Month: August 2023

You could not make this up. After weeks of waiting, the technician from Enedis arrived today as scheduled. I thought that he was only coming to see what had to be done but in fact he told me that he was here to connect my house to mains electricity. What a result!

But not so fast, this is France. He checked outside and then came into the house and after he’d checked the system over he said that he was unable to do the connection because the electrician had failed to connect the incoming mains cables to the house’s main switch. He said that if the electrician could come and do it he’d have the house connected in a trice but that, of course, was a forlorn hope.

I phoned Didier, the builder’s clerk of works, who tried to contact the electrician who, unsurprisingly, wasn’t taking any calls, so the technician explained the situation to Didier and left. I was fuming.

Later on shortly after I’d begun masking up the kitchen ready for painting, tomorrow if all goes well, Didier arrived out of the blue with the electrician on his phone. He went into the utility room and as instructed by the electrician pulled the two wires out that had been stuffed unconnected into the back of the cabinet. It took him ten minutes to connect them but it was too late.

I’ll now have to go through the whole rigmarole of making another appointment with Enedis for them to come back again and do the connection. How long will that take? Who knows. Two weeks? More? How could the electrician have been so thoughtless and stupid to have left the system in such a state.

It is not Enedis’s job to connect the incoming cables to the system. They expect the system to have been checked by the Consuel, as it was on 31st March and ready to be connected outside. Imagine if there was a system fault, they did the connection inside and the house caught fire. It was utter madness for the electrician to try to lay the blame on someone else, as he did.

It was not a complete disaster, however, because it appears that a ‘live’ Linky smart meter provides a minimal emergency power, how I do not know. But with the electrician still on his phone, Didier cut off the seal that Enedis expressly says must not be removed except by them and began to switch circuits on in the house. It turned out that all the lights except those in the lounge worked and we surmised that the ones in the lounge didn’t because 12 spots draw in excess of the emergency supply power.

All of the power points that I checked also worked, as well as the cooker and hot plate and also the house’s ventilation system mounted in the roof. I just connected one spot in each bedroom and the utility room to make sure that their lights worked but the lights in the dining area, corridor and bathroom which are all fully installed all worked perfectly.

I’ll contact Enedis again tomorrow but I won’t be holding my breath about getting an early date for the connection to be done. In the meantime I’ll go ahead with painting the kitchen tomorrow so I can get its lights up and then I might think about making some tentative arrangements to move in anyway as I’ve now got an inflatable double bed in bedroom one and with a working kitchen and bathroom it’d probably be more comfortable in the house than in the caravan.

I had to remove all of the wall masking and floor covering plastic before I could see the living room and corridor in a state to judge how well they had turned out after all the time and effort I’d put into them. I started removing the wall masking yesterday and finished the job today, together with all of the film covering the floor, before bundling everything up ready to be disposed of.

By the way, all of the previous shots I’ve posted have shown the green walls as being much too green and this time I’ve tried to edit the photos to make them closer to how they really are. They’re still not quite right but are a lot better.

So far so good. They’re not perfect but heck, I’m not a pro and don’t claim to be but if I’d been asked beforehand if I’d accept the way they’ve come out I’d have said that I sure would. The proof of the pudding though, was getting the LED spots all mounted in the ceiling and doing the making good of the green areas below the bottom edge of the coving which had been damaged when the masking had been removed. What do you think of the finished product?

The results are certainly good enough for me. I think the space is fresh, clean looking and modern – all the things that my old house wasn’t, which is what prompted me to embark on this project in the first place. Yes, there are still things to be done but the living room and corridor will be perfectly good enough for me to move into – after a good clean that is 🙂

Some of the shots shown above were taken with my Nikon Coolpix camera rather than my phone camera which is why the colours, especially the green are closer to the real thing. I also took a shot of the bank of sockets in the TV corner of the living room and the green in that is closer still. Unfortunately, however, the corner was in shade when I took it so it still doesn’t give the right impression of how the room looks when it’s bathed in sunlight.

At last! But first, more masking, this time downwards from the bottom of the coving. I had to start by putting up more of the masking paper but this time the other way up and as previously, before I’d even finished some at the beginning had begun to come off again. But I had no choice except to press on even though it meant keep going back to check work I’d already done to ensure that it was still positioned on the walls where it was supposed to be.

After the masking paper to give me a straight line below the coving I then had to hang sheets of film down to the floor to protect the green walls from the white finishing coat that I was about to apply to the coving and ceiling. And lucky that I did as the following shots taken after I’d finished spray painting show, this time with absolutely no hitches or hiccups.

Like the surgeon said after the operation, the dressings come off tomorrow, but after I’d cleaned the spraying machine and the other bits and pieces that I’d used, I couldn’t wait to take some of the masking down from the walls to see how the colours work together and also some of the masking from the floor in the corridor which has been down for what seems like weeks.

My phone camera makes the green a bit greener than it really is but from what I could see this evening, I’m delighted with the results. I’ve always liked fresh green and white together and the white switches and sockets also accent the combination beautifully. So although it’s taken a very long time and been a very painful process, I’ve got what I was aiming for. The proof of the pudding will be when I go back tomorrow, remove the rest of the masking and take a closer look.

There is some making good of the green line below the coving to do caused by the ‘gentle’ blue masking tape tearing the plasticky edge of the paint off when it was removed. But that won’t take much to do and I’ll be more interested in seeing how the white finish has come out on the ceiling. I can’t wait to install all the lights in it tomorrow which have been hanging down for what seems like forever.

In all honesty, my living room and hall walls and ceiling actually represent a huge painting project, especially for a single person working alone, and I doubt that I’ll ever again take on anything else like it. Having a two-colour combination also made it considerably more complicated and time consuming, but if tomorrow the results do turn out to be OK I’ll have got what I wanted and it’ll all have been worth it 🙂

When I checked how the paint spraying had gone yesterday the first thing I noticed was that although most of the walls were OK, parts of them were very patchy. This was partly due to my reluctance to overload the surfaces and get runs but was also due to occasional uneven spraying, possibly due to the jet becoming slightly blocked and delivering more paint in parts of its arc than others.

The professionals would probably have just started the machine up again and given the walls another coat but I couldn’t do that because (a) I don’t have enough paint and (b) I couldn’t face doing it over again what with all the mess and cleaning up afterwards. So I decided to just go round with a large soft paintbrush and see how it would come out.

In fact it looked OK as shown by the following shots taken after I’d removed the masking from around the coving.

Getting the masking off was actually very tricky. This was because the Olive Green paint that I’d bought from Brico-Depot isn’t actually a paint in the traditional sense. It actually dries into a very thin plastic film which is great on the exposed flat surfaces as it’s hard-wearing and washable even. However, it’s very vulnerable at its edges, in this case where it interfaced with the edge of the masking tape.

Consequently until I realised that and tried to find a way to avoid it, pulling the masking tape off in the usual way brought the edge of the film off with it in some places, sometimes in lengths of several centimetres, which will need repair work. If I’d known this I’d never have used it but it’s too late now and that horse has left the stable.

