Sunday break

I’m not going to call today a ‘new tool store’ day because as you can see from the photographs, it was dull and miserable and not a nice day to be working outside. There was a mist early on in the morning which seemed to start to lift but it stopped and began to slowly return. So after Wim and I had had our usual morning coffee together, I decided that I would do other things today and all I did on the new tool store was fit the two internal cross beams. Here are the shots that I took afterwards.

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The job only took 20 minutes and I was originally going to do it last thing yesterday but didn’t. The next job is the roof but with the weather being as it was today, it wasn’t worth starting on it because before I do there are a couple of things that I need to attend to that involve drilling holes in places that I won’t be able to get to once the roof is in place. So best to leave them until I can make a fresh start tomorrow and busy myself with other things today. So a welcome break! Time for another cup of tea I think 😉

New tool store – day 4

The first job of the day was to attach the two side rails that are there to stiffen the sides. I knew that this would be time-consuming because once again I had to hold screws on the outside while tightening the nuts on the inside, but having worked out how to do this single handedly I got the job done, albeit taking longer than if I’d had a helper. But I thought that I’d do it by myself because this was the last job that could have done with assistance and from then on it should be plain sailing working single-handedly.

After that it was time to fit the door trim. Unfortunately I found that the door jam on one side was slightly damaged and it was a pity that I didn’t notice this at the time because the manufacturer willingly replaced a couple of damaged items that I did tell them about. However, I straightened it the best that I could and as it’s low down on one side, it won’t be too noticeable. Following that came the end pieces, two at each end, that will give the roof its slope.

The last and biggest job of the day was making up and installing the roof beams. Each consists of two halves that had to be bolted together and the central, main roof beam consists of two roof beams joined together, which was a bit tricky as it meant that four pieces of bendy metal had to be held together and secured by four small bolts. But I got it done and then each beam had to go up and be securely fixed in turn, starting with the two smaller beams and finishing with the main one.

At this point I was all ready to fit a couple of end straps before calling it a day when I came across what is the first design error that I’ve encountered. The two straps on the ends of the main beam just could not be fitted as shown in the build manual. It’s no big deal though as all I’ll have to do is drill a couple of new holes in the main beam, one for each strap and then secure them with nuts and bolts as in the manual, but in slightly different positions. But that will be for tomorrow.

Here are the usual end-of-day shots, starting with the front corners.

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And now the rear corners.

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Here are two shots looking into the building through the front doorway.

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And finally a couple of shots taken in the interior.

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It’s now looking much more like a proper building and tomorrow should see me raising the roof, a job that I’ve been looking forward to since the beginning. I hope that I manage to get that done even if I don’t get the doors on, because there is a possibility that we will have some light rain in the early part of next week and it’ll be nice if I at last have somewhere dry where I can begin to store things.

I’ve still got the two ‘tounelles’ (small marquee-type tents) that I bought in the early part of the summer under the caravan and when I moved up from the bottom of my land I found that the carton of one of them had been damaged by damp. It didn’t look as though the ‘tounelle’ itself had been damaged, though, but even so I will be much happier when both of them, plus some other items, are in somewhere that has a roof on 🙂

New tool store – day 3

So here we are on day 3 of the build. It’s not really the third day because I’ve really only been working half days for one reason or another. And today was made even worse because I had some business to deal with this morning and when I arrived back at the caravan I noticed that the ‘sanglier’ (wild boar) had paid me another visit during the night. So I had to restore the land yet again as best I could before I could do anything else.

They keep digging up the same piece of ground and it’s now beginning to look a bit rough down there so I think that I’m maybe going to have to look at some way or other of deterring them from coming up from the little valley and onto my land. For a start I’ll have to try putting up some kind of barrier in the gap in the fence where they seem to be getting through but if that doesn’t work, I’ll have to think about some more extreme measures.

Before I could get going today I was paid a visit by two gorgeous English Setters. They are used by the hunters and one had a collar on with a mobile number on it but I don’t think that there were any hunters out today. I assume that they were together, one was mainly white and black and the other was mainly black. They both poked their heads into my caravan wagging their tails like mad and were incredibly friendly. Before I knew it, the white one had jumped inside and onto my bed but both came out when I called them and the black one even sat when I told him to. What a lovely pair of dogs they were. Maybe I’ll go for a Setter when my house is built, or even a couple…

But on to the tool store. Unfortunately I didn’t get as much done as I’d expected to today and I’ll explain why later. However, I did manage to get the basic structure completed and here are some shots that I took at the end of the afternoon, first as usual from the front corners.

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And now from the rear.

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Well what, you might ask, slowed me down today? It was actually just the rail that you can see running across the rear of the structure half way up the wall in the next picture.

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I had to do what is impossible for one person, namely to secure it in place by sticking some tiny bolts through from the outside, attaching a nut on the inside of each and then tightening them up from the outside while holding them on the inside. Here are a couple of shots that show what I’m talking about.

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I did manage to devise a method but it slowed me down quite a bit. And the problem is that I have two more longer bars that go down the sides to do the same with tomorrow. Oh well, not to worry. At least when I’ve got those in place I really should have the finishing line in sight, with a bit of a way to go but with nothing that should be too challenging for me working single-handed.

New tool store – day 2

The first job today was to get the bottom rails secured onto the new concrete base. I thought that I might be able to drill for the fixing plugs using my cordless drill but it was a futile effort. So I had to visit my storage to get my more powerful mains electric drill out, and lucky I did because although I’d drilled the pilot holes with my cordless, my larger drill still had problems drilling the larger holes for the plugs in a couple of places, presumably due to hitting stones within the concrete.

It was tricky actually, even drilling the pilot holes because although I tried to hold the metal rails down with my shoe while I drilled through the holes that were predrilled in the rails into the concrete below, the metal of the rails is so flimsy that it still kept moving. However, I was delighted when, after making one or two minor adjustments, the rails were fixed so tightly to the concrete base that it’ll take a minor earthquake to shift them.

I was then able to press on following the procedure set out in the construction manual. The first job after securing the rails was to erect the corners, one sheet on each side. Really two people are needed for this because the challenge was to support the first sheet that was fixed to the base along its bottom edge and prevent it falling over while doing the same with the second sheet and then attaching them together. Once they were connected they were safe, but it took longer than necessary because of the fiddling around that was needed.

Then I had to fit the front high level rail that also carries the sliding doors (it can go in two ways and the first time I fitted it the wrong way, of course), then the two side rails, to which I did the same to the first one as it wasn’t clear in the instructions how they should go so the screw holes lined up, and then the rail at the back. That was as far as I could go today and I was very pleased to know that at this point the structure would withstand any minor gusts of winds should there be any.

Here are two shots taken at the end of the day from the front corners.

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And finally, two shots from the rear.

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I think that I’ve now broken the back of the job as fitting the side and rear sheets should be a doddle in comparison as each one can be started by hanging it from the top rails. Anyway, that’s for tomorrow. I’m tired now and my hands are aching from screwing in the fiddly little screws they’ve supplied, so it’s now time for some tea and thoughts of getting an early night. I’d like to think that if I can start reasonably early tomorrow I should get the job nearly finished. It will be nice having somewhere with a roof on at last, to put things in. Pity though, that’s it’s taken out some of the view. Mind you, so will the house, and even more so, when that’s built 🙂

New tool store – day 1

Obviously, I’ve had the build manual for the new store ever since the kit was delivered back at the beginning of July but although I’ve scanned through it a few times, I haven’t spent the time that I should have examining it in detail. So before I got cracking on starting to put the kit together, I had to carefully read through the first few pages and take notes on which components I needed to find and lay out ready for assembly.

There are lots of hand-drawn images showing how the various bits go together but after getting the bits in question in front of me and comparing them to the drawings, many of the illustrations seemed to show them coming together incorrectly with one of the parts somehow being rotated through 90°. However, once I realised that and decided that I’d just use my common sense, I got going and work proceeded OK if not very quickly.

I got the base rails assembled and in place before I had to stop. The reason was that the manufacturer of the building assumed that it would be assembled onto a flat wooden floor whereas mine will be attached directly to concrete. To allow for this they have supplied four corner brackets with bolts to screw into plugs in the concrete whereas I want to fix it much more securely using the 5 screw holes per side that the wood screws usually use.

But firstly the wood screws are too tiddly and short and secondly they haven’t supplied any suitable concrete fixing screws or plugs, so I had to down tools as the afternoon drew on to source some myself. Here’s where I’d got to at that time. First two shots taken from the front corners showing the footprint of the building. The section in the middle of the front edge is where the sliding doors will be placed.

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And now two more shots taken from the rear corners.

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I got what I needed at Brico Marché in Le Bugue but it’s a bit annoying because when I do jobs like this, I keep buying more of what I’ve already got in storage but which is now inaccessible. But never mind, I guess that it’ll all be used in the fullness of time when I start doing jobs in the new house and garden.

