Now back to the wood store!

With all the disruption and toing-and-froing to do with my phone and internet problems, work on the new wood store took a back-seat last week. That’s not to say that there wasn’t a bit of progress, but not that much I have to confess. Since I last wrote about it on August 31, I have only got as far as finishing off the shuttering and getting the surface pegged out ready for concreting.

Anyone who doesn’t know might wonder what all the pegs are for. My dad was an expert and I learnt almost everything I know about doing DIY and building work from him and I watched him do this on many occasions. The pegs are banged into the ground in regular intervals to exactly the height that you want the surface of the concrete to be. The area between each set of four pegs then becomes a ‘bay’ and this is useful if, like me, you are working alone, can only mix the concrete in small quantities (ie one mixer load at a time) and can’t lay it very quickly. Then you can mix and lay a bay at a time working to the level of the pegs, knowing that the finished surface will end up level. As you reach each set of pegs you can either remove them, using the new concrete edge as your level, or leave them in even depending on how the base will be used in the future. I’ll be removing mine as I go.

I only need to add hardcore before concreting and I mentioned in a previous post that as I don’t yet have a tow bar on my Kia, I investigated having some ballast delivered from my local builders’ merchants, as you routinely would in the UK. It would cost me 29.60€ to pick up a 400 kg bag of ballast in my own trailer from Brico Depot. However, Point P at Montignac wanted over 60€ for the same quantity of ballast and over 90€ to run it the four or five miles up the road to my house. Clearly I have to get a tow bar fitted and I now have one on order. In the meantime, work on the wood shelter has come to a halt while it is being delivered from… Poland. As usual, it’s much cheaper to buy one in from hundreds and hundreds of miles away than to source one locally from France. Will they ever learn?