I’ll probably leave that until after I’ve painted the ceiling as that will require masking along the top of the green paint below the coving and although I won’t be using exactly identical masking tape, it’ll be similar and could result in yet more damage when it’s removed. To say that I never thought that painting the living room and corridor would be so challenging is a total understatement 🙁

I went into the house this morning all fired up ready to start painting the walls in the living room and corridor. My enthusiasm was somewhat dampened, however, when on opening the front door I found that half of the masking paper that I’d attached yesterday to protect the ceiling had fallen off and was hanging limply down.

I had no choice but to go all round and reattach the sheets that had fallen off and check that the ones that hadn’t were still attached securely enough for when I started spraying as evidently the glue on the strip that attaches the paper to the surface to be masked off was just not up to the job. I suspected as much when I’d spotted some already beginning to fall off when I left last night.

After dealing with the masking paper I then went all round and rubbed all the walls down yet again. I’d noticed that there were some areas with a texture like sandpaper, mainly high up near the coving but some also lower down, and then made sure that all the dust created was swept away from the base of the walls. Then it was time to think about painting.

I’d originally bought two 2.5 litre tubs of Olive Green satin from Brico Depot and had then increased that to three. Having seen how much paint I’d used so far I decided that this would not be enough for the area I planned to spray which I’d estimated at around 65 square metres, and as I didn’t want to have to stop half-way through, I decided to make yet another unscheduled trip to Brico Depot to pick up two more tubs.

And lucky I did, because I ended up with exactly the amount of paint that I needed for the job. I was all ready to get going as soon as I returned but yet again some of the masking paper was already in the process of detaching itself and again needed attention to get it back in place again before I could do anything else.

I planned to make the green lighter by adding some white paint to it and had already bought a tub of ‘cheapo’ white paint from Leroy Merlin on one of my previous visits there. I’d bought some new plastic buckets from Brico Depot to mix paint in and a rotary paint mixer yesterday from Brico Jem in Rouffignac so now was the time to get the job done.

Unfortunately it started badly with a large leak from around the spray gun nozzle which made the customary mess on the floor at the far end of the corridor but this was rectified, thank goodness, when I tightened the securing nut further.

Spraying in the corridor was a nightmare as it had been before because you can’t easily get far enough away from the wall. It’s also dark up there with all the doors closed and masked so it’s hard to see what you’re doing and easy to get runs which I mostly managed to avoid this time. The pressure tube also has a habit of coiling itself and then hitting against the wall that you’ve just painted which is very annoying to say the least.

Painting the walls in the living room was much easier and although the masking paper proved far from reliable I at last managed to get all of the living room and corridor walls painted. By this time it was already becoming a bit dark for photographs and in any case my main priority was tying to get everything cleaned up. This green paint proved to be particularly difficult and intractable to remove as it seems to dry with a kind of plastic film on its surface and I had to do the best that I could to make sure that my spray machine was as clean as I could get it before doing anything else.

It was hard to tell in the light available by that time how well the job had turned out. At first glance it didn’t look too bad and the small amounts of overspray that managed to find their way onto the ceiling past the bits of masking paper that gave up during spraying will not be an issue. However, I won’t be able to tell for sure until tomorrow in the daylight.

If things have turned out OK, tomorrow I’ll at last be able to remove all the masking from around the windows and doors in readiness for doing the ceiling, which will require new vertical masking all round from along the bottom edge of the coving. With a bit of luck I might even be able to get the ceiling done tomorrow which would be an enormous leap forward. There may be a few areas of wall that will need touching up but I have enough paint left over to do that with a roller and that could also be left until the ceilings are done, which is actually the bigger priority.

I had another very disturbed night last night. The very hot spell (42 degrees Celsius yesterday) mercifully came to an end as they usually do here with a thunderstorm. Trouble is it was at about 3.00 am and I found it impossible to get back to sleep again after it had died down again an hour or so later. I finally got up before 6.00 am and just managed to catch a very brief nap before starting my day before 9.00 am with a drive to Rouffignac.

I got going in the house immediately after I returned with the aim of getting another full day of masking under my belt which I knew would be the most difficult of the whole paint job. There were several reasons for this. Because it was to do with getting the walls in the living room and corridor ready for painting it involved masking up the ceiling in those areas, which meant the masking would have to be done upwards. The same will apply when I come to do the ceilings in the bedrooms but the area being masked up today is far and away the biggest in the house and whereas the bedrooms are all rectangular it also contains several angles and corners.

The job involved making a straight line below the bottom edge of the coving using wide blue masking tape and then adding masking paper to that to protect the ceiling. Here’s how things looked after applying the blue masking tape.

Here’s almost the same shot as above but with the masking paper now added.

The masking paper had to be added around the whole area which meant climbing up and down the steps and was both tiring and time-consuming.

Every time I get close up to the walls and ceiling I find a few more small bits of making-good to do and today was no exception. Most of it was to do with the damage caused when the paint spray machine’s pipe exploded but there were a few other small areas as well. With the masking now all done I should all being well be able to move onto colour spraying the walls tomorrow.

I’ll have to check all of the paper masking beforehand though, as it’s still quite warm inside the house and one or two areas were already beginning to sag a bit and detach before I left this evening. But fingers crossed, it will only have to last one spray session tomorrow 😉

What a difference! I made an early start so I could resume painting the living room while it was still cool. I opened the door and walked in at around 9.00 am and by 11.00 am I was all ready to leave with the paint machine washed and cleaned out and everything else tidied and cleared away just as I wanted. This time the machine had operated exactly as it was supposed to – comme il faut.

Compared to previously this was a completely different experience – no spilled paint all over the floor to be walked everywhere and no more wrestling with a blocked jet. This time if the jet began to stutter a bit or spray less or in a more restricted pattern it was a simple matter to just swivel it through 180 degrees in its mount, give it a momentary burst into the paint can, swivel it back and continue spraying. The old jet supplied with the machine would not do that, although it was supposed to, so was rubbish.

Here’s the room after I’d finished spraying.

And because everything wasn’t in such a mess and plastered in wet paint it was so easy to clean everything afterwards. Except myself, to a degree. I’d got everything ready and tested the machine just in my boxers with my cover-all protective suit ready on one side to put on. The spray worked so well that I decided not to take the risk of stopping but just put on my respirator and carried on.

As a result I received a goodly covering of paint spray dust all over me. It all came off when I eventually had a shower after cleaning everything else beforehand, so it was a small price to pay. I am now so much more encouraged and just hope that spraying the walls in colour, which is the next job, goes the same way as today. If so I’ll then be well on the way to being able to move in, with our without a permanent electrical connection 😐

Well yes, more or less. I had to hang around today until the new high pressure hose for my airless paint sprayer and the Einhell wet/dry vacuum cleaner arrived as I can’t do anything important inside the house until I have the former and can continue painting. The vacuum cleaner will be a bonus that I hope will help me get rid of as much as possible of the dust that’s still plaguing me and speed up the progress.