In conclusion, a follow-up on this morning’s conversation with Enedis. While I was out I missed another call from Enedis and when I called back we were at last talking about reserving a date for the connection. The earliest that they can manage is the afternoon of 25th November and yes, wouldn’t you just know it, that’s the only day and time that I absolutely can’t be around because that’s when my annual check-up at Périgueux hospital is scheduled for.

They asked if I could leave my ‘coffre de chantier’ in a safe place where they could find it to make the connection and I said that that wouldn’t be necessary as it’s been ready, installed mounted on two metal legs and waiting for over two months. Enedis was quite shocked – should I be surprised? Anyway, the connection will go ahead on that day without my being there because what could I do anyway? They’ll do what’s necessary to test the installation afterwards and it’ll be nice to hopefully come home to a working system of my own that I can at last plug into.

But funny, don’t you think, that I was told some time ago (by SDE24 actually) that my connection was scheduled for 2021 Week 47 and by my calculation Thursday 25th November is slap-bang in that week. Coincidence? Hmmmm… what do you think 😐

Enedis again… oh dear

Yesterday I received an email saying that I’d received a message from Enedis and that I needed to log on to their web site to read it. I naturally thought that after all that has occurred over recent months (it’s been more than 6 months since I initiated my demand for an electrical supply) the message would be confirmation of the date when the connection would finally be made.

But no. It actually said that my ‘dossier’ was incomplete and lacked an item – namely a map ‘cadastrale’ taken from the government web site showing the terrain on which the connection is required. I was gobsmacked because when I initiated the demand back in May, I did so on Enedis’s own web site and the first thing that they demand is a map showing where the terrain is situated and its ‘réference cadastrale’. Nevertheless, I thought that there’s no point kicking up a fuss and just reminded them of that and again supplied the necessary information.

Which brings us to this morning. I’ve just received a telephone call from Enedis saying that they are unable to provide me with an electrical supply… because my land is too far from their nearest connection box ie they have reverted back to Day 1 of the whole process when I was told that the box was some way down the road from my property and that the network had to be extended before I could be connected.

I told the caller that this was not so because SDE24 had already carried out a network extension and that there is now an Enedis ‘coffret’ within 2 metres of the box that I installed two months or more ago on my land, to which it needs to be connected. This came as some surprise to the gentleman on the other end of the line who said that he’d pass on the information. In all honesty, I don’t know what’s going on in that organisation 🙁

New tool store

After having had its components languishing on my land since the first week I arrived here, today I at last made a start on getting it assembled. I started late (as usual) and my intention was to move everything up from the bottom of my land, where it’s been since I moved the caravan down there prior to the summer, to the top in my large trailer. But unfortunately the Kia’s battery let me down today and didn’t have enough charge to start its engine.

It’s been threatening to do so for a week or so now, so I think a new battery is in order. I have to be very careful too, because when the time came to replace the Kia’s battery last time, when the battery level fell below a certain point it operated the central locking, locking both the car and my old house keys in the car – after I’d locked the house up. I ended up having to break a window to get back in, so I don’t want something similar to happen with the caravan. Plus, of course, experience tells you that when it inevitably does let you down, you’ll be miles from home with no jump leads.

The battery is on charge as I type this and will remain so overnight, but I think that tomorrow I’ll have to remind myself of its size so I can make a trip, probably back to Carrefour in Sarlat where I bought the last one, as they delivered such excellent service swapping the new one they’d supplied that failed after a few weeks, promptly and without question. Good service should always be rewarded, I think.

So anyway, while the battery was initially charging, I ended up having to cart a lot of the new store’s components up by hand – unfortunately nearly all of the wall and roof sheets, which are the heaviest. Before I did so I also swept off all of the acorns that had been deposited on the store’s new concrete base, a huge pile actually, hoed the ground around it and levelled the earth a bit pulling as much as I could into the gaps left around the concrete after the shuttering was removed. It’s far from perfect but there’ll be plenty of earth available once they start digging out for the footings and slab for my new house, so final adjustments can be left until later.

Here are all the components laid out ready for me to start work assembling them, hopefully tomorrow.

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It’s far from ideal, leaving the roof and wall sheets lying uncovered on the ground as they are fabricated from only very lightweight metal sheet that’s very easily damaged by a weight pressing or falling on it. However, they should only be there for a day or so, so hopefully nothing untoward will happen in that time. I’m also pleased, as shown by the final pic below, that I’ve now almost succeeded in clearing the bottom of my land again.

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There are now only the wooden table and chairs set that I brought with me from Plazac under a tarpaulin and two generators. I’m hanging onto them for now because the smaller one that I brought from the UK that stopped charging when a switch on its panel got damaged and that I was going to throw away, I think might still work if the switch in question and the associated wiring is replaced correctly. I’d like to try anyway.

The larger one was working fine until I went to restart it after not using it for a couple of weeks or so and found that the engine was ‘blocked’ at a certain point in its revolutionary cycle. I think that I’ll not be able to save it if it’s something like a dropped valve or broken piston ring as it’ll be practically impossible to acquire any spares, but it has some handy parts on it, such as French type sockets that I’ll be able to transfer to the other generator if I can get that working. Anyway, I intend to put both of them into the new store when it’s finished – assuming that there will be enough space – until I can get around to them. The large one also has a practically full fuel tank – contents that are not to be sniffed at now that fuel prices are beginning to go through the roof…

Just like the old days

Before I started to become heavily involved in videos, whenever I flew I always took a little still camera with me and snapped away to my hearts content. It was great when I had my French X-Air that had no doors because then the shots were always clear and sharp but that hasn’t applied so much for all my other aircraft that have had plexiglass windscreens and windows that I’ve had to shoot through.

I wanted to take the opportunity to fly in the Savannah today while the weather was so good and I decided that rather than faff around with one or more of my GoPros that are limited by having battery lives of only an hour, I’d dig out one of my still cameras and see how I could do with that. I swapped my little Sony 20 Megapixel camera for a Nikon Coolpix some time ago but some comparative test shots that I did recently seemed to indicate that actually the Sony might still have the edge, so I decided to take that with me on today’s flight.

The flight I planned is shown in the pic below.

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My plan was to head south past Belvès to Fumel and then on to another little airfield in the Lot et Garonne called Tremons that I’ve been wanting to take a look at for some time because we know someone who keeps (or kept, it’s been a long time) a Taylorcraft there. Then I planned to turn eastwards past another couple of airfields until I got to Cahors, where I planned to turn left past the city of the same name before returning to Malbec via the towns of Gourdon and Sarlat.

It all started off so well and here’s a shot that I took as I flew out past Les Eyzies.

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After Les Eyzies came Belvès and here are a series of shots that I took as I approached the town and then flew on by.

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The next waypoint was supposed to be the the town of Fumel but as I continued to fly south I could see that trouble was beginning to brew in the form of a huge low bank of cloud.

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If I had been flying to a specific destination that I knew was going to be clear of cloud when I got there, like when I flew up to La Rochelle to get my radio installation inspected and approved, I would have carried on with my originally planned flight as the cloud was a long way below me (I was at about 2100 feet). But this wasn’t the case and it became more and more evident as time passed that both Fumel and Tremons would be totally obscured by the cloud, making it pointless to continue with this segment of the flight. So I decided to turn left and see if it was possible to cut across the corner to Cahors. Here are some closer shots of the cloudbank on either side of the aircraft.

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But as I flew on and could see towards Cahors it became more and more obvious that the airfield and the city would also both be obscured by the cloud cover.

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So a change of plan was called for. I decided that I’d continue on an easterly heading (see the red line in the first image of this post) until I intersected the return route to Malbec some way to the north of Cahors, continue with my plan to take some shots of Gourdon and then to head for a touch-and-go at Sarlat, where I originally hadn’t intended to land at all. Here is a series of shots that I took as I flew across country with Gourdon gradually coming into frame in the distance on the right.

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And here are some shots that I took as I flew, now on a northerly heading, towards and past the town of Gourdon with its ancient church perched on its hilltop.

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After Gourdon, I turned slightly off my planned track to the left, so I could join overhead Sarlat-Domme. Here’s a shot taken as I approached the airfield at a height of about 2200 feet.

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And finally, after doing a touch-and-go at Sarlat, I continued on past the town of Sarlat heading for a landing back at Malbec.

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So I was disappointed not to have been able to make it to Fumel and Tremons, but there will be another day for that. Taken overall, the flight itself was a great success as the air was calm and there were only a very few bumpy bits. I was reminded of how great the Savannah is, despite having plexiglass windows, as a photographic platform because of how stable it is, especially on days like today. I certainly won’t be giving up taking my GoPro videos but I’ll have to make sure that I do more shooting of purely still photographs in the future because they are really worth the effort. At least I think so 😉

De-branched

I’m typing this while swelteringly hot and under concerted attack by ladybirds. We’re expecting a high of 16 degrees C today and it’s a lovely day out and already very hot. But I can’t open my caravan door or roof vents because once again there are huge swarms of ladybirds outside all of whom are trying to get into my caravan. As fast as I can catch and throw two out four more come in so I’m having to bite the bullet and keep everything battened down.

