Brrrr… Changed again!

Although I’m now hundreds of miles south, I still keep an eye on the UK weather forecasts and see that the whole country is in the grips of an ‘arctic blast’ that has brought snow to many parts. Here in the Dordogne we also seem to have been affected by the same weather pattern including the same very chilly northerly winds. We haven’t had snow or anything like that – we’ve had brilliant clear blue skies for the last couple of days actually – but it’s all relative. The temperature yesterday reached a maximum of 9 deg C with a wind-chill factor making it feel rather colder and the forecast today is for a maximum of 8 deg C or so but still accompanied by the same cold wind.

So it’s not a good time for being out and about! I had to go to the supermarket on Friday and usually that’s one of the busiest days of the week. But not that day! The local population wisely decided to stay at home next to their wood-burners and since then it’s got quite a bit colder. I had a coffee with Wim and Sophie yesterday morning and poor Sophie had to pop out to pick up a few things. She was very cold when she came back and said that she was glad to be back home in the warm, and I didn’t blame her. Wim gave me directions to the Perigord Noir ‘bricollage’ where he said I might be lucky to find the floor tiles I need and later on, after lunch, I nipped over there to find out.

As it’s not a good time to be working outside on the X-Air , and as I’m waiting for price information from Raj Hamsa (the X-Air company who are based here in France) for the parts I’m thinking about ordering from them anyway, now’s a good time to get work done on and in the house. I’ve decided that I have to get my fireplace sorted out inside before I can get my roof work done. The reason is that the roofing man will be putting a tile cap on the top of the chimney the way they do here, to keep the rain out, and when the flue lining is put in for the wood-burner, either this would have to be removed again or it would need to be left off in the first place requiring the roofing man to make a return visit involving extra cost.

I have a large open stone fireplace that a previous occupant had sealed off. They then installed a small wood-burner beside it which had a flue that entered the chimney through a hole in the side of the fireplace. However, they then left the original fireplace in the crude form that it had always been in which was a kind of open semi-circular pit about 8 cm deep extending out something like a metre into the room as can be seen from the following pic.

So the bottom line is that if I want to install a wood-burner stove in the fireplace itself, I first have to fill and tile the ‘pit’ and then create some kind of slightly raised platform for the stove to stand on. I then have to block off the hole in the side of the fireplace (and somehow clean off all the gunge that the previous stove left behind), open up the flu and have a metal flue liner installed that will go right up from the wood-burner to the top of the chimney, after which the tile cap can be fitted on the top to keep the rain out.

My immediate problem is that, as can be seen in the pic, the whole of my downstairs is tiled right through in traditional 30 x 30 cm terra cotta (‘terre cuite’) tiles and for the job to look anything when it’s been done, I have to try and match these as closely as possible. After an extensive internet search, I think I have find a company in Toulouse who can supply, and more importantly, deliver tiles that appear from their pictures to be almost identical, although until I receive the sample that I have ordered, I will not know for sure. In the meantime, Wim suggested that I should try Perigord Noire Bricollage who stock a large range of floor tiles and that I just might be lucky. Well, as it happened, unfortunately I wasn’t. They had some terra cotta tiles of the right size but the colour was not quite right and they also had a bit of an edge pattern that would make them stand out too much against the existing ones. So I’m back to waiting for my sample to arrive from Toulouse.

In the meantime, time is marching on, the weather is getting colder and I have no heating of any kind in my house. But I just had a stroke of luck. My local Intermarche has just made a special offer on convector heaters, 2000 watt units that can be either floor mounted on plastic feet or wall mounted. The extraordinary thing is that they were being sold at roughly 1/3 of the price of similar units in the Brico Depot at Perigueux – so I walked out of the store with five of them in a trolley. The cashier said that they will be expensive to run, but they will be perfect when I wall-mount two in the lounge and one in each bedroom because even after I have a stove installed, there will always be periods like now in the late Autumn when you need a bit of background heat before you fire up the stove proper. The last one I’ll probably keep as a portable unit so it can be used in the kitchen, bathroom or wherever, I don’t know yet.

So that’s what my plans are, for now anyway.