I’ll say one thing for Colis Privé who were delivering both items, they may arrive late in the day but they always arrive – 6.00 pm today – unlike the company delivering my new shower screen that I expected to arrive in 48 hours but which has been ‘out for delivery’ ever since 18th August, a week after I placed the order. The supplier said that once they’ve released it to the delivery company it’s up to them when they deliver it so I think that I’ll cancel the order tomorrow and find another supplier, pain in the backside though that will be.

I’m pleased with the new high pressure paint hose that arrived on cue. It seems more robust and of better quality than the original and already its coils have unwound to give a straight tube. That was the overriding problem with the original that I think contributed to its failure as you couldn’t stop it kinking in use. And because it was always bunched up in coils it kept touching the wall when you moved and damaging the work that you’d just done.

But today’s star was the little Einhell vacuum cleaner. It is what it is and is of a simple design that’s in no way pretentious. It has a capacity of 12 litres but that will be enough for my needs and at just over 50€ delivered from Amazon Prime, what’s not to like, although I think the price may have gone up a bit?

It has only a 1500 watt motor I think but it sounds as though it’ll do the job. My main household vacuum cleaner is in storage and is a pathetic French copy of a Dyson. It’s pretty useless and who knows, this little machine might end up being a good replacement for it.

I also had another pleasant surprise today. I still haven’t got my original house keys and have been relying on a single copy that is always either in my caravan when I’m in the car or the other way round. I took it back to where I had it cut to get a copy of the copy which can often be problematic. Sure enough, when I got the new copy home it didn’t work, so I took it back.

The key-cutter man squinted at it through his glasses, put it through the cutting machine two or three more times and then squinted at it again before making some more adjustments with a hand file. He handed it back to me and said that if it still didn’t work, if I came back with the original he’d make a copy of that for half-price. And sure enough when I got home again it didn’t.

When I took a close look at it and compared it to the original, I’m no expert but it looked to me as though there were still some small differences, so I decided to have a go at it myself. I told myself to take it easy because when it comes to keys, taking too much metal off is as bad as leaving too much on and filed it a bit before trying it three or four times. On the last try it worked! So I’m thinking that maybe I might start a second career as a locksmith – or on second thoughts, a burglar… 🙂

Vevor, the maker of my airless paint sprayer, has said they will send me out another tube to replace the one that burst. I suppose that’s all I can hope for as it’s the only thing that’s actually broken but if it’s of the same construction as the original what’s to stop the same thing happening again?

I’ve ordered another one from another supplier and I’ll have to see how that compares. It’s also half the length of the original which was difficult to control because of its length and I think that a kink in it may have contributed to its failing.

I’m also expecting a new dust/liquid vacuum cleaner to arrive today and shall use it to reduce the amount of dust in the living room and corridor before continuing painting. I never thought that painting would turn out to be so difficult or so protracted 🙁

I now understand entirely why the whole of France goes on holiday in August. It’s just too hot to work, unless you’re in a fully air-conditioned building that is. We’ve had temperatures consistently over 35 degrees Celsius for the past several days and it’s become very hot inside the house. With all of the living room and corridor windows and doors being sealed and masked up it’s actually become quite stifling in there and just moving around doing light tasks brings you out into a sweat.

And to make it worse, while I was cleaning up after the disaster the other day, I had to go into the fringe of the trees near the house in order to remove paint from tools etc using the hosepipe. As soon as I did I was descended upon by a swarm of biting insects all persistent in their intent to eat me. The same problem is now becoming almost unbearable down near the caravan.

I think that it’s been superb breeding weather for mosquitoes and in the morning and early evening especially, I’m being plagued by Tiger mosquitoes. These are quite small with black and white striped legs and bodies. If you feel and see one biting you, you can often slap it and kill it. But usually blood (yours) then smears your arm or leg meaning it was too late and soon you come up in a large, itchy welt.

From what I read they are prolific breeders in any water that’s around – puddles, buckets, watering cans etc, even just small amounts. It also appears almost impossible to get rid of them once they’ve moved onto your patch, which is not very encouraging to say the least, and it’s another reason why I’m desperate to get out of the caravan.

Every day, by mid-afternoon, the caravan has become sweltering inside and it stays that way for almost the whole night even when it has cooled down outside. We’ve got temperatures in the 40s through to Thursday this week after which it is forecast to cool down so I have no choice but to grin and bear it for a few more days yet.

I went to bed quite early last night, slept badly and woke early so decided to make an early start. I was in the house by 8.00 am and the first thing I did was replace the area of masking film on the floor that I had to remove when the pipe of the high pressure paint sprayer burst.

Having done that I went around the walls and ceiling with a fine tooth comb and found areas of paint splashes that I’d originally missed when the disaster first happened. I then rubbed them all down with a new sheet of sandpaper so they’re now ready for painting again when the new high pressure tube arrives tomorrow.

It made quite a lot more dust and I picked up as much as I could with the dustpan and brush but would like to remove even more if I can. I’m expecting a new dust/liquid vacuum cleaner to arrive tomorrow so before I start painting again I’m going to run all round with that.

I might even quickly give all of the walls (and ceiling if necessary) another rub down as many areas have a feel like sandpaper which I can only think has come from dust blowing up into the spray during painting. But that will have to wait until early tomorrow morning when it’s cooler as it’s much, much too hot to do it now.

I bought my new Vevor high pressure airless spray machine to paint the interior of my new house. After assembling it with difficulty according to the cursory and inadequate instructions that came with it (I had to bend the circlip that secures the main paint pick-up tube to the machine to make it fit) I managed to undercoat the kitchen without too many problems. Frustratingly I did find though, that the volume emitted by the jet was very variable from insufficient to way too much causing runs.

I then started on my living room a few days ago which is very large and a prime candidate for such a machine but have had nothing but problems with it. The first time I switched the machine on after purchasing it it would not generate any pressure, needing to be switched off and on several times and this has continued to keep happening.

But worse still, while painting my living room I eventually had to give up because the jet kept continually blocking needing the pistol and jet to be disassembled and cleaned. Inevitably, as this meant venting and opening up the high pressure line, some paint found its way out meaning that not only was paint wasted every time but a terrible mess eventually resulted due to the leakage.

As it was impossible to continue, let alone achieve results that were anywhere near acceptable I ordered several new jets and threw away the one that Vevor supplied with the machine. After testing one of the new ones for several minutes with water as I was sick of the mess made by the old one and keeping losing so much paint I tried to resume painting my living room today.

Once again when I switched the machine on it did not develop any pressure. When it eventually did after switching it off and on several times and constantly raising and lowering the pressure setting, before I could start spraying there was a muffled ‘Whumph’ behind me and when I looked round I saw that the main paint delivery tube supplied by Vevor connecting the machine to the gun had exploded sending paint all over the ceiling and walls of my living room.

