder into the empty big-bag that I already had.

My second trip to Brico Depot was a bit more complicated. This time I needed a big-bag of sand and only two sheets of reinforcing steel. However, I needed four sheets of steel in my trailer to support the weight of the big-bag which meant that I needed to take back with me two of the sheets that I’d purchased earlier. Luckily I cleared with the security guy and the young chap who loaded the steel onto my trailer with a fork-lift that when I arrived at the check-out hut, although I’d have four sheets of steel on-board, I’d only have to pay for two of them.

Unfortunately it was almost impossible to get the lady with the scanner to understand this simple notion, although the young French guy who was next behind me in the queue obviously did because he found the whole thing very amusing. However, the penny eventually dropped and here are a couple of shots of my final trailer-load ready to be off-loaded back at Labattut at the end of the afternoon.

And finally with all of the materials unloaded and ready to get going laying the base for my long-awaited little metal tool store.

The weather forecast is very favourable and it looks as though we can expect a period of several dry, sunny days. So an ideal time, hopefully, to get the job wrapped up so I can begin to move on again.

I haven’t posted for a few days but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s been going on. Far from it – life here has been particularly hectic just lately. Let’s start with the house front.

Before the builders start work, I need to have a concrete base laid for the 4.5 x 3.5 metre metal store that I bought just after I first moved into my caravan at the beginning of July. This has been held up by not having water end electricity on my land but there was a light at the end of the tunnel when Véolia eventually provided a connection to water. But this still left the problem with electricity which would be necessary to run an electric concrete mixer.

However, as my own is stuck in storage and will be inaccessible until either my new house is built or I decide to spend a day moving the stuff blocking it out of the way and then replacing it all, which I don’t fancy doing, I began to think of alternatives, the main one being somehow acquiring a mixer with a petrol engine. As I don’t like the idea of hiring things like this, I began to troll through the ads on Le Bon Coin, the free ads web site, and came across one for sale at an attractive price because, the seller said, its carburettor needed cleaning.

I like the idea of having a petrol driven mixer that can be used virtually anywhere on my land as needed, so my thinking was along the lines of if this one actually was any good, I could sell my current electric one when the time comes at a good price as it is in excellent condition. So last Thursday (30th September) I headed south with my trailer to take a look at what was on offer.

On the way I had an extraordinary and very scary experience. About a half hour away from my destination, I was approching a right hand bend up a slight incline when all of a sudden, a small Peugeot came hurtling down the slope around the bend from the other direction. It was travelling much too fast and was totally out of control and as its rear fish-tailed out to the right, it was coming straight for me.

I braked and yanked the wheel to the right and just before our two vehicles collided the other driver yanked their wheel to their right also. Somehow their car missed mine and my trailer by millimetres and it then fish-tailed in the opposite direction at high speed, straight into the ditch on the other side of the road where it overturned having spun through 180 degrees. At that time I was the only person on the scene, and indeed the only witness to what had happened, so I jumped out to see what I could do.

There happened to be a single house on the other side of the road and an old gentleman was in the garden so before I ran to the upturned car I told him to call the ambulance and the police without delay, which is what he did. When I got to the car all was silent and when I got no reply after I’d called several times to the occupant I thought the worst. However, as I climbed up on the vehicle’s underside, which was tilted in excess of 90 degrees and leaning against a high hedge on the other side of the ditch, the passenger door began to open and the head of a young woman emerged.

I asked if she was the only occupant, she was, and if she was injured, she said that she wasn’t, so I helped her to climb out of the partially opened door, with some difficulty as it couldn’t be opened very much against the hedge. However, she made it out and I helped her down to the road just as one or two other drivers began to stop to give help. Having established that all was as well as it could be under the circumstances, I said that I had to go and left everyone to it at the scene of the accident.

By way of a conclusion, I returned from the opposite direction about an hour or so later. I saw the ‘Pompiers’ (firemen and first aiders) leaving as I approached and found that the upturned car had been recovered and the scene was being cleared up. There were two young police officers on the scene so I stopped to tell them that I had witnessed what had happened just an hour or so before. ‘Ah’, the young lady officer said, ‘So you can tell us about the lorry then’. ‘Lorry?’ I replied, ‘What lorry? There was no lorry. She was just driving much too fast and I was lucky to come out of it unscathed’.

So it appears that I might have blown the young woman driver’s account of how she had come to end up upside down in the ditch. It seems that she might have made up a story about having had to swerve to avoid a lorry and if so, I have no regrets. She was driving in a grossly irresponsible and unsafe way and it was only with good luck that I came out of it uninjured. The outcome could have been completely different and if she got a ticking off as a result for making up stories, then too bad. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.

But what about the concrete mixer? Well, it seemed to be in pretty good shape but as I couldn’t start it, although it was on offer for only 90€, I knocked the seller down to 80€ and bought it. Here are some shots that I took after I’d got it home, the next day.

The seller had been very vague about the problem that he said the mixer had and had mumbled an incomprehensible reply when I’d asked if it had a spark. However, it had compression and hadn’t made any nasty noises when I’d spun it over, so that’s why I’d decided to buy it. Now it was time to look into things further.