On to today’s subject. I’ve been wanting to get cracking building my store-cum-workshop as the base that was laid-down a week or so ago is now amply hard enough to take its fixing screws. I’ve been unable to, however, because there has been a low branch from one of the adjacent oak trees hanging over it which if left would have likely fallen onto the new building if it was cut after it had been built. So I had to arrange for it to be taken down before I started building.

But the branch was one of six that needed lopping from two of the large oaks that overhang my land, several of which were over the area on which one of the corners of my house will be located. So I really needed them all to be taken down at the same time and as the weather is so good, the guys who laid the base came back yesterday to clear away their shuttering and lop the branches, returning again this morning to clear everything away. Here are some shots of the result.

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So now not only can I go ahead and start constructing my new little building but everything is also now ready for when the builders start on my new house. And the timing was good because the leaves on the trees were also turning meaning that their sap has now fallen and they should heal nicely from their wounds over the winter. So all in all, a win-win all round.

Because the weather is so good I prepared a 1½ flight in the Savannah for today. However, although I’ve charged my GPS etc ready I still need to get fuel. So I took another look at the weather and it’ll be the same again tomorrow but with a light breeze from the north, which will help landing back at Malbec. I’ve decided, therefore, that I’ll get the Savannah fuelled and prepped today and do the flight tomorrow. It’s been a longish time… yet again 😐

Bit of luck today

I’ve been waiting for the next step to happen in my electricity connection saga – hopefully actually connecting up my supply – but as nothing has occurred since the last two gentlemen from Bouygues Energies came and did whatever it was that they had to do a few days ago, I thought that it would be a good idea to find out what’s now going on. And lucky I did!

I have a contact in Enedis, a lady who was very helpful in resolving the logjam that existed between Enedis and SDE24 and getting things moving again. I thought that I should make contact with her again and did so yesterday by email. She came back today with a very helpful reply that indicated that despite my having made an application for a temporary electrical supply to be used before and during the construction of my new house, Enedis was working on the basis that I needed a permanent supply.

I therefore clarified the point and she came back very promptly with another helpful reply saying that in that case, the approach needed to be somewhat different. First I needed to select an energy supplier (ie EDF or one of several other suppliers none of whom are any cheaper – so much for market competition) and then I needed to contact that supplier and make an application for a ‘Branchement Provisoire’.

Getting this information is like drawing teeth, as my father used to say – slow and very painful. She told me that I had to get a confirmatory reference from my chosen supplier starting ‘A06..’ and once Enedis had received this they could, usually within 48 hours, provide a connection date.

This information was excellent news, but given my experience of the system to date, I gloomily assumed that these additional demands would take days. But not so. I chose EDF as my supplier because (a) they didn’t come out dearer than any of their competitors and (b) they already knew of me as a former client, which I though might be helpful. I then trawled their web site to find out how to make my application for a ‘Branchement Provisoire’ and was dismayed to find that you’re expected to do so by calling a certain customer service number.

I say ‘dismayed’ because usually this means that when you make the call, either (a) you enter into a labyrinth of ‘press 1,2 etc’ choices that are so inpenetrable for a non-French speaker that you eventually end up getting cut off without ever getting through to the department you need to or (b) you end up talking to someone with a strong regional accent who speaks at the speed of a machine gun.

Neither of those things happened today because having got over the first hurdle (the ‘1,2 etc’ choices) I was connected with a charming young lady who not only spoke really clearly but also understood my problem and set about resolving it. In a matter of a few minutes she had enough of my details (name, address, phone number, email address, power requirements) to say that she’d send me a form by post to sign and return and could provide me with the ‘A06..’ reference that I needed.

I then zipped off another email to my Enedis contact with the reference and she replied by return with an email saying, ‘Parfait!’ So that I think is the last step that I need to take in pursuit of my electricity connection. The ball is now back in Enedis’s court and hopefully, as the lady said, I should receive a firm connection date in the next 24-48 hours. In the meantime, all I’ll need to do is sign and return the new EDF contract. I hope that that’s it, anyway…

Another new theme

I decided that I didn’t much like the Writee theme after all. It looked too funereal and formal with its stark black and white appearance. So I looked around for another one and came across the Generate Press theme that I actually downloaded a very long time ago but never installed. I’ve now started using it on My Trike after tweaking it a little bit to get my slider into the heading, which took a little while to work out how to do.

So after not changing the My Trike theme for something like three years, that’s a couple of new ones in two days. That always happens because you can only decide whether you like a theme enough to keep it after seeing it for a while and getting a feel for how comfortable you are with it. So now I’ll see how I go with Generate Press 😉

I’m ready

Two guys from Bouyges Energies showed up first thing this morning. I first spotted them with their small white van doing something at the electrical box down the road into which the new box placed on my land is connected. I don’t know whether they were finishing off the connection that the previous Bouyges team had worked on in the rain a few days ago or possibly just inspecting it, but pretty soon after they’d finished down there, they came up and opened the new box on my land, did what they had to do there as well and left after a few minutes.

So we’re slowly inching forward to finally getting my ‘coffre de chantier’ connected, which will give me my own electrical supply at last. However, although I’ve fitted my box out as I want with two interior circuit breakers and two external sockets, up to now it still wasn’t ready to go because I hadn’t succeeded in installing the necessary earth. The problem was that it employs a metre length of copper rod that has to be banged into the ground and this wasn’t possible because at around a depth of 45 cms it hit a solid rock layer that prevented it from being banged in any further.

Wim kindly loaned me his metal ‘rock basher’ and sledgehammer but this still didn’t work for me – the underlying rock layer is just too hard – but then I had a brainwave. Behind the ‘coffre’ along the side of the road there’s a bank created, I think, years ago when they put the water main through. The bank is around half a metre high and it occurred to me that if I banged my copper rod in on its top, it would have that additional distance to go before hitting the rocky layer.

And so it turned out. I didn’t think of it before because I was trying to position the earth only about a metre from the ‘coffre’, but there was no real reason for that except I had only bought a metre of earth cable. After taking only a few minutes to bang the rod into the ground I bought another 3 metre length yesterday and was able to finish off the connection today.

Here’s the interior of my ‘coffre de chantier’ with the earth cable now connected into the system.

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This next shot shows the earth cable running out of the bottom of the ‘coffre’ inside the corrugated plastic ‘gaine’ which protects it, up to the earth rod on the top of the bank. The distance is less than 2 metres, so the difference is nothing really.

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This final shot shows where the earth cable connects to the copper rod. I’ve covered it with rocks to protect it, as had been done at my old house, and also to clearly show where it’s located should the surrounding vegetation become thicker during the period that it’s in use.

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So I’m now completely ready for my ‘coffre de chantier’ to be connected up to the mains, and I can’t wait. It’s becoming much colder now, especially at night and in the early morning, so I do really need my own electrical supply so I can keep a heater going in the caravan 24/7, as I did in my old house.

And talking about the night and the early morning, I unfortunately got a nasty surpise again this morning. The wild boar came back last night and dug up the same area on the bottom of my land that they dug up previously. Luckily, the affected area was much smaller this time and it took me only a few minutes to level it again, but as it had already been damaged once, it looks much scruffier this time. If this keeps happening I’ll have to decide how I can cope with it. When I’ve managed to establish more of a garden, I won’t be able to face having it constantly coming under attack from the wild boar.

New start, new theme

So having moved My Trike to a new hosting provider, I thought that it was also about time to change the look of the web site as a whole. It’s looked the same for over three years I guess, although I can’t exactly remember the last time I changed its ‘theme’, but I thought that now would be a good time to take a look and see what new themes are now available.

The design I’ve used for the Malbec web site has what’s called a slider in its heading, a very nice page feature that cross-fades a series of images from one to the next, and I thought that I’d like to have a similar one on My Trike. But it’s not that easy because each theme design has its own layout and I wanted to also keep the basic layout that I’ve developed over time for My Trike and several themes with sliders wouldn’t have allowed me to do that.

But I’ve more or less managed to do it with a new theme call Writee. I’ve had to fiddle with it a bit because no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get the slider that’s incorporated in its design to work and I’ve had to use a third-party ‘plug-in’ instead. The result is that the header isn’t quite as the designer intended but I doubt anyone would have known if I hadn’t said anything.

So welcome to Writee. Comments and opinions are always welcome 😉

I’m back!!

The migration has been successful and I’m now back with what I think will be a faster loading web site. There was a bit of a hiccup which led to a downtime of an hour or so but things were resolved and I think that everything’s running smoothly again.

Like I said in my last post, there’s always the potential for things to go wrong but if they do, it will only delay things for a short while and nothing will be lost, so long as you’ve taken proper backups. On this occasion they weren’t needed, I’m glad to say.

That’s enough excitement for today – and I haven’t even had time for lunch yet…

Oh, by the way, while the changeover was happening there was some movement on the electricity front. A team from Bouyges Energies (remember them – one of their engineers turned up months ago and said that before I could be connected up, a cable needed to be put into the ground, a simple job as the ‘gaine’ was already in place…) turned up and in the pouring rain, apparently connected up the cable that had been hanging out of the side of the box that had been installed by the previous team. Are you still with me?