Before I could do anything about the huge pool of paint forming on my living room floor from the hole in the tube, first I had to dash round with steps and a paint brush to try to brush out the considerable number of paint droplets now on the walls and ceiling. Only after having done that could I try to clean up the huge mess on the floor.

Luckily it turned out that my floor masking was very effective. I cut out and lifted the area of film covered by the paint and miraculously none had gone through onto the tiles. I was even able to return much of the paint to the can and the bigger problem was walking around on the splatters of wet paint on the floor and transferring foot marks to areas which up to then had not been affected.

I find it incredible that the tube was apparently not rated to take the pressure generated by the machine (3500 psi) with a safety margin and that it should have failed so early on anyway. I can only surmise that the jet blocking problem was due to the pipe breaking down internally and constantly sending small pieces of debris down the line as it disintegrated. I also had problems getting the joints of the extension wand and pistol gun to stop leaking and my confidence in this machine is now extremely low.

As I must try to continue getting my house ready to move into I’ve had no choice but to order another tube which will be delivered on Tuesday when I will try to carry on. What worries me, however, is that since I’ve owned it the machine has succeeded in doing much more harm than good and that it might continue doing so.

Over many years I have purchased many different types of tools for many purposes but this Vevor airless sprayer is definitely the worst tool that I have ever been unfortunate enough to buy. I notified Vevor of the issues yesterday and I’m now waiting see what the outcome of this will be but I’ll be surprised if I’m not disappointed.

Welcome to the dystopian world of dealing with French bureaucracy. On Thursday August 17th I was on the phone the whole morning with EDF trying to sort out my house’s electrical connection problems. Initially I got Jerome in Poitiers. Jerome is not someone who likes challenges or dealing with anything out of the normal run of things that will disturb his easy routine. Jerome is both incompetent and lazy.

As such he’s a typical EDF customer service employee who will go far in an organisation where the most simple tasks are either impossible, done incorrectly or not done at all, mistakes are the order of the day and nobody is ever held accountable because there’s no way of making contact with the organisation except through them. It’s a carefully thought-through setup.

As I mentioned in previous posts, having had a temporary connection via EDF for over two years, I now merely need to convert that to a permanent one. You’d think that would be the simplest thing in the world to do, but no, in France it’s not. If it was done just with the click of a mouse button asking for an engineer to attend and switch the connection over (10 minutes) and making the necessary changes to the charging tariff, half the people in EDF and Enedis, it’s sister company and partner in crime, would be put out of work and the French state could never tolerate that.

So a completely new project and ‘dossier’ has to be created with all that that entails including the massive potential for cock-ups, which are inevitable. First there was the inevitable confusion over my address. When the temporary connection was set up there was no house number because there was no house so it was described as ‘the place know as…’.

Now I’d have thought that EDF would have been pretty used to that – it must be so for every new-build house that they connect – but the concept was a difficult one for EDF client services to grasp and it was challenging for them to set up a NEW account (yes, a new dossier means a new account even though the client ie me, and the supply address are the same as for the existing connection) with a minor change in the address details.

Just for information, although I’ve only had my old address at Plazac and my new address at Fleurac, I was told that at the time of my conversation with Jerome there were 4 ‘dossiers’ in my name – only God and EDF know why – and unbeknown to me, things were going to get worse.

So by now we were about 20 minutes in and we’d managed to resolve the address issue but that still left what for some reason has turned out to be the huge stumbling block of what’s called the PDL or ‘Point de Livraison’. Nobody has bothered to explain but I’ve found out myself that this is a unique code that’s applied to the meter that records the usage of electricity at the location, so quite simple really.

The meter in my temporary connection box has a PDL and it’s shown on every bill that I receive. Before they could go ahead and instruct Enedis to make the connection to my new house they needed to know the new PDL. Naturally I had no clue what they they were talking about, just as a lay French person wouldn’t either, and nobody was either willing, or more likely able, to tell me where to find it.

Way back on 1st August I had a telephone ‘rendez-vous’ with an ‘engineer’ from Enedis in order to progress my connection. He helpfully told me that I was already connected and that was it, before rudely ending the conversation without making any effort to deal with the issues that clearly existed. He was evidently another lazy, incompetent person who didn’t give a damn about the customers of the organisation for which he worked.

Almost two weeks prior to my conversation with EDF’s Jerome I’d also had a conversation with another EDF customer service agent who’d set me up with a new ‘permanent’ account. I’d then received an email from yet another EDF tosser called ‘Mallory’ who assured me of their fullest attention in getting my connection done but then proved incapable, apparently, of replying to emails.

Both of these parties were, however, useless and merely compounded the problems. When we’d hit the PDL stumbling block it appears that they’d used, or made up, a PDL to create the ‘new’ permananent contract. Sadly, the system, as it is, doesn’t work like that which I know but apparently they do not. When I emailed a helpful contact that I’d made in Enedis she told me that the PDL being used by EDF was for another temporary connection which, of course, is the last thing that I need and that only the real PDL would be acceptable to progress the connection.

At this point I decided to do my own research and it didn’t take long to establish that although it’s not live, the PDL can be obtained in seconds from the new Linky smart meter that’s installed in my house. Apparently the EDF buffoons either aren’t aware of this or can’t be bothered to share such information with you as with it the situation could have been well on the way to being resolved weeks ago.

I checked the Linky PDL with Enedis and my contact confirmed that it was correct, referred to an existing Enedis connection project which was ready to go with all fees paid and could be connected on the same day. I passed this information on to ‘Mallory’ in EDF by email but it apparently was totally ignored.

I found this out when I was in contact with Jerome who listened while I explained the whole saga for the umpteenth time, assured me that he understood what the problem was and after sorting out the address issue, said that he’d fix it. He said that all he’d need to do was update the PDL on my new contract and that the line would go quiet while he did so.

It did do alright, because after about five minutes the line went dead. This has happened to me so many times I now know what it means. Jerome found that he’d have to do some work for a change so just put the phone down.

I didn’t call back immediately but left it for a few minutes before redialling the EDF customer service number. I said that I’d been talking to Jerome but the young lady on the other end of the line said she didn’t know who that was and that she’d deal with my problem. And this young lady was like a shining star compared to her colleagues.

The first thing we established was that Jerome had done absolutely nothing, so she made the necessary amendments to my contract address and then went on to deal with the PDL problem. It didn’t take her long to find that the system wouldn’t allow her to do so (what happens if your meter breaks down?) and the quickest way to deal with it was to create yet another new contract for me.

There was an interesting result from doing this. The temporary connection I’ve had for 2 years is of 12kVA power (12 kilowatts) and when the contract for my new permanent connection was originally set up it was found that 9kVA would be sufficient making it a bit cheaper. This young lady went through the whole questionnaire yet again and said that 6kVA should do it, making it cheaper still and that if later this was found to be too low, it could be increased. See what I mean compared to Jerome?

