Day: August 23, 2022

Totally out of the blue this afternoon, I suddenly noticed that something was going on ‘up top’ on my house-build. When I went to investigate, I found that a young guy was going around the recently laid concrete floor slab with a large brush and a bucket of thick green sealer of some sort. For some reason he was painting a line the thickness of the walls all around the outline of the house and when he had done that he then sealed around where each plastic pipe or tube had been brought up through the surface of the slab from the ‘vide sanitaire’ below.

I don’t have the faintest idea what the purpose of this was. Clearly the green goo, which has since cured, is some kind of special sealant and could even be a type of DPC (damp proof course) that I’ve never encountered before. This is a strong possibility as I understand that the blocks that are used to construct the walls are not bonded by cement mortar in the ‘normal’ way but rather by a special adhesive that is applied (squirted) out of a gun and as this green sealant has been applied direct to the floor slab it will be beneath the first layer of blocks which is where a traditional DPC would have been.

But whatever, the builders know what they are doing and this construction method suits this environment. The house will also come with a fully insured 10 year guarantee, which will be reassuring, so I’ll be very interested to see where things go from here. I asked the young chap who didn’t turn up in a van with the builder’s name on it but rather in one of an independent contractor, whether this meant that work would be resuming next week. He didn’t know for sure but he thought that it will more likely be in early September, after the August holiday break.

On another topic, I ordered a replacement battery for 24ZN, my X-air, over the week-end, which was due to arrive today by Chronopost between 11.10 am and 12.10 pm. It hadn’t arrived by the latter time and I was standing up at the road waiting for the delivery when I saw a white van draw up 100 metres away at the entrance to the little lane that leads down to Labattut (I live a bit further on at Labattut Basse). My phone rang and when I answered it the line cut immediately.

When I tried to phone back the number would not allow incoming calls but I knew that it was my delivery because my call was answered by Chronopost. The driver made no attempt to contact me again or to look for my house but having arrived late, merely turned around and drove off. There is no way to contact Chronopost other than by chatbot or a premium rate number so I’m very, very annoyed.

I used to have this problem a lot when I was at Plazac because my house there was even more difficult to find than my present location and as the deliveries come from Brive and this is about the farthest limit of the delivery area, the drivers used any old excuse to high-tail it back to their depot as quickly as possible. If my battery gets sent back to Clermont Ferrand where it came from the merde really will hit the ventilateur, I can tell you 😐