More ‘cellier’ work

Having painted it, I’ve been pressing on as fast as I could to complete the work in my ‘cellier’ (utility room). The main reason for this is that until all of the preparatory work was completed I couldn’t install the floor and wall units that I have planned and until the storage that they will provide is available I can’t empty out all of the items that I have in storage that I’ve now been paying for for 30 months.

As well as painting its walls and ceilings, the plumber left me with something of a problem in the far corner of the room where I want to have my washing machine. The pipework he left behind was a bit of a mess to say the least because he’d committed the plumbing sin of having pipes crossing over, as shown in the following image.

He’d included a ‘P’ trap for the washing machine waste to feed into but I’d told him that I also wanted to fit a worktop with a sink along the same wall that would also need a hot as well as a cold supply. He evidently hadn’t thought at all how best to arrange these together with the shared waste outlet to the septic tank and what he left behind was actually pretty awful.

He placed the pipe for the sink waste on the left whereas the sink will be off to the right and by having the washing machine waste crossing in front of the hot and cold water supplies not only would it be tricky to run the three connections up to the sink but it also meant that it would be impossible to push the washing machine as far back against the wall as one would want. This would leave a lot of the machine protruding from beneath the worktop which would not only be unsightly but would also make the front of my lovely new Indesit washing machine prone to knocks and potential damage.

So before I could continue on to fitting the floor and wall units and the worktop I had to address this problem and come up with a completely new layout of the piping. The next image shows what the pipework in the corner now looks like.

In fact I’m thinking about altering it again because by placing the washing machine ‘P’ trap on top I’ve had to cut down the tube that the rubber outlet pipe from the washing machine pokes into to a point where the water surface inside is closer to the top than I would like. By redoing the arrangement and dropping the ‘P’ trap in question down lower I could avoid any possibility of water overflowing when, say, the machine is pumping out and the sink is being emptied at the same time. So that’s what I intend to do after Christmas and it’ll only take a short time to accomplish.

As the image shows, I’ve completely separated the cold and hot supplies to the sink and here’s a shot of the ends of them to which the mixer tap flexies will be attached. When I cut the pipes to do the re-jig I kept the connectors that the plumber had fitted to save a few euros and also have connectors that I knew wouldn’t leak.

Here’s a view of the complete new arrangement.

When the plumber fitted out the separate toilet we agreed that we should abandon the outside tap that I’d originally proposed to have on the front corner of the house and move it further round to the side. The original connection at the manifold in the ‘cellier’ was therefore abandoned and he ran a new connection for it. Whether this was the reason I do not know, but one manifold outlet now remains unused and blanked off, as shown in the next pic.

The problem with this is that the manifold has four outlets when it only needs three and extends further to the left than it needs to just preventing the freezer from being pushed back against the wall. I’ve found that Leroy Merlin offers a suitable smaller replacement for only 9.50€ so that’s another job I’ll be doing as soon as Christmas is over.

But that’s it for now and I’ll be taking a day off tomorrow like everyone else in France. But Christmas only lasts for one day here so like everyone else (almost) in France I’ll be back to work on Tuesday.

Happy Christmas everyone. Enjoy the break and I’ll be back next week.