She then said that she’d contact Enedis while I waited in order to expedite the connection and after several minutes she came back with the bad news that put the cherry on the top of the cake of this whole farce.

When she’d cross-checked the address of the connection with Enedis she found that there was a discrepancy that she came back to me to ask about. It turns out that yes, there is a live Enedis project with the correct PDL but not at my address. Despite having connected up my ‘branchement provisoire’ it’s shown as being at the address of a neighbour down the road who has been connected for many years and is definitely in no need of another.

Oh no, you think, just another cock-up. Yes it is, but this one has ramifications. It means that an Enedis engineer will have to come on site to make an ‘inspection’ and the earliest that one can do this is 31st August – another two weeks away. Then Enedis will have to arrange for the connection to be made and I’ll be surprised if this happens before the end of September.

And this is after I applied for it to be done on 11th July. This can’t be normal surely, you ask. Yes, a similar thing happened when I ordered my current temporary connection and also when I ordered my water connection from Veolia. So it is normal – and my French friends also agree.

Only half a day today (Wednesday) because having done all of the making good I want to leave it to cure before continuing. I’m very happy with the way it turned out – and for me to be happy it means it’s perfect, or close to!

I also did a few more bits of making good that I wouldn’t have done if the ‘disaster’ hadn’t happened so in a way it was a blessing in disguise. That’s how I’m going to look at it, anyway 🙂

And no pictures with this post – after all that, there’s nothing to see!

We had a huge thunderstorm two nights ago and one massive thunderclap seemed to be directly overhead and shook the whole caravan. We had another last night, so that’s two nights in a row of disturbed sleep, not to mention the nights when I’ve had difficulty sleeping due to the heat.

This morning I found that yet again the roof of one of the ‘tonnelles’ (gazebos) was damaged by the high winds and torrential rain so whereas I thought all of my problems in that area were over following the end of the winter it appears that things are just as bad as before, and possibly even worse, as the end of the project approaches.

So one way and another what with these things and the challenges I’m facing getting the inside of the house ready for occupation, I think I’m becoming tired and stressed both physically and mentally. As I’m becoming aware of the fact that nobody can keep working non-stop day in, day out as I’ve been trying to, I therefore took it easy yesterday and did nothing more for the rest of the day after collecting three more 12 litre cans of sealer-undercoat from Leroy Merlin.

That was appropriate anyway as yesterday was a public holiday here in France and it was unfortunate that my day of rest was ruined by last night’s storm. As it was, I didn’t re-wake until after 9.00 am having gone to bed at about 11.30 pm last night, so I must have derived some benefit from it.

The good news is that I’ve checked the paintwork in the lounge and corridor again this morning and it’ll be a piece of cake to make good the problem areas. Afterwards it’ll be impossible to see that they were ever there and work will be able to resume, possibly later today but more likely tomorrow, after the making-good has had time to cure and my spirit has also had time to recover a little bit more.

Then it’ll be ‘onwards and upwards’ once again. You mustn’t allow events to get you down when the rewards of renewed effort will be so great ?

After all the work that I did prepping the living room and corridor for painting it was heart-breaking this morning to see the results of yesterday’s spray painting debacle. Some of the problems were of my own making. For example, as shown in some of the following images, spraying this kind of paint is not like spraying a car when the paint flashes surface dry very quickly and can be over-sprayed with a second coat soon after the first. This kind of paint stays wet for a long time – hours I’ve found on surfaces like the coving – and if you go back over it too soon it develops huge runs.

But the overriding problem was that the spray jet kept repeatedly blocking giving rise to two problems. Firstly, while it was in the process of blocking it created an uneven spray pattern making it impossible to get an even finish on the surface being painted. Secondly, every time the jet was removed for cleaning, which on many occasions took many attempts over several minutes, the machines delivery tube was wide open allowing paint to emerge. Every time it did so some found its way onto the floor until eventually I was almost paddling around in the stuff.

The machine blocked up so many times that eventually I think I began to lose control of the situation a bit, especially when the bucket of painty water was knocked over onto the floor. I was trying to get as much done as I could before both the paint and the light ran out and some of the run issues were due, I think, to there not being enough light for me to clearly see what was going on.

Here are some shots of the depressing sights that greeted me this morning starting with the view as I entered through the front door.

A closer look at the floor area around the paint cans. The heap of kitchen roll on the left was used to mop up the water from the overturned bucket and as I had to continue spraying for as long as I could while the jet was clear, there wasn’t enough time to clear it all up at the time.

Looking towards the corridor and the kitchen door. I eventually had to totally remove the masking around the kitchen door due to the need to constantly get to the sink during my many attempts to unblock the spray jet.

Looking back at the area around the paint cans. How could anyone work effectively in a mess like this? It was a truly awful experience.

Every time the jet needed unblocking the machine had to be de-pressurised. There’s a small diameter flexible plastic tube that allows the paint released to be returned to the can but this can happen quite violently. I didn’t notice at the time that on at least one occasion some huge splatters went onto a wall. They can’t be left like it and will have to be removed and the wall made good again later on.

But the worst things were the runs in several places at the base of the coving along the tops of the walls. This was due to paint overloading because unlike on the plaster wall surfaces, the paint remains wet on the non-absorbent polystyrene surface of the coving for much, much longer and cannot be over-sprayed once it has been given a coat of paint. This morning the paint on it was still as wet as though it had only just been painted.

I’ve had to remove all of these runs and will have to do my best to make the walls good again once the paint has dried, but I doubt that it’ll ever look any good. The problem was compounded at the corners because having already sprayed the ceiling at those points I then went back and sprayed the corners again from both directions, so with hindsight it’s not surprising that the paint build-up was so great as to cause the runs.

So a big part of the problem was my own lack of experience of the technology and in future I’ll hopefully be further along the learning curve and be able to avoid the runs problem, for example. But the main issue was jet blocking and it was that that set the series of disasters in motion. I don’t know whether the pros start with a new, clean jet on every paint job but I’ve ordered six more new ones that will be delivered on Thursday.

I’ll have to leave things be for a day or so anyway to allow the paint to dry and then I’ll have to make things good as best I can before re-sealing the affected areas. My guess is that yesterday’s experience has put me back several days but I’ve no choice but to bite the bullet and carry on 😕

I got going with the painting today. I’d like to say that everything went smoothly and the results were perfect, but I can’t because the reality was absolutely the reverse.

Everything that could go wrong did and it all started when shortly after starting the jet of the high pressure spray gun got blocked. This presents a tricky problem with the machine being full of paint at 3500 psi that needs to be vented off.

The jet has to be removed and this allows paint to drain out of the delivery pipe. Pretty soon some found its way onto the floor. It took ages to clear the jet by which time there was a pool of paint on the floor as the pistol that I’d propped up vertically had decided to fall over.

Things went rapidly downhill from there because the jet kept blocking up every few minutes and while it was doing so the gun kept spraying unevenly which made it impossible to get an even finish over the surfaces being painted. Then the gun began to leak from the nozzle joint and I only realised it after I found that my hand was covered in paint and it was running down my arm. But even worse was to come.

