Coming on fast

Today saw another great leap forward with the interior of the house. The electrician arrived early at about 8.15 am and I nipped up to tell him about needing to move the plug points that I mentioned in a previous post. He said that putting them to one side of the appliances they were for was usually OK and I said that it wasn’t for me.

I referred to the dishwasher and asked how on earth was I supposed to plug it in with the fitted cabinets in place if its power point was behind the adjacent cabinet and over half a metre away? He got the message and said it wouldn’t be a problem moving all three of them.

I also said that I’m probably going for Indesit appliances and whereas I can buy an under-counter Indesit fridge in the UK, there’s no such thing in France (true). The only Indesit model I could fit in is 142cm high, so it would mean shortening the worktop and making it free-standing in the corner.

In that case as it stands, it would cover the power point that he’s placed in that corner above the counter. He understood that too (he’d marked the wall out to show where the various appliances and power outlets would be) and said that he’d move that over as well.

I popped my head into the house at lunchtime and while I was there I told the plaster-work team about the mis-positioned walls. They didn’t like it and said that they’d worked to the builder’s plan. I said that I’d given them a print of my plan as I’d designed the house and highlighted the importance of getting the measurements dead right, especially at the bedroom end wall. They said that the difference was all down to the angle, which was just plain silly.

I said that anyway, it wasn’t worth arguing about because I’d worked out over the week-end how to cope with the difference in measurements but I emphasised that if I hadn’t done so and couldn’t get my kitchen units in they’d have had no choice but to move the wall. End of.

I then had to leave and was away for the afternoon checking out kitchen stuff at Brico-Depot. I’ve now definitely decided I’ll be sourcing my kitchen furniture from there, as I did for my old house at Plazac. Their stuff is of high quality and their marketing is second-to-none in my opinion.

As well as having several models on display incorporating many features and accessories, they also provide a 12 page leaflet covering every model, worktop, accessory, component, finishing piece etc that they offer together with the price of every single item. This means that while you’re making your choice of model you can also do detailed calculations showing exactly how much to the centime your choice will work out to.

Having obtained the information I needed, by the time I got back to the house the workers had all left and unfortunately the light was beginning to fail. Nevertheless I managed to get several usable shots showing the progress that had been made, with several walls now being full double-sided, enormous strides made with the wiring for the lighting throughout the house and the cable bundle now hanging down in the ‘cellier’ ready to be connected up to the breaker box.

First some general shots of the living room showing the mass of cabling now hanging down for the ceiling lighting. The electrician is a bright spark, if you’ll excuse the pun, because he showed me how he’d marked out the positions of the spots (and therefore the ceiling holes) on the floor and then used a laser to project them up onto the ceiling. Very clever, and it meant that the ceiling positions and lighting pattern were exactly right. You could say ‘spot on’ ahemm…

Now a couple of shots of the kitchen showing the lighting cables and in which you can make out the moved power outlets.

Here’s a shot showing the kitchen lighting cables (seven of them) in more detail.

The next two shots show the ‘cellier’ (utility room) and the huge bundle of cables hanging down in the far left corner ready to be connected to the main breaker box.

The next shot shows the lighting in bedroom 3. Both of the other bedrooms have the same number of ceiling spots and are therefore similar.

The final shot shows the ceiling cabling in the bathroom. There are four spots and also visible is another hole in the centre of the left-hand wall. This is for ventilation and there are also similar vents in the kitchen, utility room and the separate WC.

Only the kitchen vent has a switch and my guess is that the other three will be working non-stop. This makes sense because the main living spaces (the living room and the three bedrooms) will be constantly ventilated by way of the system mounted in the roof space and slots in the tops of all of the double-glazed widows and doors.

So that was it for today. I’m happier and more relaxed than I was over the week-end as I now know precisely how I’ll be installing the kitchen cabinets in a way that will give me exactly what I want. And as a result of my discussion with the plaster-work man who showed me what he had discovered, it now appears that the living room end of the house is about 10cm longer than the plan, so my house will end up being slightly bigger and even more value for money than I originally thought it was 😀