Month: June 2026

I don’t have a workshop so I have to do any major job outside. But yet again today the thermometer has hit 40 degrees C so it’s far too hot to do that. And especially so since the wind destroyed my large 4m x 3m parasol that offered some useful shade over my terrace area. And it’s because of that event that I’ve had to look for a new way to get shade back again because due to the shape of my house the terrace is a sun trap and the 3m x 3m parasol that I’m left with just isn’t up to the job.

So I had to find a much better solution which I think I have done in the form of what is called over here a ‘store-banne’, something resembling an old-fashioned extending shop awning. I say ‘I think I have done’ because any ‘store-banne’ would ideally need to fit under the light over the door leading onto the terrace. I think the one I’ve bought will do, but I won’t know for sure until I come to fix it to the wall, although I think it just will.

But getting back to the original point, like everything that you buy on line these days, when it arrived today it came in a big box and needed to be assembled. So where was the only place I could do that? On my living room floor, of course. As you can see, my living room looks more and more like a workshop because as well as there being three fans whirring away trying to move the hot air around there are tools and boxes of fittings in every direction.

So that’s how I got around the heatwave and assembled the ‘store-banne’ ready to be fixed on the wall. Given its price I’m surprised by the quality of its construction. It’s 4m x 3m so should nicely cover my terrace table and chairs and the main reason I chose this model is because it also has two full-length roller-blind curtains along its front which will be especially useful when the hot sun rises from the east. Formerly I had to tilt my old parasol but the curtains will make it much easier to create shade early on.

Anyway, below are pics that I shot after I’d finished the basic assembly. All that’s left are the front curtains and I’ll show those in a later post when I’ve got the thing up on the wall. Ideally you need two people for that but I’ve never shied away from a challenge and I’ll work out how to do it 😉

A short time ago I purchased a nail gun from a supplier on Aliexpress in readiness for when I (eventually) start building my garden tool store/workshop. I’ve not yet had a chance to use it properly – I’ve just fired 10 or 15 nails by way of practice – so when the trestles I was using for painting my shutters collapsed a couple of days ago because their joints had never been fixed I was pleased to get an opportunity to put it into service.

I decided to use staples rather than nails but unfortunately after the first half dozen or so one jammed in the nose of the gun and when I tried to get it out it broke off at both ends rendering what is in effect a brand new gun unusable. So I contacted the supplier asking for advice on what I needed to do to extract the broken piece of staple.
They said they would check with their engineer and came back the next day with a proposal to send me a replacement part which I could fit myself. I replied saying I’d need instructions in advance on how to do so and they helpfully sent me a video showing how the gun had to be disassembled.

I could possibly do it but the person in the video was a skilled assembly worker, so I expressed my reservations and asked if there was any alternative, thinking that my gun could be returned to their German warehouse. They came back with an immediate response saying no worries, they will send me a brand new replacement gun.

I expressed my gratitude for what I considered a very generous gesture and proposed that if they sent me a return label I would return my gun. They replied saying that they don’t have a return label and that I could keep the original machine.

I admit to having had some dodgy experiences with Chinese suppliers but this one has proven to be exceptionally outstanding. And who are they? They are the Onevan Global Store who can be found on Aliexpress. I recommend them.

Despite the temperature – 42 degrees forecast again for today and for several more to come and even after that it’s forecast to not fall to much below 40 degrees. So working outside on the excavator is a no-go and I’ve more or less given up on doing much more work on my garden tool store/workshop until the autumn. And I can’t see me installing my swimming pool and doing the work I have planned for my terrace until next year. But there’s nothing I can do to control the weather.

But that doesn’t mean I can stop work altogether. It’s cool enough in the early morning and evening to get things done. I got Isward going yesterday evening on cutting the grass at the back and restarted him mowing again this morning at not long after 6.00 am. As I type this he’s just about finishing off. I’ve also been pressing on with painting my shutters. In a day I can give two pairs two coats of undercoat per side followed by two top coats the next day.

