Got there

Despite the weather having deteriorated considerably compared to yesterday and being subject to constant drizzle and harder showers while I was working outside, I still managed to get to exactly where I said I hoped I’d be with my new ‘baie coulissante’ work today. Firstly I had to finish off fitting the remaining side securing screws which was a bit tedious and fiddly as I just had to get the best fixings that I could by packing more plug material into the wall blockwork. I succeeded eventually but luckily the results will never be seen as they weren’t pretty and I didn’t achieve the tightest fixings in the world.

Then I had to move on to the external making-good. This included adding a small amount of stone in the top left corner where material had come out during removal of the old window frame, filling all of the ‘bad’ joints in the stonework next to the new window frame and adding material where the gap between the wall and the frame was too large, the latter two so I eventually end up with a sealing joint that’s as even as possible all around the frame. You don’t have problems like this with a ‘normal’ house but mine is far from that as I mentioned in my last post.

The final steps were then to do some of the ‘worst’ making-good on the walls inside to make the final making-good easier (remember, some of what were old external walls are now inside) and seal all around the frame inside to make the whole job weather-tight. I just used acrylic window/door frame sealer for that and it didn’t need to be too precise as the internal seal will be completely hidden when the walls have been made good. Here’s how things finished up at the end of the day.

I’m very pleased with the results. The doors both slide really smoothly and despite yet again there being a dearth of fitting information, the door handles and locks work perfectly. I originally found that locking wasn’t working properly but I found that that was due to a small piece of sliding plastic mounted on the door edge not returning high enough to allow the pin that locks the handles from slipping into position but a few minutes of ‘adjustment’ using a small round file solved that problem.

I’m now having to get around to thinking about making the floor good which won’t be as easy as it sounds as sourcing matching floor tiles will be impossible, as I found when I did my fireplace work, and even getting ones that are close to what’s there will be difficult due to their age. I’ve found a couple of ‘possibles’ on the internet so far, but as I found when I did my fireplace, when you get to see them after driving possibly hundreds of kilometres, they look nothing like my existing ones or even the photographs of them on the internet in many cases. But that’s for later. The priority now this week is to get my winter wood organised and in my wood store ready for the cold days and nights.