I’d kept a bucket of water handy in order to try to flush the system out and it had already become more like very thin paint than water. One time when I’d been trying to clear the jet from yet another blockage I’d propped the gun up against it and while I wasn’t looking it was just heavy enough to knock the bucket over sending the water it contained all over the floor.

I can’t go on as it’s too painful to recount the sequence of disasters that just kept coming. I had to remove the masking from two doors that I’d painstakingly put in place in order to get at tools that I needed to dismantle the spray handset and to the sink in the kitchen to try to clean the jet and I know that with paint on the soles of my shoes I walked some into the rooms in question.

I ended up emptying two 12 litre cans of sealer-undercoat and although the ceilings had been covered, unevenly, there were still large patches of wall where coverage was too thin as a result of the jet beginning to block up while still spraying at reduced volume. And although the corridor walls had been sprayed, complete with the odd run when the jet suddenly cleared itself and started working properly, half of the walls in the living room still hadn’t been painted.

It was pushing dark by the time I’d finished as cleaning everything up, or trying to, was a complete nightmare. This included myself and I ended up having a shower outside under the hosepipe because of the amount of paint that I had to remove from my face, arms, legs and body. I dread seeing what state the living room is in tomorrow 🙁

I got myself across fairly early this morning to Leroy Merlin to pick up another 12 litre can of sealer-undercoat plus three more rolls of 3M blue masking tape. I think the latter must be a big money-spinner for 3M because they’re far from cheap and can’t cost a lot to make. When I returned I finished my breakfast and than got going continuing masking ready for painting.

Today I was aiming to finish masking all of the doors and the whole of the floor in the living room and corridor. It was only as I was doing it that it became clear just how monumental a task this was. Because I’ll be spraying down to what we Brits call ‘skirting board’ level ie the tile plinths that go all around the walls, I have to be certain to prevent any paint blow-by onto the tiles. This is doubly important because the masking applied now will be used for both the undercoat and the coloured top coat later on so it must be securely applied with a good seal all round.

It was a back-breaking task, literally because my back was so painful every time I stood up from crouching down and working at floor level that I eventually had to call it a day in the early evening before I’d managed to complete the whole job. There’s just a small area of floor left where the living room joins the corridor and I still haven’t masked off the main front door yet as that will be the last thing I do before I start painting.

I did remove all of the protection from the front door though that prevented it being damaged while all the building work was going on and I’ve also not finally sealed the bathroom and kitchen doors as I’ll need access to those rooms right up to the time I start spraying.

The first sheet of floor-covering film that went down.

The main area of the living room ready for spraying with the floor in that section totally masked off.

Looking towards the small area of floor still left to do.

The underfloor heating manifold masked up. I’ll have to decide what to do about the wall area behind the pipes later, as I will also with the wall behind the mass of pipes in the ‘cellier’ (utility room).

The corridor ready for spraying with its floor all masked up.

I’m very confident that the living room and corridor ceiling and floors will all have a coat of sealer-undercoat by tomorrow. The ceiling and coving will not be top-coated though, as it’ll be necessary to top-coat the walls first, which will mean masking the ceilings off.

All the advice is that when spraying finishing coats of different colours, it’s easiest to paint and mask off the vertical wall surfaces and then paint the ceiling rather than the other way round and after thinking about it, that’s the way I’m going to do it 😉

As I type this I’m being eaten alive by tiny black mosquitoes as I am every evening at about this time. I think it’s because the caravan is under the trees at the bottom of my land and may also be because I leave a watering can with water close by. That’s for the little dog from Chateau Malbec who comes to visit me most days and loves to drink out of it and I’d hate to upset her by leaving it empty.

But whatever the reason it’s another big incentive for me to move out of the caravan and into the house as soon as possible 😕

I made good progress today despite creating a whole lot more dust that I had to get rid of yet again. I’d noticed clumps of dust that had remained on the walls after rubbing the plaster down and wondered if the ceiling was the same. Of course it was! I couldn’t think about spraying knowing it was there so I had to go right around the living room and corridor walls and ceiling with a large broom removing it.

Then I had to wipe all the surfaces that would have masking tape applied to them with a damp sponge and only then could I continue masking things up that needed it. After applying masking tape all around the door frames I could start masking the doors up. This actually is the easy bit (if any masking could be described as easy) because I have a special 3M applicator that lets you apply film from a roller with its top edge stuck onto masking tape. You run this across the top of a door sticking it as you go and cut it to length with an inbuilt blade.

The film that the masking tape is attached to is in the form of a drop-down sheet so all you then then have to do once the film drops down and covers the door is apply tape to its edges. Regrettably the film is only 1.8 metres long so I’ll have to fill up the bottoms of the doors when I mask up the floor. I did all of the doors that I wanted to but left the bedroom and bathroom doors with the film left high so I can get in and out of them.

I intend to buy another 12 litres of sealer-undercoat tomorrow together with more rolls of masking tape that I’m using masses of and am about to run out of. And then, who knows, if everything runs smoothly I might get the living rooms and corridor walls and ceiling undercoated. If I can, that would be a HUGE leap forward 😀

But tonight is party night! After finishing this I’m off to Madeleine and Victor’s for a knees-up! Well, a discreet evening of convivial company anyway 😉

There is no way that I’ll be able to get as much painting done by the end of this week-end as I first thought. In fact I think I’ll be lucky to get any done at all, actually. There’s much, much more prepping still to be done than I ever imagined. It’s well-known that spraying is quick and easy – once you start spraying – but getting there is what takes all the time and effort. And so it’s proving.

The first thing that I found this morning was that somehow I’d missed rubbing down the plaster on some quite large lower wall areas. Dust is the bane of prepping for spraying because it prevents masking tape sticking to surfaces and I’d already spent a considerable amount of time getting rid of as much in the house as I could. Now I had to create a whole lot more that would need removing all over again.

I already knew that the window and door frames were left in a messy state by the installers with lots of dried silicone around their edges. However when I checked more closely I found that their tops also had lots of dried plaster on them, so not only did I have to carefully remove the silicone, which took some time, but I also had to remove the plaster as well that created even more dust.

I then had to go all round and remove the over-smears of plaster left on all the door frames and then give them all a thorough wipe to ensure that when I get onto masking the doors the masking tape will stick on them too. It was then time for the first actual masking job, namely running tape all around the tiled plinth to which masking film will eventually be attached and by this time the clock was ticking into the early evening.

I decided that come hell or high water I’d mask up all the electrical sockets and switches today and that’s how I finally left things.

The work today was back-breaking needing me first to be working at very low level and then on the top of a set of steps. It made me appreciate once again just how big an area the walls and ceiling in the corridor are and I’m wondering if before I start spraying I might need to buy yet another large can (12 litres) of sealing undercoat so when I do start I’ll be able to finish without being interrupted.

