Month: February 2022

Sorry, but it was too good to miss that headline and surely everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before I used it. We’ve had another lovely day today for working outside and I went out bright and early intent on getting the ‘tonnelle’ roof properly attached to its frame. To cut a long story short, I ended up releasing the tension in all of the roof rods and detaching the whole structure from the frame. Only then could I get the fabric to stretch properly to accommodate all of the roof rods in their respective pouches in the roof edges.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The end cross beams to which the centre end roof rods are attached are slightly ‘handed’ – the fixing brackets into which the rods are bolted are slightly offset from centre. I didn’t think this mattered as there was no mention of it in the assembly instructions, but it does. Naturally with there being a 50% chance of being right, mine were the wrong way round so I had to completely remove them, turn them round and reattach them.

Only then did the roof bolt on without much strain and then the ‘tonnelle’ structure was complete. Then it was just a matter of fitting the side and end curtains, but that wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds either. The structure’s top beams have an upper and a lower bar and the instructions show the curtains attached to the lower one. But as my ground is not even, if I did that the curtains would drag on the ground at one end and this can only be avoided by suspending them from the top bar.

Here are some shots showing the curtains as I originally fitted them, inside the ‘tonnelle’ frame legs as the instructions appear to show.

The next two shots show the curtains completely zipped up and fully closed.

You’ll notice that there are some hanging problems where the corner and side posts are and I then tried turning the curtains round and hanging them outside the frame, which is how they are at the moment. However, the zips are being overstretched as a result and the zip stitching, which is a bit untidy all round, is now visible on the outside of the ‘tonnelle’. I’ve now worked out how to hang the curtains properly from the top bar inside the frame so I’ll revert to that arrangement when I get a chance.

All of the next shots show the curtains hanging outside the frame posts. Once I’d got all the curtains in place I collected the cane table and chairs that have been under a plastic cover down at the bottom of my land since I left Plazac. When I uncovered them I found that where the cover had allowed water to penetrate it had caused some slight damage to the wood, mainly on the chair backs and the rim of the round table. It’s not too bad though and it will only take a little bit of rubbing down and varnishing to make it hardly noticeable.

I gave everything a hose down to clean it up a bit but the table still needs a bit more work because the packing tape that I used to secure its glass top while in transit has left quite a bit of residue behind. Nevertheless, it and the chairs will be OK to use for now once the chair seat pads have dried out. Here are a couple of shots of the set inside the ‘tonnelle’.

I was very pleased to find that there will be enough room if I move everything down a bit towards the end for the 2-seat sofa and two single armchairs to fit across the other end. There may even be enough room for a small low table, which would also be really nice, especially as I’ve already ordered a plastic ‘tapis de sol’ (camping mat) measuring 2.5 x 3.5 metres to cover the floor.

To finish off, here are some shots of the ‘tonnelle’ showing its general position relative to my caravan and other things.

As the ‘tonnelle’ is slap bang in front of my caravan, I’ve now lost my gorgeous view to the south, but this will be a small price to pay to have somewhere shady and cool to eat and drink outside once the weather begins to heat up, as it will do soon.

But thinking ahead even further to when building work on my house gets underway, I now think that it’ll probably be a good idea to move my caravan back down to the bottom of my land where I had it last summer. This would mean shifting the ‘tonnelle’ down there also, but that won’t be too bad and checking how things might work with it outside my caravan up at the top was one of the reasons why I decided to erect it in the first place. I think down at the bottom will be much better, even if it will mean making new arrangements for my electricity and water supplies.

That’s the only way to describe today. It started off OK as my first job was to unload the latest (and hopefully, final) batch of wood that I’ll need for my fencing that I bought a week or so ago but have left under a plastic tarp on my trailer ever since. What really shocked me was how much of it was covered with a thick greenish mildew, presumably because it was wet when I bought it and the warmth under the tarp subsequently provided ideal conditions for it to take root and multiply. It looks pretty horrendous but seems to brush off quite easily so shouldn’t give rise to too many problems, and when I eventually come to paint all of the fencing – wood, posts, horizontal bars, gates, everything – with preservative, it’ll be killed off anyway.

This wood is what I’ll be using for the horizontal bars on the fencing sections in the front of the house and the vertical bars of the gates. It actually consists of the outer sections of the trunks that are stripped off before the trunks are sawn down to make planks and I chose to use it because I think that it’ll give a pleasant rustic effect. But more of that when I come to do the job in a few weeks time. Here are some shots of it after I’d unloaded and stacked it prior to re-covering it.

After a quick lunch I decided to tackle a job that I’ve been thinking about for a few days. There will almost certainly be a few more cold snaps before the temperatures really start to climb as we go into the full Spring, but we’re already experiencing more and more lovely days when it would be pleasant to be able to sit outside. I acquired a couple of ‘tonnelles’ (small marquee type tents) last summer which I’ve never used and have been stored in my new ‘abris’ for the past few weeks.