Shown below are the second pair after their first top coat on their fronts (their backs were top coated yesterday). I’ve just got two more pairs of small shutters to do (for the kitchen and bathroom) and then I’ll be onto the large pairs for the living room doors. If I can’t get much more work done outside in my garden at least it will be nice seeing the shutters back up in colour.

As we’re expecting 42 degrees today my day started off at 7.00 am while it was still relatively cool. I set off Isward the robot to mow the front grass which it has done successfully many times previously. But not today. It got half-way through before deciding to head off into the long grass on the boundary with the adjacent field. I reset it, set it off again and it did it again shortly after in the same place.

A GPS problem? Anyway, I restarted it and after a while it decided to once again head out of the lawn boundary onto my driveway. So I then remapped the lawn entirely, cancelled the first mow and set it off again and later it decided to head off yet again into the adjacent field in the same place, at which time I decided to give up on mowing the lawn for today and concentrate on the next pair of shutters which I’d washed earlier after removing all their furniture. By this time it was after lunch and after all my trials with Isward I thought that it would be a relief getting back to something as simple as rubbing down and undercoating the shutters.

Wrong! Almost as soon as I started rubbing down the first one the trestles that the pair were lying on collapsed. It appeared that all the trestles that I’d purchased were cheap for a reason – their frameworks are all tongue and grooved but the tongues had never been glued or otherwise fixed in the grooves. No problem, I thought. Just the job for my trusty new nail gun. And so it would have been, except after the first 20 or staples one jammed in the nose of the gun and I can see no simple way of getting the jammed piece out as in trying to do so it has broken off on both sides.

I’ve contacted the Chinese supplier to find out what to do but for the time being the gun is partially in bits on newspaper in my kitchen. And it’s still only 3.00 pm so plenty of time left for lots more things to go wrong. I’m waiting in expectation…

I took some photos this morning of the first pair of shutters hung back up on the wall and I have to say that they certainly do make a strong statement! However, this is not far off of how I envisaged them when I initially prepared the plans for the house as shown by the final image below.

We’ve had another scorcher today so not a day to be working outside. But much as I would have liked to be out early getting some excavation work done I decided that my top priority was to try to get the hardware and software rebuild of my main computer done and with this in mind I’ve spent the last two days doing that and painting shutters. The latter has been a thankless task. I’m usually pretty good at hand-painting and proud of the results but painting these two small shutters has been one of my worst painting experiences ever and I shudder that I’ve got several more pairs to do.

I’ll never touch another can of Dulux paint ever again because as I said in my previous post, based on this experience it isn’t what it used to be. What should have been a relatively straightforward and easy job – painting large flat surfaces laid horizontally – has turned out to be a nightmare as the paint has meagre coverage and covering power and even after two top coats the undercoat was still showing through in several places. I refitted the furniture earlier this evening and found that some patches painted this morning were still not dry which I find unbelievable. The final results after yet more retouching are shown in the images below. The shutters don’t look bad but they don’t stand up to close scrutiny and I’m not proud of them.

I’ve been painting the first pair of shutters for the past two days, one coat of universal undercoat on each side of each shutter yesterday and two coats of top coat today. I’m not that happy with the results because even after the second top coat you can see patches of undercoat beginning to show through again as it dries. So much for hoping that I’d be able to get away with one coat each of undercoat and top coat.

The paint I’m using is Dulux Basque Red, a traditional colour for shutters and doors in these parts. I had hoped that with the red being such a full colour it would have good coverage and covering power but it appears that I was wrong. Back in the day Dulux was a premium quality brand (at a premium price) when it was owned by the UK’s ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) but since being taken over by Akso Nobel it appears that the quality bit has been dropped and only the premium price now remains. If I’d known what results I’d be getting I’d have gone for one of the multitude of lower price paint brands, many with no need for undercoat, and got similar, if not better results.

