Back in Plazac

I left home to head south to give my friend Val a hand installing her new kitchen on 20th January, never believing that I would be away for 3 weeks! I thought that it might take a fortnight or so to get the work done but actually got back again to a rather cold and soggy Plazac late yesterday afternoon. Val lives near to Limoux in the Languedoc, a small town that is famous for its sparkling wine called Blanquette de Limoux, which is said to pre-date champagne. This was traditionally produced by a method similar to the ‘methode champenoise’ when the wine is fermented in the bottle, keeping the carbon dioxide produced in the wine to make it effervescent, and a small quantity still is. As well as carbon dioxide, fermentation produces by-products called leas and if the carbon dioxide is not released, it stops the fermentation process prematurely before the wine has had the opportunity to reach its full alcoholic potential.

With champagne, the wine is cleared of the old leas after the initial fermentation has finished and a secondary fermentation is then started in the bottle to raise the alcohol content and produce the effervescence. However, with Blanquette de Limoux that is produced in the traditional manner, the old leas are not cleared so the final product is a bit cloudy, and also the alcoholic strength of the final product is somewhat lower. However, nowadays the bulk of production is done by the ‘cuve close’ method involving the use of large stainless steel tanks and this results in a wine with higher alcoholic content that meets the modern taste and at a much more economic cost. The same method is used for other wines, such as Veuve du Vernay that I used to be Product Marketing Manager of many years ago, which is how I got to know about such things and why they still interest me.

Not that I had much time to either see much of the area or to sample much more than a few glasses of the product in question, because we were plagued by days of torrential rain that left many of the local vineyards that are located on almost every available patch of level or not too sloping land, under water. And on the occasions when the sun did show its face, usually I was fully occupied indoors by the task of kitchen fitting 😕

I’ve mentioned previously that Val decided to plump for a new Ikea kitchen and I initially became involved back last November when she told me about the design that a professional kitchen person had produced for her. I pointed out that if he went ahead and installed a high cupboard with sliding doors in the position that he had proposed it would be impossible to open any of the drawers while standing in front of it. I then came up with what I thought was a better alternative so had only myself to blame when Val decided to go with it! We sourced the units together from Ikea in Toulouse before Christmas and originally her brother Greg was going to come over from the UK in the new year to fit it. However, this became impossible so I stepped forward to take on the task never knowing what I was letting myself in for 🙂

But let’s not get too far ahead and start at the very beginning. Shown below is a picture of what Val’s kitchen originally looked like – a style that might affectionately be referred to as ‘franco-chaotic’ I think, with a mish-mash of hand-made cabinets thrown together, some with doors and others with none and just curtains to cover their contents.

Before Christmas, she had had the whole lot ripped out, some rewiring done, the walls and ceiling skimmed with plaster and the whole room repainted in plain white, so it should have been a relatively straightforward matter to get stuck in with installing the new units. Unfortunately not. Ikea units are designed to fit directly against the walls and do not have a void for services behind them. This meant that the existing plumbing had to be extended downwards to below the bases of the new units and rerouted and also some of the new wiring had to be treated likewise. However, the latter left much to be desired and required other time-consuming modifications to make it usable, and that didn’t include the making good that the electrician had also conveniently (for him) apparently forgotten to do. Take a bow Cameron from Australia – probably from the ‘wild-west’ of the country, I assume 😐

With the preparatory work completed, involving much toing-and-froing to the local ‘Mr Bricolage’ that frequently held little or no stock of the required items, occasionally involving the need to use an alternative, here are a couple of pics showing the stage reached after the first few days after the units and worktop had been installed down one side of the kitchen.

Shortly afterwards, Val was able to use the sink in her kitchen for the first time since December, after the new one had been installed, which almost certainly explains the happy smile on her face.

Val’s kitchen is rather triangular in shape, tapering down to a very narrow end where the pro designer had originally proposed to fit the tall cupboard with drawers. I intended to build right around the narrow end of the kitchen using a narrow 40cm wide unit with drawers and knew that this would present certain challenges, as shown by the following image.

However, things worked out as planned and the final result was very satisfying with a good use of the limited space available. It was then just a matter of slogging on to get the job completed. Here are a couple of shots showing the plumbing under the sink and just after the new gas hob (using cylinder gas) and electric oven had been fitted.

Measuring up the space for the proposed under-counter fridge and freezer was a bit fraught as the run of the units required a full, uncut 3 metre length of worktop, but fortunately everything worked out exactly as planned (phew!)

That meant that the main installation work was completed, leaving just the finishing to do, so it was time to celebrate by breaking open a bottle of Blanquette de Limoux 🙂

And to finish off, here are a few shots of the finished article.

I was very pleased with the way the final job turned out. This is the first (that I can remember anyway…) Ikea kitchen that I’ve fitted and I wasn’t that impressed by it. I like the final look of it but I didn’t like the absence of service void behind the units that prevented their being ‘adjusted’ to take account of dodgy walls and/or floors, the pathetically flimsy legs that dropped out of their ‘fixings’ every time you picked up a cabinet to move it before installation, the quality of much of the melamine used in manufacture (a peg blew through and shattered the face of one cabinet’s side panel during installation, which would have been disastrous if it had not then been covered by the unit next to it), the need to tediously nail the back onto every cabinet involving the waste of an awful lot of time, the way you have to attach ‘slow closing’ units onto standard hinges and drawer sliders instead of just fitting slow-closing ones in the first place, the fact that Ikea don’t supply a double-width unit (at all!) to take a sink unit, that the sink unit they do supply does not have a proper back and bottom to it, the gruesome quality of the Ikea-supplied kick-plates and having to measure up every door to attach handles and knobs because Ikea can’t be bothered to supply you with drilling templates, to name just a few. There were other things too but I just can’t be bothered with listing any more – but in any case, I hope I’ll never have to take on another Ikea kitchen install in my lifetime 🙁

So what have I been up to since I’ve been back? Nothing to do with flying, that’s for sure, because the weather has just been too cold, wet and miserable. I arrived back to a freezing cold house yesterday but fortunately I’d planned ahead and left kindling all ready to go in my ‘poele a bois’ and a supply of wood stacked up beside it. I soon got through that, though, so today I was out cutting up some of the large tree stumps that I’ve had under my shelter for the past few weeks and then splitting the cut pieces with my new ‘fendeuse’ to make some nice size logs. I’ve had these burning away this evening and my stove has been chucking out a good bit of heat, so all’s well down here in the Dordogne. I hope it stays that way and that maybe the weather might improve a bit soon. I think that it will not do so for a week or so yet however, because this is, after all, the winter and we might still have to expect a bit of snow even though the shoots of the daffodils and bluebells are already well above the ground. But life here in this corner of France will continue in its own way and at its own pace 😉