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So the cable is in and connected, but I’m still not connected up, of course. That will require a visit by a further team – my guess is from Enedis – who will be responsible for making the ultimate connection to the box that I put in place (see above) weeks and weeks ago.

So that will be four teams involved – EDF, Enedis, SDE24 and Bouyges Energies. Is it any wonder that things take so long to get done and cost so much in France?

Ok, here we go… again

Up to just after I came to France, my ‘My Trike’ web site was hosted on a business account with several others that I ran at the time but which have now all been run down since my retirement. ‘My Trike’ is the only one left, but it has remained on the business web hosting account that has been costing me considerably more per month than I really need to be paying. So today I’m going to be doing something about it, by terminating my account with my current (UK based) web host and migrating ‘My Trike’ to a new (US based) one and in the process saving myself a considerable amount of money per year.

Migrating a web site to a new host is not something that you do lightly because there is an element of risk involved. You have to take great care to back everything up properly, both the ‘simple’ web page data and the more complex, such as any, usually, MySQL databases that are used. If you miss anything or foul anything up, especially with the databases, then you can end up at best with lost and irrecoverable data or at worst with a non-functioning web site, possibly as, in my case, after many years compiling it. And you also need to know what you’re doing when it comes to recovering the data you’ve backed up onto the new host’s servers.

But I’ve done it twice before, I think from memory, with ‘My Trike’ so I’m already quite experienced in the process and will be doing it all over again today. This will be my final post on my old hosting company’s server and when I come back it will be with ‘My Trike’ having been migrated over to the new one. So here’s ‘fingers crossed’ and looking foward to seeing you over on the other side. If you get a ‘400 error – page not found’ message when you next try to log on you’ll know that I didn’t make it…

Things that go ‘oink’ in the night

For the second day in a row I ended up today totally knackered and running with sweat. Yesterday it was because of my futile attempts to bang a 1 metre long metal rod into my rocky ground but today the reason was quite different and I’ll explain why.

Yesterday I noted that from a distance there was something weird about the ground at the bottom of my land – some raised brown strips that I thought might be piles of leaves or old grass cuttings, but I thought nothing more about them as I was focused on sorting out my caravan’s water supply and fitting out my electrical box. However, when Wim arrived this morning for our usual Sunday morning coffee together he said, ‘I see that you’ve been visited by the sanglier (wild boar)’, and he was right.

A small herd (I think, from the extent of the damage and the hoof marks) had invaded my land a couple of nights ago and wreaked havoc.

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As we have seen so many times before on our grass runways here, they love land on which the grass has been cut because it allows them to get to the roots so much quicker than when they have to fight their way through long, thick stems and when they do, they attack the ground with both their snouts and their hooves and cause a lot of destruction in the process. Here are some shots of what my hitherto quite level grass looked like after they had departed.

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And these weren’t the worst bits. I didn’t take any more pictures because I wanted to get cracking on reinstating the ground as soon as possible, but in the centre of the largest and most severely damaged area they had dug down over six inches (15 cms) in places and tossed large divots aside for quite a distance. As we were expecting rain (it’s raining now as I type this) I wanted to start repairing the damage as soon as possible as I thought that hopefully the rain would help settle the ground down again, so I got out my trusty rake and set to the job in hand.

It took over two hours of hard work that were thoroughly exhausting and as it was sunny with a temperature of about 16 degrees C, I was soon dripping with sweat. The trouble is, the damage that the boar do is not predictable or consistent. Some of the ground can just be flipped back over again and trodden down, but not that much. The majority of the divots they create are tossed aside from the hole from whence they came so pretty soon you’re into a game of patchwork turfing.

Sure, you want to try to get the land as level as possible but you also want to replace the divots with as much grass showing upwards as possible, so you end up bent over fitting pieces back into the holes by hand like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. However, I eventually did as much as I thought I would today and although the ground really now needs rolling, it didn’t come out too badly as the following shots show.

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Indeed, from further up the land near the top, you’d hardly notice any difference.

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The question now, of course, is what is the memory-span of a wild boar. I went onto the land below mine and found several large holes that the boar had created before moving up onto mine where presumably the pickings were easier. My problem will be if they remember that and come straight back onto mine and do a repeat job. I’d hate to have to do what I did today all over again… 😐

Mixed results today

Since my caravan was connected to its own water supply I’ve noticed that the water has a bit of a nasty smell and it also seems to taste a bit off. I didn’t notice the problem while I was collecting water from my neighbour’s outside tap and if I draw water straight from my own tap it seems to be OK. The obvious conclusion therefore, is that it’s something to do with either the hosepipe that I’ve used to connect the caravan to my tap or the pipework inside the caravan itself.

I doubt that the caravan pipework is to blame because it uses standard domestic plastic tubing that is widely used these days and will also be used in my new house when the time comes, so the finger of suspicion points at the hosepipe I’ve used. It’s my original garden hose from Plazac, which I’ve had now for at least a couple of years.

Brico Marché at Le Bugue is my new ‘Brico’ port of call as it’s far closer than Brico Depot at Trellissac and carries a much wider range of stock than either Bricojem at Rouffignac (I went there this evening to buy a metre of earth cable and they were out of stock…) or Les Briconautes at Montignac, which I think is just a bit further away anyway. I was in there the other day and I thought I’d take a look at what hosepipes they had on offer and I’m glad that I did.

Brico Depot only had the usual coloured plastic pipe in various diametres whereas I was interested to see that as well as all of those, Brico Marché also had some reinforced transparent hosepipes which were marked as being ‘Phthalate Free’. This got me thinking. Phthalates are used as plasticizers and also in hundreds of other products, like shampoos and cosmetics. They have not been identified as being ‘bad’ for you but they are not ‘good’ either, especially for older people among which they have found to be responsible for causing early deaths.

So I thought that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to swap my old hosepipe for a new ‘phthalate free’ transparent one and I did it today, having had to make a return journey to Le Bugue because I found that my current fittings weren’t compatible. So here’s what my caravan water supply now looks like (sorry for my phone camera deciding to play silly out-of-focus games today).

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And what’s my conclusion? The water does now seem to have lost its odour and bad taste, but as phthalates are odourless and tasteless, it may not be because of the different type of plastic that I’m now using. It’s more likely that as my old hosepipe has been standing open to the air with ‘old’ water in it, internally it has taken on some of the characteristics of stagnant water and needs some kind of clean-through to be suitable for carrying drinking water again. However, I won’t bother doing that now I have my new hosepipe as the old one will in future only be used in its normal role as a garden hose.

But anyway, I count that as a win… it’s nice to be able to make a lovely, fresh tasting pot of tea again that doesn’t smell and taste as though it’s been made from water that someone’s washed their feet in!

The other project that I was working on today was the box housing the components for my temporary electricity supply. I still have no news on when Enedis will be turning up to connect me up but I decided that I wanted to be all ready in advance of the event so there will be no delay and it will be a simple matter of plugging my caravan into the box as soon as it’s made live.

In order to do that, I needed to mount a couple of waterproof sockets onto the outside of the box (other people have put a single socket inside but I didn’t want to do that) connected via a couple of circuit breakers as I want one for myself and a spare for eg the building contractors or, indeed, just washing my car say, and I don’t want whatever happens with the second one to affect the supply to my caravan. And the last thing that you must do here in France is provide an approved earth for the system in the form of a metre metal rod banged into the ground.

Here’s a shot of the inside of the box after I’d made the two connections (line and neutral) to the main system earth-leak detector (‘disjoncteur’) on the left to the two circuit breakers for my two sockets on the right. The black cables on the right hand wall of the box are the two separate supplies to the external sockets.

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Here’s a shot of the two external sockets. As can be seen in the image, I’ve also waterproofed the joint between the box and the housing in which the sockets are mounted.

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The two external sockets are of the usual French design.

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The two sockets have a common earth and the connection to the system earth is by a simple connector in the bottom of the box.

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It’s a simple matter to make a connection to the heavy system earth cable which I’ve passed through the bottom of the box contained in a concertina plastic tube known here is a ‘gaine’. But it’s then that the problems start. The other end of the system earth cable has to be connected to the earth rod, in my case a heavy copper one of nearly 1.5 cm diameter, driven a metre into the ground. Here’s a shot of what I’m talking about.

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Seems simple enough, so what’s the problem? The problem is that the ground here is so rocky that the rod won’t go down any deeper than 40 cm, which is not enough for an approved earth. How can you get round that? You either have to use a more robust method of banging the rod into the ground (I’ve been using a club hammer and I’ll probably have to get my huge sledge hammer out of storage) or you can use multiple earths. The problem with that is it’s a bit hit-and miss. I could, for example, cut my meter rod in two and bang each half 50 cm into the ground and then link both as a single earth for the system.

The trouble is that you then have to start taking some careful resistance measurements to ensure that the arrangement works properly and, more importantly, safely. I think that I’ll go the sledge hammer route first and see how I do with that before starting to get in more deeply 😉

Today’s news

There’s barely a day goes by at the moment without there being some kind of news. Firstly, the new Malbec web site. As I mentioned in my last post, a week or so ago we lost the original web site that I created for Malbec airfield. I received no notification that it was going to happen, but to be fair, some months ago I also lost the free email address that I’d used when I set the site up and they probably sent me a message on that that I wouldn’t have received to tell me that it was going to happen.