I know that I applied far to much to the walls and ceiling in the kitchen – probably twice as much as was necessary – but with masking film draped all round it’ll be quite a complex job doing the living room and corridor and I’d like to have a straight run at it.

Despite being dog-tired I had an awful night’s sleep last night, the reason being that it was so hot in the caravan. When it’s that hot it makes all your insect bites itch despite being treated with hydrocortisone cream, even the old ones from days before, and with the caravan being so close to the trees and my grass not being cut, I’ve got plenty on my legs, around the knee area especially.

So I started a bit later this morning but despite that, although I’d like to have done more, I still managed to achieve my main aim for today, which was to finish the ceilings in the bathroom and separate toilet. This meant that bar the woodwork in both rooms and the bathroom shower screen, which should arrive any day now, both rooms would be effectively finished.

First the bathroom.

Now the little separate toilet.

I love both rooms and am so happy to at last see some spots in place in the ceilings. Some needed a bit of enlargement of the holes that the electrician drilled but now I know what to expect it’s no big deal if I have to do the same for more of them when the time comes.

Whereas all of the others in the house are all white, the pair of spots in the little toilet have chrome bezels. I didn’t particularly want that, in fact I’d have preferred them all to be white, but when I found I’d under-counted and had to order more, the white ones were not available.

So a good result for the day which means that I can go straight onto masking up the living room and corridor ready for undercoat spraying of the walls and ceiling in those areas. When I’ve done that I’ll be able to top coat the living room and corridor ceiling and the kitchen ceiling and kitchen walls that will be painted rather than tiled. That will be a huge leap forward and with a fair wind, I reckon I might get there by the end of the week-end 😉

It was scorching hot here today, not that I experienced much of it. I had a busy schedule.

7.30am – rubbish (Contiboard and worktop offcuts plus some cardboard) to ‘déchetterie’ in Rouffignac
8.00am – quick shop in Carrefour (first customer through door) on the way back
8.30am – finish breakfast (two cups of tea)
8.45am – get cracking on preparing for painting

I especially wanted to get the ceilings (and coving) in both the bathroom and separate toilet sealed and undercoated today and I intended to use a roller on each as the areas involved couldn’t justify firing up the pressure sprayer. My first task was masking both rooms up but if I’d intended to use the sprayer the masking would have had to be far more thorough.

As it was I intended to cover the floors and fittings in both rooms so I didn’t have to worry about paint splashes and although it wasn’t strictly necessary as its walls remained uncovered, I also masked the window in the bathroom. Both rooms had to have their ceilings rubbed down and the coverings also meant that I didn’t have to worry about the dust that would be created.

It was a long day and here are some shots of the bathroom after I’d finished.

And now the separate toilet. The room is so small that merely hanging sheets of plastic film around the walls covered the fittings and created a tent-like space in which to work.

The WC was hardly visible through the plastic film, as was also the small hand-basin and the sheet at that end also completely covered the window.

So, as I say, it was another long tiring day. The upside is that with the masking and covers in place, I’ll be able to continue straight on with top coat painting tomorrow and then I’ll be able for the first time to at last get some lighting fixed permanently in the ceiling (four spots in the bathroom, two in the toilet). That small step will in itself be a significant leap forward 😀

I want to have painted a few walls and ceilings by the end of this week so I need to mask up the rooms and areas involved. To do so I need to clear them first by removing all of my tools, sundry materials that are laying around and rubbish and then cleaning right through to remove the huge amount of dust that was generated when I was installing the kitchen.

But first I wanted to remove another job from my ‘to-do’ list, namely replacing the clips that hold back the large shutters on the three sets of double doors that have been kicking around on the floor in one of the bedrooms since I removed them several weeks ago. I told the shutter fitters to fit them below the shutters but after several locals told me that this was incorrect and they should be on the edges, I removed them in order to fit them correctly myself.

And I think it was a good move because I don’t think that the fitters would have taken the trouble and made the adjustments that were necessary to make them work properly that I did. Fitting the clips for the right-hand shutters was very straightforward. It was just a matter of taking the measurements, drilling the walls in the right places and screwing them in.

But it was not so for the left-hand shutters. Firstly there’s a vertical metal locking bar that extends for the full height of each of the doors that interferes with the operation of the clips and secondly there’s a weather-board on the edge of each door to close the gap between the left and right-hand shutters when closed which makes the edge of the left-hand shutter twice as thick as that of the right-hand one.

So the gap between the piece of metal that flips over to secure the shutter and the wall had to be carefully adjusted and it also had to be beaten flat and oriented to pass behind the vertical locking bar. This took time and effort that I don’t think would have been forthcoming from the original fitters.

Here’s the final result which I’m now very happy with.

Then it was on to clearing the house of tools, rubbish and sundry materials. The first thing that I decided to do was fit all of the interior doors that have been stored on their edges taking up space in bedroom two. This will actually assist when I come to masking rooms up as it’s easier to mask up a doorway with a closed door using plastic film than it is an open doorway as with the latter, the movement of air constantly disrupts the film when you least want it to move. Here’s the first view of the kitchen door.

All of the doors are now in place with their handles temporarily fitted so they can be opened and closed. Surprisingly, even though each door was replaced in the frame from which it came, several were binding and one, the bathroom door, wouldn’t close at all. I’m hoping that this is because the doors and the frames have been kept in different conditions of temperature and humidity in different parts of the house and that matters might rectify themselves if left alone. If not, too bad, I’ll have to make a few adjustments, which won’t be the end of the world.

To finish off I swept right through the whole house and removed as much of the dust as I could. Before I mask up, let alone start painting, I’ll have to do a more thorough job as when I painted the kitchen I found that dust on surfaces prevented the masking tape from sticking allowing some small blow-pasts of paint. That’s for tomorrow though 😉

And (almost) nothing achieved. I say ‘almost’ because I did manage to order a shower screen for my ‘douche italienne’ but even that wasn’t straightforward. The model that I went for is on sale on Mano-Mano, one of those home-grown French web sites that try to emulate Amazon by acting as a shop window for lots of sellers and manufacturers.

I need a 110 cm wide screen to go onto a 110 cm square floor area so the bar that secures its top to the wall needs to be the same length. The trouble was the model I wanted only comes with a 90 cm bar and when I asked if that could be swapped for a 110cm one I was told that it couldn’t.

So I looked around and even went onto the seller’s own web site where the model on sale on Mano-Mano was more expensive, so expensive in fact that it was worth buying it through Mano Mano and sourcing an additional bar from a different supplier. Go figure – you couldn’t make it up.

Progress on getting my house connected to electricity was, however, painfully absent. The barriers put in the way of doing so are considerable and almost impenetrable for the average French person, let alone a non-francophone foreigner like me.

Bear in mind that I made the initial request for connection on 11th July and progress to date has been zero. At the end of last week I’d made a desperate request to EDF to just get the house connected, as you would do in the UK, when it would be connected in a jiffy.

But not so in France. Here they are only concerned about their labyrinthine system and the needs of the customer take a very distant second place.