The first thing I found was that the spark plug was loose, so somebody had obviously been in there. When I removed it, it appeared to be brand new and unused but it had a huge gap, I think in excess of 50 or 60 thou. Briggs and Stratton say the figure should be 30 thou, so I regapped it, poured a few drops of neat fuel into the combustion chamber through the plug hole and replaced the plug finger tight. When I pulled the starter cord, the motor fired up immediately!

I’d also removed the carburettor air cleaner. The seller had said that the problem was that ‘the carburettor needed cleaning’, which sounded pretty unlikely to me. So I then poured a few drops of fuel straight into the air intake and pulled the motor over again and again the motor roared into life!

To cut a long story short, I’ve now run the mixer for several minutes and apart from a bit of normal wear-and-tear, I think that there’s nothing wrong with the motor at all. I think that the seller was, like many French men in my experience, not very mechanical and didn’t understand the need for a spark plug to be accurately and correctly gapped. There is no way that with the plug gapped as it was the motor would have even started, let alone run, and I think that he had blamed the carburettor and a blocked fuel system as being the problem.

But whatever the reason, I’m now very pleased with my purchase of a petrol driven concrete mixer for the princely sum of only 80€ and I look forward to being able to get around to using it some time in the very near future.

So with the concrete mixer ready to go, it was time for me to get the materials together for the concrete base of my little metal tool store. I need several big bags of ballast (a mixture of stone and sand) together with eight 35kg bags of cement and 8 sheets of reinforcing metal for the concrete, so went off to Brico Depot yesterday with my large twin-wheel trailer to pick up my first load. This consisted of a big-bag of stone and 6 bags of cement and as each big-bag weighs about 400kg, it wasn’t a load to be trifled with.

The first problem came at my end. The big-bag had been loaded onto my trailer by fork-lift on a small pallet, which made it very difficult to remove. A big-bag is much too heavy to lift by hand but because my trailer bed tilts, it’s usually possible to slide one off, albeit with some effort, onto the ground. Unfortunately, the pallet made this much more difficult than usual and the outcome, drat it, was that the bag fell off the trailer and toppled over onto the bare ground, spilling quite a bit of its contents.

I decided to deal with that problem later and to return to Brico Depot to pick up another big-bag and the remaining two bags of cement. Regrettably, this time I was served by a fork-lift driver who had been at the back of the queue when brains were being given out. Instead of approaching my trailer from the rear through the open tailgate, he decided to do so from the side. This meant that he couldn’t place the load in the middle of the trailer, but over to one side instead, and in doing so his machine also impacted against the side of my trailer.

When I got back I found much to my anger and dismay that in doing so he had ripped off two bolts securing the wing to the trailer body, although it will now be impossible to prove that. But there was even worse to come. By placing the load over to one side, it was on a relatively unsupported section of the trailer floor. I’d done a hasty floor repair at the time I moved out of my old house and knew already that it was on the weak side, but this load was too much for it. On the way home, the floor partially collapsed and the big-bag fell part-way through, luckily not falling the whole way as it was then supported by the two bags of cement.

When I realised what had happened I stopped and secured the bag as best I could with a length of rope and luckily made it the whole way back without further problem, except for one. As I was driving on the long stretch of road from Les Versannes to St Geyrac, luckily not too fast so as not to disturb the toppled big-bag, I saw a small lorry driving towards me in the opposite direction. Just before it reached me, a driver behind it in a small white Peugeot suddenly put his foot down and pulled out to overtake it, obviously having not seen me coming in the other direction.

For me it was a scary déjà-vu moment as the Peugeot came straight at me as had happened a few days before, and as I’d done then, I yanked my wheel over to the right. Just at the last moment, the other driver did the same and with millimetres again to spare, an accident was miraculously avoided. And how they missed colliding with the back of the small lorry I’ll never know, but for me it was my second near-miss of a head-on collision in less than a week.

Here are a couple of shots of the first big-bag that fell of the trailer and overturned, depositing some of the stone that it contained onto the bare earth.

And here are some shots of the second big-bag that collapsed the floor of my trailer.

I covered the cement up but left the big-bag problems until this morning while I slept on what I might do to resolve the problems in the easiest way. The solution that I came up with was to buy another new, empty big-bag, transfer as much of the material from the toppled bag on the trailer into it until I could remove the bag either from the top or bottom, transfer the material left in it to the new bag and then transfer the stone from the toppled bag on the ground into what would then be another empty bag. Here’s a shot of the new (very) big bag that I bought at Leroy Merlin this morning.

My plan worked a treat. I lost hardly any of the contents of the bag that fell through the trailer floor and only a couple of shovelfuls of the stone that fell onto the ground. Here are a couple of shots of the collapsed trailer floor after the big-bag had been removed.

And here are some shots of the material on the ground ready to be used to make concrete.

But all my problems are not yet over – far from it. I still need to pick up two more big-bags and 8 sheets of reinforcing steel and it would appear that my trailer is now out of service. But maybe not. I think that if I make two trips and lay four sheets of steel on what remains of the trailer floor with a big-bag on top each time, the steel itself will act as a floor and spread the load. That’s the theory anyway and only by trying it out tomorrow will I find out if it will work or not 😉