Anyway, I’ve worked pretty solidly over the past few days and the week-end to create a replacement using another free web-site service (yes, they do exist, you just have to compromise a bit over the domain name) and ended up working into the early hours of this morning to finish it off. In fact I’ve created two replacements in that time. The first one turned out to be incredibly slow and kept throwing up database connection errors. This was probably because it was on an Indian web host’s servers where local demand is very high, although to a point I was prepared to live with that.

However, the deal-breaker (if you can call signing up for a free service a ‘deal’) came when I couldn’t get email to work. The Malbec web site, like My Trike, has a ‘Contact’ facility with a pre-defined form that uses a special server email function. This can have two problems. Firstly, if the server is recognised by recipient email servers (like Gmail and MS Outlook) as having a reputation for spam, then any messages generated by the form will be filtered out and deleted before they get to their destinations even though they are not spam. The second problem is that if the web server is overloaded and running slowly, its email function will time-out and the messages will never actually be sent.

I think that my first choice of a replacement free web site service suffered fom both of those problems because although in testing a very few messages did get through, the majority didn’t and none were delivered to Gmail and Outlook addresses, which have strong spam filters. So I was forced to look for yet another replacement and actually this did me a huge favour because although I wasted a lot of time signing up for several free services that I then immediately rejected, either because I didn’t like the style of the free domain names that were on offer or because only after signing up did I find that email was a ‘paid-for’ extra, I eventually came across an amazing free service offered by x10hosting.com.

This has turned out to be unbelievably good, although not for the inexperienced as they don’t offer much in the way of basic help. They expect you to know what you’re doing, which suits me as I guess that that discourages them from being swamped by newbies clogging up their servers and slowing them down. As a result, the new Malbec web site has turned out to be much better than the old one that was lost, much faster and with all of the facilities that I needed for it to do what I wanted it to. Here’s a shot of the finished home page which if clicked on will take you through to the actual Malbec web site itself.

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So that has been a big win. The next thing that happened today was a car drew up on the roadside outside my caravan and a lady got out clutching several sheets of paper and a map. It turned out that she was a surveyor, on behalf of EDF, Enedis or SDE24 I didn’t quite catch, although I think the latter, and her job was to get the new electric cable that was laid last week permanently marked on the map. She said that I will be connected up very soon now, but experience tells me that there’s a large discrepancy between the French idea of ‘soon’ and my own, so I’ll just go on waiting… patiently… NOT 😐

I finished off my last post talking about acorns and how I’ve been plagued by them dropping everywhere and on my caravan roof. Today I’ve suffered from another plague – ladybirds! We had a cold night last night and I had to get up and put more covers on my bed, but this morning it turned out to be somewhet weirdly quite warm but foggy. The fog burnt off and we’ve had a gorgeous warm, sunny afternoon and I’ve been going out and about in just a tee shirt (you know what I mean… ).

I don’t know where they all came from, but by the early afternoon the air was full of millions of ladybirds, most of whom it seemed wanted to join me in my caravan. As fast as I could catch and throw one out, two or more would come flying in and in the late afternoon as the sun was beginning to dip below the trees on the other side of the road, you could see millions of tiny ladybird wings shimmering in its rays.

I threw dozens out but quite a few are still with me in the caravan. Sadly, you can’t convince them that they belong outside and experience tells you that they will end up as tiny, brightly coloured, dry, shrivelled husks on the windowsills and elsewhere. Nature, I guess, has always been thus… 🙁

You win some, you lose some

When I came to France over 9 years ago, I brought with me an old generator that I’d used when I was working on MYRO on the airfield and needed power. It only had a power rating of about 2.2 kW but I used it while I was waiting for electricity to be connected here in France at my old house and a few more times when we had power cuts. After that, for most of the time it stayed neglected and unused in my workshop.

I needed it again though, when I moved out of my old house and into the caravan on the land on which my new house is going to be built. The trouble was that as you’d expect, it wouldn’t start. My friend Victor then breathed his magic on it and got it starting and running like a Swiss watch, and it did so for a week or so before something happened to a switch on its panel causing it to disintegrate and short between its high (220 V) and low (110 V) settings and the generator to stop charging.

So I had to replace it at very short notice, on a week-end with no shops open, in the height and heat of the summer before everything in my fridge started to perish and I did so with one I found on Le Bon Coin, the French small ads web site. I chose it because it had a fairly high output of around 4.5 kW that would allow me to run my fridge, kettle, fan, laptop and microwave and charge my phone all at the same time. It was also quite economically priced at only 200€.

OK, it was a bit scruffy but it started and performed well, the downside being that its quite large motor had shocking running costs of around 500€ per month. So the electricity it produced was very expensive, considerably more so than my original generator, but in the absence of an alternative I had no choice but to go along with it.

However, the alternative came after 2 or 3 weeks when my neighbour kindly agreed for me to connect my caravan to their house’s supply, a common thing it turns out in France where getting a new supply connected can take a long time, as I’ve found out to my own cost. However, once my caravan was connected to my neighbour’s house, all was well despite the heavy drop in power due to the length (150 metres) of the cable. That was up until we had a power cut a few weeks ago and I found that something had gone wrong with the generator’s motor, like a dropped valve or broken piston ring, and it wouldn’t turn over, rendering the machine useless.

I’ve made some excellent purchases from Le Bon Coin, the concrete mixer that I recently bought and mentioned in a recent post being one of them, but unfortunately, that generator can’t be included in that category. The seller couldn’t have known what was about to happen and the experience can only go down as bad luck – like it says in the heading, you win some, you lose some. But that didn’t matter as I was plugged into my neighbour’s house.

However, that changed unexpectedly yesterday, not forever but for the next few days. For reasons that I won’t go into I have to disconnect my cable from my neighbour’s house, from today until Monday afternoon, so as of yesterday I needed to find another generator yet again at very short notice. Fortunately, Le Bon Coin again came to the rescue and I found one that looked ideal with an output of 3.5 kW, so probably less expensive to run than the last one, and with wheels again to make it easy to move around. It looked very clean in the ad and the seller assured me that it was in very good condition, and with an asking price of only 100€ the fact that it was located down in the Landes meant that it would still be overall an economic buy.

And so it proved when I turned up at the seller’s home in Mont-de-Marsan yesterday afternoon. The machine started immediately and ran without making any nasty noises or smoke, so I was happy to hand over the cash and bring it back to Fleurac. Here are some shots that I took of it running earlier this afternoon.

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It’s running as I type this and unlike the big old machine that it replaces, I can hardly hear it at all from my caravan, so that will please my neighbours I’m sure. I was also delighted to find that my kettle boils quite quickly again and my microwave is back to its full power. I’ve bought two jerricans of fuel to tide me over for the week-end and I’ll have to see in due course whether its running costs are also lower than those of the machine it replaces. So for the moment, it looks as though this machine is a ‘win’. I hope I’ll still be thinking the same in a few days time.

Now on to something completely different that I’ve also lost within the last few days. Back in 2016 I think it was, I created a web site for our home airfield, Chateau Malbec. I used a free web site service, which meant that it had a slightly weird domain name (http://malbec-ulm.rf.gd) but it otherwise looked great and performed as well as any ‘paid-for’ service. That was until a week or so ago, when I aimlessly tried to log on and found that it had a database connection error.

To cut a long story short, it appears that with no notification, the service provider decided to cancel its free service and go exclusively for paid-for web site hosting. When I initially set the web site up, I’d kept copies of the coding for all of its pages on my home computer together with a back-up of the data on the hosting server. Unfortunately, however, my home PC suffered a computer hard drive crash not long after I’d created the web site and I lost an enormous amount of irreplaceable personal and other data, including those back-ups.

This wouldn’t have mattered if I’d then downloaded new back-ups of the Malbec site from the hosting server, but stupidly I didn’t. Now I’m paying the price as I’ve had to start building a new replacement Malbec web site from scratch using another free web site service. It won’t be easy because the old web site was all in French (naturally) and it had been meticulousy checked by a native French speaker, which may be difficult to achieve again to the same standard as before.

However, we’ll see how things go, and there is still a long way to go. For anyone wanting to watch progress, you can click on the image of the new home page below to see the current state of play.

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And finally, something about acorns. I’ve mentioned previously how I’m currently being plagued by acorns. They have been falling like rain from the trees under which my caravan is positioned to the extent that they’ve often sounded like gunfire when they’ve been hitting the roof. Quite often it’s been hard getting to sleep or I’ve been woken up in the night when I have managed to drop off but the situation came to a head the other evening when we had a bit of a storm pass through with some high-ish winds.

For an hour or so it sounded as though I was under attack as so many were dislodged and came tumbling down and I dread what my caravan’s roof might now look like. Wim assured me that they sound much worse than they really are and it’s unlikely that the roof will have been damaged, but I won’t relax until I can get hold of a ladder and see for myself. But to show the extent of the problem, here are a couple of shots showing the state of the new concrete base that was laid last week and the ground around it.

