‘Sparks’ did well

‘Sparks’ is what we call an electrician in Britain. He started at around 9.00 am as usual and the two-man plaster-board team only turned up today for a short while to give him a clear field. And he needed it because he was everywhere, including up in the roof-space, as the following pictures show.

I didn’t take any photos at lunchtime because I had to go out to get hold of a few things, including a 5 x 4 metre plastic tarpaulin. I needed that because I wanted to move the interior doors out of the house today and my plan was to put them in one of my ‘tonnelles’ double wrapped in the tarp so even if any rainwater did blow in there, it wouldn’t stand a chance of wetting the doors.

The first thing I saw when I went up to see how Sparks was doing was the cable for my satellite dish that he’d drilled the wall for and poked through. He said that he would to save me climbing a ladder and crawling around in the roof space myself but I didn’t expect him to do it today.

First off as usual, a general shot from the living room.

Next the TV corner. We had a short debate on where to site the plug sockets – close to the front wall or further away towards the middle of the section of wall. After umming-and-ahhing for a few moments we decided on a compromise 🙂

Now a view from the TV corner towards the kitchen showing the cables that have been poked down from the ceiling in that area alone.

Another view back towards the corridor leading to the utility room, bathroom and bedrooms showing yet more cables.

The kitchen wall showing the cables for plug points, the fridge, the oven, the hob unit and the cooker hood that will vent to the outdoors through the roof.

The view straight up the corridor towards the bedrooms. Insulation-come-sound deadening material has now been placed in position along the right hand side as viewed ready for the plaster-board to be attached along that side.

Looking back through the kitchen door at the wall on the opposite side showing the cables for two plug points, a light switch and the plug point for a dishwasher. There’s also another low level plug point on the right which can’t be seen as it’s behind the doors leaning against the right hand wall.

Now the ‘cellier’, or utility room. The washer-dryer combo will be on the right against the outer wall and there will also be lots of storage and other stuff that I’ll go into in more detail in another post. It’ll be great because I had no such thing in my old house in Plazac and it was a total nightmare just because of the lack of storage space alone.

The next two shots show bedroom 1 and the alcove space it contains in which I’ll be building full-height wardrobes and storage cupboards.

Now the same again – two shots of bedroom 2.

And now bedroom 3.

And finally two shots in each direction up and down the corridor.

I also received some excellent news today. As regular readers will know, the cables and water pipes were put into place before the the concrete floor slab was laid so are now pretty much fixed in place with additional ones being hard to do. I recently asked whether as I’ve now decided to build a garage-workshop in front a cable could be laid to supply power to it ready for when it’s built and was told that this would be OK.

Today, while the electrician was there, I asked whether the same again could be done to provide a power cable at the back of the house that I could use to run a small swimming pool pump. That’s more challenging because it would mean a cable being pushed through under the house from above and someone then going into the space below to bring it out at the back.

It would be an ‘extra’, of course, but my view is that it would be better to do it now, during the build, than to leave it to afterwards. The electrician, fine chap that he is, said that he would be able to do it, so I can look forward to having a proper little semi-above-ground swimming pool (what’s called ‘hors sol’ in France) to languish in during the hot summer months when I’m not slaving in the garden. And if the worst comes to the worst, it could always be used for some fancy lights on the terrace 🙂