They have curtains on their four sides that can be pulled back selectively according to the weather and the degree of privacy that is required and my idea was to place the first one close to my caravan with the round glass-topped wooden table that I had in my kitchen at Plazac and its matching four wooden chairs inside it. We originally had this set in our conservatory in the UK with a matching 2-seat sofa and two armchairs which I have also kept in storage, so it will be quite suitable for the intended purpose. My second job today was to get the ‘tonnelle’ erected.

It was actually much tougher than I thought it would be, partly on account of its size that made it unwieldy for one person to handle, and as a result it took longer than I thought it would do. In the end I only managed to get its basic frame structure and roof completed and here’s how it looked at the end of the afternoon after the sun had dipped behind the trees on Malbec on the other side of the road.

But there was still a problem. The the roof covering fits very tightly onto the bars that form the roof structure – too tightly in fact. Try as I might, I couldn’t get it to stretch enough to pull over one of the pockets into which the ends of the roof bars sit securing it on the roof frame, without the risk of ripping it. Here’s what I’m talking about.

I don’t yet know what the solution is. As the photo shows, I’ve released the fixings that secure the roof bars to the horizontal frame rails but it still won’t stretch enough to go on, so I’ve left it until the morning to see if I can work something out. Who knows, maybe if the roof becomes wet with dew it’ll stretch a bit anyway, but I doubt it because it’s probably made out of polyester fabric which doesn’t stretch the way a natural fibre like cotton does. Anyway, that’s for tomorrow…

Since putting the barrier in place on the slope through the trees up to the upper level, there have been no new signs yesterday or today of the ‘sanglier’ on either my land or that next door to mine on the south side. However, they have caused quite a lot more damage on the land on the lower level, as the following shots taken yesterday show.

So they have returned but have stayed on the land below mine. I’m hoping that this is because the new barrier has prevented them from climbing up and that it will give me the respite that I need to get ‘anti-sanglier’ fencing in place on the bottom section of my land. If so, the effort involved will have paid off and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this will be the case 😐

This was how all of my fence posts were laid out along the boundary of my land earlier today ready to be banged into the ground.

But unfortunately the guys who were going to do it couldn’t make it and it’ll be Monday instead. So this gave me even more of a reason to see what more I could do to stop the wild boar coming onto my land and doing more damage in the time until I can get fencing put into place on the bottom section. I mentioned in my earlier post that I’d found the gap that they had got through this time to come up from the land below and this is it.

You can see through the trees the damage that they’d done on the land below mine before coming up the slope and through the gap. The next shot shows where they emerged after doing so.

So what I had to do was construct some kind of barrier in order to prevent them doing this, and here is how it turned out.

It doesn’t look like much but what the photograph doesn’t show very clearly is how the barrier extends forward above the slope creating a space with a wall in front of the animals and a ceiling over their heads making a barrier that they can’t climb over. I’m hoping that that will be enough to deter them.

As the next two shots show, I’ve also tried to block their paths on either side to prevent them from finding a way round it.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the fight is over. There’s another gap some 20 or 30 metres further to the south through which they could come if they wanted to. It’s shown in the next shot.

What it also shows is that they haven’t used it – so far – and that there’s no damage to speak of at this point on the land below. This, though, is the damage on the land next to mine above the new gap, which is of similar severity but to a much more limited area.

I’m hoping that this is because the new gap isn’t favoured by the sanglier because it’s too close to the neighbouring house and by my blocking up the route they do use, they’ll be encouraged to go elsewhere to forage for whatever it is they’re looking for. To date the damage on my land and the land adjoining it shows that they don’t like to venture too far to the left or right of their exit route.

The final shot below shows the distance that my land is away from this second gap. If I’m correct in my thinking, I’m hoping that the greater distance will keep the sanglier away at least for long enough for me to build my fence before they become used to the changes and more confident again.

So that was it for today. I just hope that I don’t look out again tomorrow morning and find that all of my assumptions were wrong and that I’ve had yet another visit. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out, though.

By the way, as the land I’ve built the barrier on isn’t mine, once I’ve got my fencing in place I’ll probably remove it again. I’d also like to do that because the gap is one used by the small deer (chevreuil) when they decide to take cover after being spooked and I’d hate to think that I’ve done something that removes their escape route and discourages them from coming. When I peeked out of my caravan the other morning four of them were feeding only 30 or 40 metres away 🙂

Why? Because literally all of the ground that I replaced a couple of days ago and more had been dug up again this morning and I was out before breakfast putting it all back again. Yes, yet again. This is becoming very tedious and infuriating. I can’t understand what the special attraction of my land is because although the neighbouring land to the south had a few digs and scrapes on it, the damage was nothing like as extensive as on mine.