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Walking over the ground is like walking on sea shells as they crackle and break underfoot – in a way it’s quite disconcerting. However, although there’s the odd latecomer, there can’t be many more left to drop so maybe things will become a bit more peaceful around here. And I’ll start getting some better nights’ sleep 😐

It’s started

After a certain amount of everyone, including the mayor, standing around talking, which seems ‘de rigueur’ in France, engines were started earlier this morning and work began on connecting me up to electricity. It didn’t take long before the chap operating the ‘mini pelle’ (small excavator) had uncovered the empty plastic tube (‘gaine’) that was buried a few years ago and runs up from the corner of my land to the ‘coffre’ (electric box) 80 or 90 metres away on the other side of the road.

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They have a ‘cable snake’, a long stiffish cable on a spool, which presumably they intend to shove up the ‘gaine’ until it emerges at the other end and which they’ll then withdraw with a strong cord attached to it (I saw this happening when they were laying cables in the ground at my old house just before I moved). They’ll then attach the cord to the electrical cable and pull that through until it is inside the ‘gaine’ and sticking out at both ends, ready to be connected at the ‘coffre’ on the other side of the road and a new ‘coffre’ that will be the source of supply on my land.

I don’t think that I’ll be getting connected up today – I think that all they’ll do is get the cable in place, although I’m not sure – but at least everything is now getting underway and it must surely happen quite soon. Mustn’t it?

FOOTNOTE

It’s just after 4.00 pm as I type this and the small team has now finished, cleared away and left for the day. As I expected, they’ve only extended the main supply cable down to my land and put a box (‘coffre principal’) into place ready for either Enedis or a contractor to come along and actually make the necessary connections to make it live. Here are the results of their handiwork.

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So although it’s a big advance, the project is far from finished. The big question now is, ‘When will my connection actually be made?’ This is an imponderable. It’s not unusual to see boxes like this standing untouched for many weeks – the new boxes that were put in outside my old house that I left at the end of June still haven’t been connected up. I guess that I’ll just have to wait patiently for a bit longer to find out 😐

Guess what…

Mr Bouet, the mayor of Fleurac who has been fighting my case with the water and electricity suppliers, originally told me that the workmen would be along yesterday to do the necessary work to connect me up to electricity. I wasn’t too surprised when they didn’t show up but continud to live in hope.

He dropped by again today to tell me that he had just approved a request to dig up the road opposite my land and that they would definitely be along tomorrow. I said that I’d be very happy if they did their stuff any time this week.

Towards the end of the afternoon a hirsute young man with a full bushy beard together with another more earnest looking young man clutching a photocopied map pulled up in a work van on the road just outside my caravan. After a brief conversation we shook hands and he said that they’ll be along tomorrow mornng at about 9.30 am to do the job.

Here’s what I found parked up near the ‘poubelles’ (waste bins) a few minutes ago when I popped out to Rouffignac to pick up a few things.

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Hurrah! And it shows that Mr Bouet’s efforts bore results because originally SDE24, the organisation responsible, originally said that the work was scheduled for week 47, mid-November. It helps to have powerful friends with contacts in France 😉

I’ve moved

I started later in the afternoon than I’d have liked but I did succeed yesterday in making the move back up from the bottom to the top of my land. There are still one or two things left down there to be moved up later or disposed of but they can wait for a day or two as I didn’t finish until after dark and the move took quite a lot of effort. However, I was pleased that I shifted the caravan and its contents with no disasters, moved everything under cover that I needed to and and got the interior of the caravan back into some sort of order after having removed quite a bit of heavy stuff for the move and moved other items around inside so they couldn’t be damaged.

Here are some shots taken this morning. The caravan is a bit closer to the road than I would have liked but I’m happy with how it’s turned out as at least it’s very level and stable with very little step up into the doorway.

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Its positioning vis a vis the trees has worked out pretty well as it’s not too close to them and I’ve got a fair sized clear area between the caravan and the trees where I can keep things out of view from the road.

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It’s closer to the water tap than I anticipated but one positive outcome of that is that I was able to extend the paved area that I placed around the tap to give me a flagstone right outside the caravan’s door. Much better than stepping out onto grass or mud plus it’s the height of luxury now having running water in the caravan, even if it is just cold for the time being!

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Here’s one final shot from the road end showing the clear space behind the caravan that I mentioned above. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to get even my small trailer up there but I’ll have to wait and see. I hope that I will.

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A huge up-side of the move is that I’m now back with a super, south-facing view from my caravan door.

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However, there is one down-side. I had a small problem with acorns falling onto its roof when the caravan was down at the bottom, but now it’s far, far worse. Up-top they are falling like rain and sometimes it’s like a fusillade when several fall simultaneously and all pound on the roof together. In fact, some are so loud that they almost sound like rocks hitting the roof and not only do I fear for the caravan’s plastic roof vents but I also hope that its roof is not being dented by them. Wim tells me that this year is a year of abundance for acorns, which go in a two-year cycle, so next year there will probably be very few of them. All I hope is that this will only last for a week or so more because getting to sleep is difficult when just as you’re dropping off there’s a sound like a couple of gun shots when two of the ruddy things hit the roof!

Thwarted?

Hmmm… I don’t know yet. My plan for today is (was?) to move my caravan from the bottom of my land back up to the top nearer to the road. The guys who laid the concrete base for my new tool store also did a bit of levelling of the ground up there with their tractor and shovel, both for the base and the adjacent area where I intend to site the caravan, and afterwards I spent an hour or so levelling it up a bit more and tidying it up by hand in readiness. However, this is the sight greeting me looking out of my caravan door this morning.

Looking towards the south.

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Looking towards the west, towards the top of my land.

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Looking north-ish.

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So we’ve got a very thick mist but even worse, we had a very heavy dew last night and everything outside is soaking wet, including the grass, which looks as though it’s been quite heavily rained on. And wet grass and muddy ground was just what I was looking to avoid by moving my caravan up the slope while we were still enjoying ‘good’ weather. But it looks, for the moment at least, as though the weather may have thwarted those plans, although not for certain. The weather forecast is for sunshine and a high of about 19 degrees Celsius later this aftenoon, so with a bit of luck everything may have dried out by then and the move will be possible, but I’ll just have to wait and see.

On a much more optimistic note, I had a fantastic meeting with my builders, Batim of Terrasson, yesterday afternoon and came away with a hugely positive feeling for my new house project and how they are dealing with it. Yesterday we went through the technical layout, plumbing and electrical services mainly, and materials and colours. I created my house design on my computer using an architect’s software suite and although it wasn’t up to full professional standard, it was pretty good. They, however, have taken it upon themselves to go to the next level and reproduce my model in much greater detail on their own professional system.

The results are similar to my own but to a much higher standard. By doing what they’ve done, Thomas, their technical guy who I worked with yesterday, had got to intimately know my model and had developed his own uncanny understanding of what I was aiming for. Therefore he knew all of the right questions to ask knowing that I would have all of the answers he needed to button the project up, which I did. So after just under two hours I came away with two detailed technical drawings of my new house and all of its internal and external systems and he was in a position on behalf of Batim to officially get the project underway.

The general layout and floorplan.

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The technical layout for the electrical and plumbing services.

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The only problem I have is with the lighting. I queried the kind of fittings that they intend to use and Thomas said that they’d be using what are described as ‘DCL’. He showed me a picture on his computer and I said that I had reservations and would have to look them up on the internet. In fact I will have to reject them because (a) I said that I want to have no hanging light fittings anywhere in the house and (b) I want the lighting in the living room and corridor to be LED inset into the ceiling and the other to be flush ceiling mounted. Here’s what ‘DCL’ looks like.

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It has a socket for a light bulb (5) that plugs straight into a ceiling fitting or alternatively the ceiling fitting accepts a plug into which a hanging light cord is connected which is then suspended on a ghastly hook (7), for goodness sake, exactly what I’m not looking for. I think I’ll have to have a word with Thomas.

I asked when exactly he thought that work would begin and his reply was that they are waiting on their own detailed soil study to allow them to exactly design the groundwork and footings of the house. This is because of the clay content in the ground and as it’s obviously in my interests for them to do the job right, I’ll be patient. However, he estimates that they should come onto site to begin work sometime around mid-end of November, which I’m pretty satisfied with. All-in-all, I’m very impressed with how they’re handling things so far and if their final build results are on the same level of their project planning, which I think they will be, I’ll have no hesitation in recommending Batim to anyone at any time.

Job done

Chilly start this morning but we’re expecting another sunny, warm (for the time of year) day today. The guys laying the concrete base for my new tool store had a slight setback yesterday when the chain drive of their tractor-mounted concrete mixer broke, but they got it welded and running again after about an hour or so and the job was completed by the early evening.

