Highly frustrating!

The weather here in the Dordogne has taken a turn for the better, at least for the time being, and if I wanted to, I could even go for a flight today as it’s clear, bright and fairly warm with a max temperature of around 15 degrees Celsius forecast for later this afternoon. However, the runway at Galinat is still likely to be a bit soft and I’m still very busy working on the plans for my house, so I don’t think that I’ll bother.

But the same can’t be said for northern France, which is still locked into a highly unsettled weather pattern with very high winds forecast, building over the next couple of days and going into next week. After that it’s expected to get back to just raining every day, so the prospects for my flying the Savannah down look exceedingly remote for most of the rest of February! I find that unbelievable and very frustrating, to say the least.

In the meantime, I’ve been dedicating my time to working on the plans for the work I want to do on my house. I’ve now got up to the roof level and progress has been quite slow and painstaking as I’ve discovered on close inspection that it’s actually quite a complex design. And I want my model to be as accurate as possible as not only will I be creating plans from it for my building work, but they’ll also probably be the only ones in existence as I’m pretty sure that when the house was constructed, the builders would have made nothing more than simple sketches.

As I’m working as my own surveyor and architect, I’ve had to keep going up into my grenier to look again at various details and take more measurements while I’ve been creating my model and every now and again, I’ve been pleasantly surprised when I’ve cross-checked dimensions from my model with the real thing just how closely they tally. So touch wood, things can’t be going that badly.

Here are some shots at where I am today with modelling the roof structure, which needn’t be exact but has to be fairly right as some major work will be done on it, removing the tile covering, installing insulation and then replacing the tiles again with new ones on the front elevation. Also, the front ‘kick-out’ will be modified to extend over my proposed new single-storey extension, as I’ll explain in another post.

It’s taken me two or three days already to get the roof modelling somewhere near right, and I’ve also been working on other interior details. Here are a couple of shots comparing the model of my staircase up to my two bedrooms with the real thing.

The detail has to be more or less right as otherwise the floor plan would look silly, and once again, it took me a few hours to get it to the stage that it’s at, as the ‘curved staircase’ model provided in the software just didn’t work out and I had to model each stair tread and riser from scratch. But I think that in the end it’ll be worth all the time and effort – at least I hope so 😉