I could clearly see where the animals had come from. There’s quite a large gap in the tree line some 30 or 40 metres to the south of my land, where I’ve placed mesh to stop them, and I could clearly see where they’d climbed up and then turned right to make a bee-line for my land.

The guys are coming back later on today to start banging more of my fence posts into the ground and in the meantime I was thinking about starting work building the gates. I’m now wondering, however, if my time would be better spent collecting downed wood from the trees next to my caravan and seeing if I can block this access up because it’ll be a few more days before I can get fencing in place on the bottom of my land to discourage the ‘sanglier’ from coming back onto it.

Much to my surprise, Thomas, the surveyor from my house builder, turned up again this morning. He was surprised to see all my stakes in place and although I don’t think that he had come to place any of his own, I think that they came in useful for him because the purpose of his visit was to measure the differences in the heights of each corner of the house in order to gauge how the land will need to be adjusted to create a level platform for the house to stand on.

So he laughed and said, ‘Let’s see how accurate they are’, and we then worked together with his gps positioning device to accurately place all of the stakes exactly in their correct positions. In fact he was quite impressed because the first few were only a few centimetres out and the rest were only out by at most a few tens of centimetres because (a) I had turned the house slightly anticlockwise and (b) hadn’t got the 45° degree bend in the middle quite right.

I was very pleased with the outcome because the small changes that we made moved the back corner of the house slightly further out from under the trees and with a couple more branches removed, as I mentioned in a previous post, I’ll be able to almost avoid having a problem with falling leaves and acorns. Even so, we both agreed that I’ll need to place screens in my guttering to avoid the rainwater pipes and soakaways becoming blocked.

So the positions of my stakes are now official. I tried taking some more photographs to create some images showing the finished house from different angles but without great success. It then dawned on me that you can only create accurately scaled composite images with the correct perspective angles if the ‘cameras’ used to shoot the actual surroundings and the model have identical focal length lenses ie you can’t combine shots where one is taken with a wide-angle and the other with a telephoto.

So I did the best I could and here are some more shots of my house as it will be taken from three different angles. First from the south-west.

Secondly, from the south-east.

Finally from the east showing the back of the house.

We talked about how the flat platform will be created and this will be done by lowering the front right-hand corner to about the level of the corner on the other side and then using earth removed when the foundations are dug out to raise the back. Thomas said that they will create a level area outside at the back of the house for a patio or terrace the northern end of which will be in the form of a gentle slope down onto the garden.

I am really pleased with how things are going and can’t wait for the work to begin, which should be very soon 😀

After the builder’s surveyor had left – he was taking detailed measurements for the footings because it turns out that they need to be more complex than was originally anticipated and the groundwork contractor needs to have detailed specs ahead of starting their work – I repaired the damage caused by my latest nocturnal visitors and then did something that I’ve been wanting to do for some time.

Up to now the only images of my new house on my land that I’ve been able to create by combining images from my architects’ design software and photographs of the terrain have been rough approximations. The reason is that even by taking great care, it’s been almost impossible to get the scaling right. Yesterday I purchased some wood from Brico Depot to make some stakes to accurately mark the house’s position and although I was hampered by recurrent showers, I got them in place at the end of this afternoon as the light was failing.

I don’t have a laser theodolite or even accurate measuring equipment like those used by surveyors but I took great care measuring distances and angles and I’m pretty confident that my stakes are not a mile out compared to the ‘implantation’ plan that I agreed with my house builder. Here are a couple of shots that I took firstly showing the view of the house from the south and secondly from the east (its rear).

And now the view from the front. Because the stakes are accurately placed, I can use them to accurately scale an image lifted from my architects’ design software and in order to get it right, I’ve combined the images in stages. The first shot is just of the terrain with the stakes in place, the second shows the terrain with my house superimposed in transparent form to ensure that its scaled and positioned exactly and the third and final image shows the house accurately positioned and scaled.

So the final image above is the most accurate image to date showing how the house will appear on my land when it’s completed. Unfortunately the light was poor by the time I could take the shot of the land with the stakes in place but even so, I’m very happy with the result and will look more at what’s possible, perhaps using shots taken with one of my drones. That should be fun and interesting but I’ll need to wait a few days for the weather to improve before I try doing that 😐

I had another visit from the ‘sanglier’ last night. This time not as bad as on some previous occasions but annoying at the very least and the damage will take me at least 20 minutes to half an hour to repair.

However, it appears that the fencing that I’ve put in place is doing its job because this time there’s evidence of damage on the adjacent land to the south that shows that they came from that direction.

So it looks as though I’m going to have to accept that this will continue to some extent until such time as I’ve managed to get the ‘grillage’ in place along that side of the land. There’s a small problem with that because although the guys were supposed to come back as soon as the land had dried out enough to take the weight of their large tractor (we had more rain last night), the builder has arrived this morning to take some final measurements before starting on the groundwork next week and he has suggested that I hold off putting up fencing close to where they will be working.