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As expected, the main problem came from the constantly falling acorns. They couldn’t be prevented so I’ve just had to accept that there will be marks in the floor where acorns dropped on it while the concrete was still soft. I guess that won’t be a problem however, once the floor has had stuff like my ride-on mower and concrete mixer on it for a while and the building has been used as a workshop a few times. And I describe it as a ‘building’ because now that it’s finished, you can see that it will be quite large, with the footprint of a single garage.

Today I’ve got a little bit of shopping to do but after that I’ll put on my working togs and get onto hand-levelling the area for the caravan. I doubt that I’ll move the caravan up there either today or tomorrow as the meeting with my builder will be in the afternoon, but my plan will be to do the move on Saturday. And what a relief that will be. It was very noticeable this morning how much colder it was down where the caravan currently is compared to up-top where it will be. So hopefully that will make things a bit more confortable when I get out of bed each morning, because it’s certainly now beginning to get a bit nippy. And I’ll also have running water. What luxury 🙂

Progress

At last! Yesterday the guys came in and made a great start on the base for my new tool store as well as an area for me to position the caravan on when I move it back up to the top of my land. I’m really pleased because as well as knowing that the weather will be favourable while the base is being laid, from the current forecast, it’ll also be fine when I can eventually move the caravan. I’d hate to have to move it on upward sloping muddy ground and wet grass which could always be a possibilty now that the year is advancing towards autumn and winter.

Here are some shots that I took this morning before work started again.

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The guys arrived about half an hour ago and as I type this they are already pouring concrete. The biggest problem today will be falling acorns. Earlier on I cleared away all of the acorns that had fallen overnight but after they arrived there was already a fair sized new crop on the black plastic membrane that we laid on the earth under the reinforcing steel. We’ll just have to hope that the ones that fall before the concrete starts to harden can be cleared off, after which it shouldn’t matter how many more fall onto it.

The good news is that as soon as the base has been laid I’ll be able to move the caravan up top, which is what I intend to do this week-end. I’ll not wait until my own electricity supply has been connected as there’s a possibility that the weather might have changed by then. In the meantime I’ll just have to live with a connection to my neighbour’s house that’s 50% longer than at present. It worked before and hopefully it shouldn’t be for too long anyway. But at last I can see some evidence of progress on the ground, and that’s where it matters 😉

New tool store

Yesterday I was thinking about where exactly I should position my proposed new tool store-cum-workshop. It’s a bit tricky. It needs to be in front of the house, but not so close to it as to detract from the look of the house itself while still being close enough to be easily accessible for eg electricity. It mustn’t be so close to the road as to be obtrusive while on the other hand, it mustn’t be so close to the planned position of the house as to interfere with construction. So not an easy one.

However, I came up with what I think is the best compromise and today I marked it out. Shown below is my basic plan based on the contractor’s accurate ‘implantation’ (positioning) of the house.

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The position is not exactly as shown above but it’s near enough – a bit closer to the road than shown but not by enough to worry about. The angle (rotated ant-clockwise 45° from due-north) is important, though, because I want the tool store to form the missing branch of the ‘Y’ shape on which the shape of my house is based. This will not only be more easy on the eye but will also give me the future option of extending the tool store into a larger detached double garage-cum-workshop with a design that matches the style of the house. I know from my computer-aided design work that that should be the ultimate objective.

Here are some shots of the marked-out area.

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What has come as some surprise to me is just how large the area is. OK, the tool store will measure 4.1m x 3.1m and the area I’ve marked out is 4.8m x 3.6m in order to give me a border all around the store itself with a larger area of hard-standing, if you like, outside the entrance. But the differences in dimensions are not that great. I keep saying that it will only make for a ‘small’ workshop, which may be so, but I think that it will be fairly adequate for the sorts of jobs that I’ll be doing in it.

In view of the size of the job, I’m now trying to line up some help as I think that it’ll be a bit too much for me alone. I’ve just received a message that Wednesday will definitely be on and even possibly tomorrow. I replied that ‘the sooner the better’ suits me fine. I also think that the amount of levelling to accomodate the caravan up there will be much less than I originally thought, though, and that it will be possible to make up the level differences using the earth dug out for the concrete base, possibly with some left over even. I can’t wait now to see things starting to happen 🙂

Shhhh… only whisper it

I heard from ‘an independent third-party source’ yesterday that whereas SDE24 originally said that the extension of the electrical network onto my land was programmed for ‘week 47’ ie mid November, I can now actually expect a contractor to come on site to carry out the work on 18th October. This is very good news as I installed my ‘coffre de chantier’ (my own temporary electrical box and meter) some weeks ago and the road and the position of the new permanent ‘coffre’ to which my ‘coffre de chantier’ will be connected have been marked out since the first week of August.

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So now I already have water on site together with the materials to lay the base for my proposed new store in which to keep my ride-on mower and other tools and which I’ll also be able to use as a workshop, albeit a small one, as it will measure 4.1m x 3.1m when completed. The weather forecast is still very favourable and hopefully it will be possible to get the base laid by the end of this coming week.

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And talking about the end of this coming week, on Friday I have a meeting scheduled with my house builder. I’m hoping that this will be to finalise where I want to position services, electrical sockets and the like, to identify a date on which work will commence and for me to hand over an initial cheque to get work underway. If that is so, I really will be able to see a light getting brighter at the end of what has been quite a long tunnel.

Like a charm

My theory was correct and my idea worked like a charm. In my first trip to Brico Depot today I ordered four sheets of reinforcing steel (panneaux de dallage) and a big-bag of ‘mélange’ (ballast, a mixture of sand and aggregate).

I realised immediately as soon as I saw it that the concrete reinforcing steel that I had originally intended to buy was far too flimsy either for reinforcing a concrete slab or for supporting a big-bag on my trailer’s damaged floor. I ended up going for four sheets of the proper stuff, which was nearly five times more expensive than I’d expected (gulp!) The upside, though, is whereas I’d expected to order a total of eight sheets of 2m x 1m metal, I would only need six sheets of the proper steel as it comes in sheets measuring 2.4m x 1.2m.

Here are some shots of my first order of today loaded up in the Brico Depot yard and ready to be paid for and whisked off home.

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I’ve also now learned that trying to manhandle a big-bag off the trailer is a foolish endeavour. The best method is to shovel its contents while it’s still on the trailer into another empty big-bag standing next to the trailer on the ground. It doesn’t take long, doesn’t take a lot of effort and you lose hardly any of the material in the process.

So that’s what I did – actually I offloaded some of the ballast into the Leroy Merlin giant big-bag that was already half full of ballast from earlier on and the remainder into the empty big-bag that I already had.

My second trip to Brico Depot was a bit more complicated. This time I needed a big-bag of sand and only two sheets of reinforcing steel. However, I needed four sheets of steel in my trailer to support the weight of the big-bag which meant that I needed to take back with me two of the sheets that I’d purchased earlier. Luckily I cleared with the security guy and the young chap who loaded the steel onto my trailer with a fork-lift that when I arrived at the check-out hut, although I’d have four sheets of steel on-board, I’d only have to pay for two of them.

Unfortunately it was almost impossible to get the lady with the scanner to understand this simple notion, although the young French guy who was next behind me in the queue obviously did because he found the whole thing very amusing. However, the penny eventually dropped and here are a couple of shots of my final trailer-load ready to be off-loaded back at Labattut at the end of the afternoon.

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And finally with all of the materials unloaded and ready to get going laying the base for my long-awaited little metal tool store.

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The weather forecast is very favourable and it looks as though we can expect a period of several dry, sunny days. So an ideal time, hopefully, to get the job wrapped up so I can begin to move on again.

Latest news

I haven’t posted for a few days but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s been going on. Far from it – life here has been particularly hectic just lately. Let’s start with the house front.

Before the builders start work, I need to have a concrete base laid for the 4.5 x 3.5 metre metal store that I bought just after I first moved into my caravan at the beginning of July. This has been held up by not having water end electricity on my land but there was a light at the end of the tunnel when Véolia eventually provided a connection to water. But this still left the problem with electricity which would be necessary to run an electric concrete mixer.

However, as my own is stuck in storage and will be inaccessible until either my new house is built or I decide to spend a day moving the stuff blocking it out of the way and then replacing it all, which I don’t fancy doing, I began to think of alternatives, the main one being somehow acquiring a mixer with a petrol engine. As I don’t like the idea of hiring things like this, I began to troll through the ads on Le Bon Coin, the free ads web site, and came across one for sale at an attractive price because, the seller said, its carburettor needed cleaning.

I like the idea of having a petrol driven mixer that can be used virtually anywhere on my land as needed, so my thinking was along the lines of if this one actually was any good, I could sell my current electric one when the time comes at a good price as it is in excellent condition. So last Thursday (30th September) I headed south with my trailer to take a look at what was on offer.

On the way I had an extraordinary and very scary experience. About a half hour away from my destination, I was approching a right hand bend up a slight incline when all of a sudden, a small Peugeot came hurtling down the slope around the bend from the other direction. It was travelling much too fast and was totally out of control and as its rear fish-tailed out to the right, it was coming straight for me.