You’d think that as I’ve had a ‘temporary’ connection for about 2 years (called a ‘branchement provisoire’) that it would be the easiest thing in the world to say, ‘OK, the house is finished, now just make it permanent and make any changes to the tariff that are necessary’. Er, no.

I’ve been told that the two ‘systems’ are quite different (eh? why?) and that not only must you make a completely separate application but you also end up with a new contract and a new customer reference. And that, of course (hands being figuratively rubbed together on the other end of the telephone line) means, sir, that yet another new ‘dossier’ has to be created with all that that entails for information, involvement of engineers and inspectors, creation of new references and lord only knows what.

And that’s when you begin to hit brick walls because nobody tells you exactly what the information comprises and where to find it and, heavens above, there’s no way that Enedis who’s in charge of the network and responsible for actually connecting the wires, can possibly talk directly to EDF who’s in charge of accounts and billing. Sir, we are two separate companies!

So having made my plaintive plea to them at the end of the last week I was surprised this morning just as I was about to leave the caravan by a call from EDF. Despite my request for the caller to speak slowly and clearly, I gathered from their rapidly accelerating French that this was to do, unsurprisingly, with connecting my house.

Beyond that I understood about half, or a bit more, of the conversation and had to join the dots for the rest. I had to re-provide lots of information that I’ve already provided several times previously – address and floor area of the house, electrical equipment being used, number of people living there and so on.

At the end of it I was no wiser than I had been previously about what was then going to happen, if the house was going to be connected, if so when, if I had to do anything else… you know, crucial stuff like that. However, a stumbling block that had arisen just previously concerning a reference called a ‘PDL’ reared its head yet again and seemed to be what was blocking the system and bringing it to a halt.

Nobody had bothered to explain what a ‘PDL’ is. It’s short for ‘Pointe de Livraison’ and it’s a code found on your bills that is specific to the ‘point of delivery’ ie the electricity meter. I’d been asked several times what the new PDL was – how the heck was I supposed to know! I’m the ruddy customer, not an electrical engineer.

Incidentally, on the EDF (or is it Enedis, I’m losing the will to live) web site it asks, ‘Want to connect your new house? No problem! Just choose your supplier (in my case EDF), tell them and they’ll do the rest’. What a travesty of the truth!

But ‘Zut! Alors!’ A few minutes after my conversation with the man from EDF with whom our conversation was terminated rather brusquely, an email came through welcoming me as a new (hollow laugh, new after 11 years) customer and setting out details of my new contract. And among them was a new PDL.

I’d already found out that the PDL for my ‘branchement provisoire’ could not be re-used as it was for a temporary connection which is different, as I explained above, to a permanent one. I thought the PDL on the new contract was manna from heaven and the missing piece of the jigsaw that would at last get me connected.

So as soon as I spotted it I phoned the number for Enedis that the man from EDF had given to me earlier. But would you believe it (yes I know, I wasn’t really surprised either) my hopes were then soundly dashed. The young lady on the other end told me that the PDL that I’d just provided was for a ‘branchement provisoire’ – a temporary connection – and was no use to her. I had to give her the proper new PDL. But where should I get it from? My builder? The electrician who installed the system? Ah, that was my problem.

There was no mention of the PDL on the official inspector’s paperwork (that would be much too sensible) so after going around in circles for another 10 or 15 minutes I got sick of it, told the young lady that the system is crazy, too painfully complex and that I’d had enough. She said that that was a shame but I hung up anyway.

But being me I didn’t let it stop there. After a strong cup of tea I did a bit more research on the internet and to my complete surprise I uncovered the fact that if you have a Linky it’s a piece of cake to get the PDL off it. If you page through its display it comes up with a ‘Numéro de PRM’ and this, my friends, is the same as the PDL (which is why the French give it a different name).

I’ve told all of the people that I’ve been in contact with from both Enedis and EDF that the new system has been installed in my house together with a Linky. Why has nobody told me that I could get the PDL reference that they’ve all asked for from it in seconds? Are they all gormless, ignorant or just lazy? I suspect all of the above.

A few weeks ago I was in contact with another young lady from Enedis who had given me some very helpful advice. I decided to see if she could help and sent her an email telling her about my problems, providing all of the contract information that I had and giving her the PDL that I’d got minutes before from my Linky.

She came up trumps minutes later telling me that this was linked to an existing Enedis project, that all the work had been done, the fee had been paid and all that was necessary was for it to be put into service. For that I just had to complete a form F100 from EDF. At last! What a star!

I can’t find any link taking me to the F100 but I believe that the information requested by the EDF man from the first phone call this morning was relevant to it. In the hope that the blockages have been removed I sent a message to EDF client service (an oxymoron if ever there was one) with the new contract references and included the new PRM/PDL. Your guess is as good as mine, however, as to whether my house will be connected this time next week 😕

I’ve at last got the bathroom washbasin installed and connected up. It’s taken much longer to do than I expected, partly because I went back to the UK for my sister, Sandra’s, funeral that took three days out of my schedule. But also because, as usual, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time driving backwards and forwards to Le Bugue (Brico Marché), Trelissac (Brico Depot) and Chancellade (Leroy Merlin) trying to get hold of the materials that I needed for the job.

The first things were large washers to hold the basin back against the wall. I went first to Brico Depot who sell such things ‘en vrac’ meaning that you can fill various sizes of small plastic envelopes up with any kind of ‘quincaillerie’ (screws, nuts, washers, bolts etc) at fixed prices. The sizes I wanted were out of stock but while I was there I bought a washbasin waste.

So the next day I went to Brico Marché who also sell items ‘en vrac’ and bought envelopes of screws and washers of various sizes. Unfortunately, when I went to use the washers they didn’t work and when I did the job today I ended up making the securing pieces that I needed myself by cutting and drilling some of the sheet metal that was left over from when I repaired my trailer.

I also found yesterday that the waste that I’d bought from Brico Depot was of very poor quality and after trying to modify it to fit, it was leaking like a sieve. So today I ended up making what seems to be becoming my regular Sunday drive to Leroy Merlin to buy another of better quality.

And all of this so far without doing any work on installing the washbasin. That happened today. It took longer than it normally would have because I’ve injured the main lower joint that connects my left thumb to my hand. Not only is it very painful but I also now have a much weakened grip in that hand to the extent that I keep dropping things.

But I got it done eventually (late afternoon) and was very pleased with the results. Since taking the following photographs I’ve siliconed around the top and sides of the basin and the foot of the column making the whole thing look even better.

I now need to silicone around the bases of both WCs (bathroom and separate toilet) and order a shower screen for my ‘douche italienne’. While that’s on order I can at last be getting on with masking up for painting. I think I’ll do the bathroom and toilet first as they will involve minimum disruption and will be quick to do allowing me to get the lighting in place in both. Then I’ll do the kitchen followed by the living room and corridor and hopefully all of the above will be completed by next week-end. Hopefully 😕