The images below show how the undercoat is beginning to show through again, especially on the edges. If I have to do a third coat it will (a) take more paint and (b) take more time. Even if tomorrow I can turn the shutters over and paint the fronts that means the two pairs will have taken three days to paint. Do the math. I’ve got nine pairs to paint so even if I can keep painting at the rate of two pairs every three days, which I doubt I’ll be able to as I have other things to do (like my excavation work), it’ll take me between two and three weeks to complete all of them. And I shudder at the cost if I keep using Dulux given at the amount of paint I’ve used just on these small shutters.

Yesterday I got to the bottom of why my excavator wouldn’t start and appeared to keep having a flat battery. I surmised that its new battery fitted In China had failed and ordered a new replacement which arrived on Tuesday. I fitted the new battery yesterday and it didn’t solve the problem. The machine stayed totally dead. When I put a meter on both batteries – the original and the new – both were fully charged which told me that the original battery was being charged on the machine and the reason it showed a full charge so quickly when placed on a battery charger was because it was already at 100%.

I then removed the new battery, replaced the original and the machine was still dead so I decided to try it with a fully charged jump pack. Still dead. Then I connected the earth of the jump pack to a a grounded bolt on the machine, got power and the machine started. That told me that the problem was an earthing problem and when I checked I found that because the main engine earth connection had never been tightened it had vibrated and become completely unscrewed (see the left bolt in the photograph below).

In fact NEITHER of the two bolts clamping the fuel tank, the left of which also makes the engine earth connection, had been tightened and that also explained why the tank was sitting about 2 cms too high and too close to the top of the engine cover making it almost impossible to remove the fuel filler cap . I’m very annoyed about this because due to the bolts not being tightened during manufacture I am now 70€ out of pocket for a battery that I have no use for which I’m now trying to return. The Chinese manufacturer is, as usual, very apologetic and admits it was at fault but that doesn’t make up for the time I’ve lost over the past ten days or so. 🙁

It’s been getting really hot inside my house during this latest ‘canicule’ – around 30 degrees Celsius most evenings – and one of the reasons for this is the absence of its shutters. I removed them nearly two years ago – see HERE as they were getting rained on at the start of a wet winter and becoming streaked with dirt. I intended to paint them the following Spring but as usual, events got in the way and they’ve remained where I put them, securely under thick covers under the trees in the front of my house.

That all changed today. I’m unable to do anything in my garden (except watch Isward roll up and down making a beautiful job of mowing my lawns) as the new battery for my excavator, which was promised for last Saturday, did not arrive and won’t do so until tomorrow, and I can’t fix my main computer, which is still not functioning as I’m waiting for a disk that I need to be delivered. So I decided that this would be a good time to start on my shutters.

All I’ve done today is mount them back on the house where they can stay until I can get each pair down again in turn in order to remove their fittings, thoroughly clean them, paint them and put them back up again. They can stay there now as we’re expecting a hot, dry summer and hopefully I’ll get them finished before the weather begins to change again in the Autumn. They didn’t do at all badly under the covers. Rodents managed to get in as they do everywhere but although they took in nut shells, acorns and stuff like that they didn’t make any nests or do any damage to the shutters themselves.

Putting the small shutters up wasn’t much of a challenge as they aren’t very heavy to carry or rehang. The large ones for the full height double doors in my living room were a different story. I remembered what I job I’d had taking them down and humping them round to where I stored them and wasn’t looking forward at all to the job of carrying them back again and rehanging them. I even wondered if, after nearly two years, I’d be able to do the job alone but would you believe it, I managed humping and hanging all six of them (3 pairs) without too much difficulty. Maybe I’m healthier and stronger now than I was then 😀

I have to say that I’m pleased to see them back up again. They make the house look more ‘finished’ again, even though they’re not painted, as the images below show.

Tomorrow I’ll start the job of painting them kicking off with the small ones on the front of the house, which are not affected by sun and with which I’ll then replace the ones at the back as I go. And hopefully if I work in the front of the house under the trees I’ll be able to do it without being affected by the heat, which is expected to get up to around 40 degrees Celsius over the coming days. I’ll possibly even think about finishing painting them before I get back to my excavation work, but I’ll see how things go. In the meantime, here is the first pair stripped of fittings ready for cleaning, lightly rubbing down and painting.