I braked and yanked the wheel to the right and just before our two vehicles collided the other driver yanked their wheel to their right also. Somehow their car missed mine and my trailer by millimetres and it then fish-tailed in the opposite direction at high speed, straight into the ditch on the other side of the road where it overturned having spun through 180 degrees. At that time I was the only person on the scene, and indeed the only witness to what had happened, so I jumped out to see what I could do.

There happened to be a single house on the other side of the road and an old gentleman was in the garden so before I ran to the upturned car I told him to call the ambulance and the police without delay, which is what he did. When I got to the car all was silent and when I got no reply after I’d called several times to the occupant I thought the worst. However, as I climbed up on the vehicle’s underside, which was tilted in excess of 90 degrees and leaning against a high hedge on the other side of the ditch, the passenger door began to open and the head of a young woman emerged.

I asked if she was the only occupant, she was, and if she was injured, she said that she wasn’t, so I helped her to climb out of the partially opened door, with some difficulty as it couldn’t be opened very much against the hedge. However, she made it out and I helped her down to the road just as one or two other drivers began to stop to give help. Having established that all was as well as it could be under the circumstances, I said that I had to go and left everyone to it at the scene of the accident.

By way of a conclusion, I returned from the opposite direction about an hour or so later. I saw the ‘Pompiers’ (firemen and first aiders) leaving as I approached and found that the upturned car had been recovered and the scene was being cleared up. There were two young police officers on the scene so I stopped to tell them that I had witnessed what had happened just an hour or so before. ‘Ah’, the young lady officer said, ‘So you can tell us about the lorry then’. ‘Lorry?’ I replied, ‘What lorry? There was no lorry. She was just driving much too fast and I was lucky to come out of it unscathed’.

So it appears that I might have blown the young woman driver’s account of how she had come to end up upside down in the ditch. It seems that she might have made up a story about having had to swerve to avoid a lorry and if so, I have no regrets. She was driving in a grossly irresponsible and unsafe way and it was only with good luck that I came out of it uninjured. The outcome could have been completely different and if she got a ticking off as a result for making up stories, then too bad. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.

But what about the concrete mixer? Well, it seemed to be in pretty good shape but as I couldn’t start it, although it was on offer for only 90€, I knocked the seller down to 80€ and bought it. Here are some shots that I took after I’d got it home, the next day.

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The seller had been very vague about the problem that he said the mixer had and had mumbled an incomprehensible reply when I’d asked if it had a spark. However, it had compression and hadn’t made any nasty noises when I’d spun it over, so that’s why I’d decided to buy it. Now it was time to look into things further.

The first thing I found was that the spark plug was loose, so somebody had obviously been in there. When I removed it, it appeared to be brand new and unused but it had a huge gap, I think in excess of 50 or 60 thou. Briggs and Stratton say the figure should be 30 thou, so I regapped it, poured a few drops of neat fuel into the combustion chamber through the plug hole and replaced the plug finger tight. When I pulled the starter cord, the motor fired up immediately!

I’d also removed the carburettor air cleaner. The seller had said that the problem was that ‘the carburettor needed cleaning’, which sounded pretty unlikely to me. So I then poured a few drops of fuel straight into the air intake and pulled the motor over again and again the motor roared into life!

To cut a long story short, I’ve now run the mixer for several minutes and apart from a bit of normal wear-and-tear, I think that there’s nothing wrong with the motor at all. I think that the seller was, like many French men in my experience, not very mechanical and didn’t understand the need for a spark plug to be accurately and correctly gapped. There is no way that with the plug gapped as it was the motor would have even started, let alone run, and I think that he had blamed the carburettor and a blocked fuel system as being the problem.

But whatever the reason, I’m now very pleased with my purchase of a petrol driven concrete mixer for the princely sum of only 80€ and I look forward to being able to get around to using it some time in the very near future.

So with the concrete mixer ready to go, it was time for me to get the materials together for the concrete base of my little metal tool store. I need several big bags of ballast (a mixture of stone and sand) together with eight 35kg bags of cement and 8 sheets of reinforcing metal for the concrete, so went off to Brico Depot yesterday with my large twin-wheel trailer to pick up my first load. This consisted of a big-bag of stone and 6 bags of cement and as each big-bag weighs about 400kg, it wasn’t a load to be trifled with.

The first problem came at my end. The big-bag had been loaded onto my trailer by fork-lift on a small pallet, which made it very difficult to remove. A big-bag is much too heavy to lift by hand but because my trailer bed tilts, it’s usually possible to slide one off, albeit with some effort, onto the ground. Unfortunately, the pallet made this much more difficult than usual and the outcome, drat it, was that the bag fell off the trailer and toppled over onto the bare ground, spilling quite a bit of its contents.

I decided to deal with that problem later and to return to Brico Depot to pick up another big-bag and the remaining two bags of cement. Regrettably, this time I was served by a fork-lift driver who had been at the back of the queue when brains were being given out. Instead of approaching my trailer from the rear through the open tailgate, he decided to do so from the side. This meant that he couldn’t place the load in the middle of the trailer, but over to one side instead, and in doing so his machine also impacted against the side of my trailer.

When I got back I found much to my anger and dismay that in doing so he had ripped off two bolts securing the wing to the trailer body, although it will now be impossible to prove that. But there was even worse to come. By placing the load over to one side, it was on a relatively unsupported section of the trailer floor. I’d done a hasty floor repair at the time I moved out of my old house and knew already that it was on the weak side, but this load was too much for it. On the way home, the floor partially collapsed and the big-bag fell part-way through, luckily not falling the whole way as it was then supported by the two bags of cement.

When I realised what had happened I stopped and secured the bag as best I could with a length of rope and luckily made it the whole way back without further problem, except for one. As I was driving on the long stretch of road from Les Versannes to St Geyrac, luckily not too fast so as not to disturb the toppled big-bag, I saw a small lorry driving towards me in the opposite direction. Just before it reached me, a driver behind it in a small white Peugeot suddenly put his foot down and pulled out to overtake it, obviously having not seen me coming in the other direction.

For me it was a scary déjà-vu moment as the Peugeot came straight at me as had happened a few days before, and as I’d done then, I yanked my wheel over to the right. Just at the last moment, the other driver did the same and with millimetres again to spare, an accident was miraculously avoided. And how they missed colliding with the back of the small lorry I’ll never know, but for me it was my second near-miss of a head-on collision in less than a week.

Here are a couple of shots of the first big-bag that fell of the trailer and overturned, depositing some of the stone that it contained onto the bare earth.

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And here are some shots of the second big-bag that collapsed the floor of my trailer.

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I covered the cement up but left the big-bag problems until this morning while I slept on what I might do to resolve the problems in the easiest way. The solution that I came up with was to buy another new, empty big-bag, transfer as much of the material from the toppled bag on the trailer into it until I could remove the bag either from the top or bottom, transfer the material left in it to the new bag and then transfer the stone from the toppled bag on the ground into what would then be another empty bag. Here’s a shot of the new (very) big bag that I bought at Leroy Merlin this morning.

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My plan worked a treat. I lost hardly any of the contents of the bag that fell through the trailer floor and only a couple of shovelfuls of the stone that fell onto the ground. Here are a couple of shots of the collapsed trailer floor after the big-bag had been removed.

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And here are some shots of the material on the ground ready to be used to make concrete.

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But all my problems are not yet over – far from it. I still need to pick up two more big-bags and 8 sheets of reinforcing steel and it would appear that my trailer is now out of service. But maybe not. I think that if I make two trips and lay four sheets of steel on what remains of the trailer floor with a big-bag on top each time, the steel itself will act as a floor and spread the load. That’s the theory anyway and only by trying it out tomorrow will I find out if it will work or not 😉

Some good news

At last! I received a very welcome email from my builder yesterday asking whether I now have water on my land, which I do, of course. I’m hoping that this means that I’ll soon be receiving news, maybe this coming week, of when they’ll be starting building work. Initially they said that it might be possible to get cracking in September but changed that to October when we signed the contract and it’ll be great news if they do now confirm that that’s when they will actually be getting going.

I’ve also got good news on my Fimi quadcopter front. I’ve had a chance to do some longer test flights today and as far as I can see from screen grabs of videos that I shot just before it ended up in the oak tree and today, nothing seems to have changed. It therefore seems to have been unharmed by its experiences, which is a great relief given that it’s worth some way north of 300€!

By way of comparison, here are four shots, from before and after for comparison. Today is slightly duller than the day before the Fimi took its excursion into the tree and the times of day are different so the white balance has changed somewhat, but more importantly, the picture definition appears to be unchanged, which is a big relief.

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In other news, the postie drove down my land to my caravan this morning to hand me my new bow and arrow set. It’s actually quite impressive even though it is just a starter kit and I’m tempted to have a go of it. I don’t think I will though, because if I am going to sell it on, it would obviously be better if it remained ‘new still in its packaging’. But anyway, here are a few shots of it.

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At the time of writing, there are no signs of the thunderstorms that were forecast for this afternoon and maybe they fizzled out to become the showers we received this morning. They’re still being forecast for 7.00 pm on XC Weather though, so we’ll have to wait and see if they do actually materialise.