I have a house

Well, almost! As of today, all of the construction work has been completed. Yesterday I received a message from the tiler saying that he would be coming to my place today and sure enough he and a colleague arrived on site at about 8.45am.

When he saw the problem that I’d been complaining about and it was explained to him that all of the miscoloured tiles had to be removed he wasn’t very happy but I wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer and left them to the job of removing the tiles from the plasterboard backing as best they could. I knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Sure enough, when I went up a while later to see how things were going they looked pretty bad. The tiles wouldn’t come off the plasterboard without bringing the latter with them – and I mean the whole board. It soon became apparent that the only way to proceed was to cut the affected areas of the walls away completely, insert plasterboard patches and then tile the patches from scratch.

So while they continued with cutting out the affected sections of the wall I went off with my trailer to Brico Marché at Le Bugue to buy a sheet of waterproof plasterboard which the second man got cracking on straight away when I returned to cut the panels that would be needed. For the main area this meant 1 1/2 rows of tiles across almost the whole width of the wall. But it worked and turned out to be the most effective way of dealing with the problem.

Here are some shots of the job as the day progressed starting with the main problem area after the panel had been inserted and tiled.

Here are shots of the other two areas higher up that also had to be rectified.

The next shot shows preparations being made for laying the floor of the walk-in shower.

Here’s a shot of the other long wall that hadn’t been tiled at all previously, before it was grouted.

And finally, shots of the whole bathroom at the end of the day after all of the work had been completed.

The tiler said that he’ll have to return to fit the joints around the shower base (you can see the empty gaps in the photographs). I think he said that the shower could be used anyway after a day or so but I won’t, just to be sure that everything is perfect before being put into use.

It only remains for the plumber to return to install the toilet in the bathroom (and possibly the hand basin if I can persuade him), turn on the water to all areas (there’s no water going to the bathroom and front exterior tap) and for the heat pump to be connected. The house will then be complete according to contract and it will just be down to me to decorate it right through and paint the shutters.

It’s been a long haul, very stressful at times, but this close to the finishing line, I can’t wait to move in, which I’ll semi-do even before the electricity is connected. Camping in the house will I’m sure be more comfortable than camping in the caravan, which I can’t wait to see the back of. I can’t really complain about it though, because it’s saved me thousands of euros (literally) in rental fees and domestic taxes which I’d have to have paid if I’d rented a small house or apartment for the last 25 months 😉