“What’s next?” I asked in my last post. Well, I’ll tell you.

While I was in my old house I bought a couple of very nice parasols, the larger and the more expensive of the two being 4m x 2m in size to completely cover my outdoor table and chairs set. Although they were acquired 5 or 6 years ago, both have spent most of their time in storage, have only been used 20 or so times the whole of the time I’ve had them and were still like new.

I’ve been unfurling the larger one on several days in the last couple of weeks as my terrace has been subject to direct sunshine and was getting very hot. All was well until yesterday when a huge gust of wind came apparently out of nowhere and blew it over despite it being very heavily weighed down. Due to its weight it was badly damaged and although I intended to at last get back to my garden excavation work today, instead I had to spend a miserable morning cutting it up and taking it to the décheterie for disposal.

Anyway, after lunch I was able to get out into the garden to at last continue excavating. But it was not to be because yet again I was prevented from doing so. After starting the excavator up once and switching it off again the battery then wouldn’t even crank its engine over and it was impossible to restart it even with a jump pack. So that was that. The battery has been playing up over the last couple of weeks and today it decided to fail completely.

I’ve told the supplier in China what has happened and informed them that I’ve had to order another locally in order to resume working. Because of the time difference I’m waiting on their reply but I fully expect to be recompensed and will be very annoyed if they prevaricate in any way.

There seem to be forces outside of my control that are intent on preventing me using the (expensive) equipment that I’ve purchased and doing the work I have planned in my garden. It’s one calamity after another and I can hardly keep up with them.

So I decided to devote my time this year to sorting out my garden, right? Getting it into the shape I wanted, building a garden tool store/workshop, installing an above-ground swimming pool that I’ve had for a year now, fixing the ground around my house that’s collapsing a bit because as I told the builder at the time, there wasn’t enough earth to backfill the void under the building, plus a few other jobs. And I equipped myself with the tools for the job – a mini excavator from China and a motorised dumper. So what could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot as it happens. First several weeks were lost due to continuous heavy rain that prevented me even getting the excavator out of its garage let alone driving it on my land which its tracks would have cut to pieces. Then, when the rain did stop we had a couple of weeks of totally unseasonal intensely high temperatures that made working outside without cover more or less intolerable, so still very little progress was made.

Little, but some as despite the heat I managed to get cracking on digging out for the base of my planned tool store and transporting the earth up to the top of the garden in order to reshape and reduce the severity of the downward slope from the (collapsing) terrace to the garden. So I was able therefore to concentrate fully on my garden work? Well, no actually.

Before I could I had to allocate several days of perfect working outside weather getting my car ready for its bi-annual test (CT). This unfortunately had to include stripping out its under-bonnet in order to replace the windscreen washer plastic tubing that had been gnawed away by the mice that got into the car a few weeks ago as if left it would have been an automatic fail. As it is I couldn’t fix the tubing for the rear washer that still doesn’t work, but that wasn’t needed for the CT, which my car fortunately sailed through.

So back to the garden, then, only to be confronted almost immediately with something of a personal disaster. Many months ago before I went off to Istanbul for implant work, I placed myself for a course of treatment in the hands of a dentist in Montignac. To say that the man is incompetent is an understatement. Crowns he fitted at my great expense were falling out repeatedly while the treatment was in progress and when in Turkey I had one of his crowns replaced with an implant in addition to the ones I’d planned for. The disaster was that a double crown, bridge almost, that he’d fitted then fell out leaving me in need of emergency dental treatment.

The problem is that it’s impossible now to find a dentist in this area and at the time of writing this the work hasn’t yet been done. I’ll have to try to find a local dentist (perhaps there’s one who has lost a few patients since I last phoned around) but if I can’t I’ll probably have to spend more time travelling back to my old dentist in the UK. I’ll have no alternative as my son is getting married in September and I’ll have to get the work done in time for that.

So then back to the garden? Well yes, but it soon became clear when the grass front and back of my house began to rapidly start growing that unless I did something I’d be spending all of my time keeping it under control rather than doing what I needed to do, namely following through with my plans to reshape my garden. So I took the plunge and invested not an inconsiderable sum in a lawn robot that I thought would take over the task of controlling the grass and thus freeing the time up for me.

But there was just one snag. Setting the robot up was, let’s just say, more error-prone and more complicated than I’d reckoned for. And it took several days, the best part of a week actually, with Whatsapp messages going backwards and forwards between me and China. However, I eventually I found my way through the maze of instructions in the ‘user manual’ that in the usual Chinese way somehow omitted the ‘how to’ details of several of the crucial steps in the set-up process.

But I did it, albeit with several more days lost, and the robot began to do its job and pretty well too. In fact I have to say that I’ve never seen my weed-infested apologies for lawns looking as good as they do after a few days of Isward the robot quietly humming to himself as he rolled up and down and back and forth in my garden seemingly enjoying the job of keeping the grass and weeds under control while I did other things.

I’m especially pleased with the area close to my house’s northern wall where the septic tank is sited. The contractor placed it closer to the house than I would have liked making the spaces between the house and the septic tank covers rather steep. However, I’m succeeding in resolving the problem by building it up using earth brought up from the excavation and although it’s not yet finished, I think that eventually it’ll be possible to get a mower or strimmer around the area in question.

OK, so now if I put my tooth problem to one side I can concentrate solely on my garden? Unfortunately not. The day before yesterday while I was clearing more brush and scrub away from the corner of the garden where I’m excavating the base for tool store I noticed that Isward hadn’t moved for a while so went to investigate. It turned out that he’s expired. Not dead exactly but mortally wounded by a technical fault that couldn’t be cleared even after many attempts at doing so.

I followed the instructions of customer services explicitly but it transpires that a servo motor controlling the height of the cutting blades has failed. They apologised profusely for wasting yet more of my time and promised to send me a brand new replacement machine, together with yet four more replacement blades as a goodwill gift. This is already on its way from Germany but in the meantime before it arrives lawn mowing has come to a halt and I only hope that the grass doesn’t grow too long again requiring me to mow it manually.

So back to uninterrupted excavating then? No, dammit! Just as I thought I’d be able to my computer has broken down. I’m writing this on my slow old laptop that I can’t continue using as all of my files, photographs and programs that I use are on my main machine. I thought I’d discovered the problem and bought a new network card, but before I could install it (after unpacking it unfortunately) the machine stopped booting up entirely.

I built the machine myself in the caravan while my house was being built so I know it pretty well. I think the problem may be the motherboard, the second most expensive component after the processor so have had to order a replacement. Luckily Amazon had a ‘used’ replacement at less than half price which I’m now waiting to be delivered, but it’s a complex machine and fitting it will involve almost a complete rebuild. My worst fear is that if it’s not the motherboard it’s the power supply. If it is, although it’s still within its 5-year warranty period, I could end up facing yet more delay.

As mentioned, the day before yesterday I spent several exhausting hours in quite intense heat cutting and clearing away scrub, brush and small trees from the area at the back of the excavation to allow access for my excavator and the images below show the results. I need the access to clean up the hole I’ve dug and also adjust its side, front and back levels.

The following morning, yesterday, I looked out first thing and was amazed by what I saw. The wild boar, which I haven’t seen any sign of for months, had come up during the night onto the field next to my house that the local farmers had cut and cleared of hay while I was doing my brush removal work and had dug a large crater just yards from my garden.

I still haven’t had a chance to finish my fence to keep them out. I ordered the parts to connect my post auger to my excavator but specified the wrong size and am still awaiting two connectors. My fear now is that they may try to get into my back garden and wreak havoc as they did several times previously and have set up some barriers that won’t really be up to the job of holding them back.

On top of all this, did I mention that due to an ear wax problem I’m almost deaf and need to arrange an appointment with my doctor to get my ears syringed? No? Sorry, what did you say? I couldn’t quite catch it… 🙁