It may still be possible to erect say, half of the run of fencing upwards from the bottom where the sanglier always do their work and that may be enough to deter them as I doubt that they will want to come higher which would be too close for them to where the work is going on. However, I first need to see what the builder is proposing and then I’ll be able to decide. But it’s good news the building work is at last on the verge of starting and the construction of my new house will soon be moving forward 🙂

The rain stopped and we had an awesome day, actually. So time to get outside and finish up clearing away the rest of the leaves that have been standing in small heaps for days and being rained on. It took the whole afternoon but the effort was well worth it because now I can move onto other things.

All the leaves have now been cleared – all that I’m intending to clear anyway – and here’s the last barrowload before I took it and emptied it out in the trees.

I’m so pleased to at last see grass and the top of my land looking reasonably clear again.

Here’s the heap of leaves where I dumped them in the trees. It’s bigger than it looks – well over 100 barrowloads – because beforehand there was a hollow that has now been filled. And not only filled, because in the process a lot of leaves have been trampled down as I’ve walked over them to empty out the barrow.

My next job is to make the first two of the three gates that are needed in the lower three sides of the fence. I’ll have to leave the third until its posts have been put in place just in case they are not parallel and the gate’s dimensions have to be varied accordingly.

But first I think that tomorrow I’ll go to Brico Depot and buy some wood to make some pegs out of because I want to bang six into the ground where I estimate the corners of my house will be. The builder will inevitably remove them when they start work but I’d like to visualise beforehand where the house will actually be standing and get a feel for its dimensions. Up to now, everything has just been on a computer screen or paper and it would be nice to at last see something actually on the ground 😉

It rained for the whole of yesterday evening and last night keeping me awake for much of the time and this is the sight outside my caravan this morning.

There’s standing water running down the slope of my land and mud. And more mud. Continuous rain is forecast for most of this week and intermittent heavy showers over the week-end and going into next week so what the ground will be like then is anyone’s guess.

I’m having big problems trying to force a start date for the construction of my new house out of the builder but it’s a waste of time for the time being as there’s no way that heavy excavation equipment could be moved onto my land for the foreseeable future without doing much too much damage to contemplate. So he’s off the hook. For now.

It certainly looks as though this week, or most of it at least, will be as far as my achieving my plans is concerned anyway. I laid out all of the posts for the remainder of my ‘anti-sanglier’ fence last week ready to be pounded into the ground but since then it has done little more than rain. So although the guys were due to come back this week to do the job, it doesn’t look as though that will be possible because the ground will be much too wet and the tyres of their large tractor would tear it to pieces.

I’ve also been waiting for a call from the sawmill since the end of last week to tell me that the wood that I need for the fence sections in the front of my new house and the three gates that I’ve included in the other sides was ready for pick-up. That came today, so I had to go and collect it, bring it home in my large trailer in the pouring rain and then leave it covered up as best I could to prevent it getting even wetter than it already was.

Before the rain set in I managed to clear away most of the dead leaves and acorns that have been the bane of my life since the autumn when they all fell to earth and hoped to finish the job on Saturday. I couldn’t, however, and since then the almost constant rain has prevented me from doing so and much else besides. I couldn’t get anything done on Sunday but did manage to make a few more heaps ready to be dumped in the trees yesterday between the showers, but there just wasn’t the time for me clear any of them away and dump them.

Sure, I got some lovely pics when the sun peeped through from time to time between the showers, as the following shots show, but I’d rather have just been allowed to get on and finish the job.

Here are a couple of shots of the wood that I needed that I took today at the sawmill.

When I arrived most of it was tied in a bundle outside and I started to load it onto my trailer by hand. However, I had a word with the manager and he said that he’d load it using his machine. That was great, but unfortunately it had to be done from the side of the trailer with the tailgate removed, and when the bundle rolled onto the trailer it forced the opposite trailer side over onto the wheels on that side.

He jiggled things around using the machine and I pushed the side upright again, but as this was the side and mudguard that were previously damaged by the loader at Brico Depot, I’ll have to take a closer look when it stops raining in case any more damage has been done that might make the trailer unroadworthy. If not, I’ll have to dismantle the trailer anyway when I can get around to fitting a new floor in it, so it won’t be a big issue until then.

In the meantime, because I had to drive the trailer without its tailboard in place, I found a length of webbing which I attached to both sides and made the whole thing more rigid and secure. Here’s the wood after I got it back to Fleurac before I threw a cover over it to protect it from the rain.

I decided that I wouldn’t let the rain beat me and that I’d at least try to get the rest of the leaves and acorns raked up into heaps ready to be dumped. Although I got a bit wet as I continued working in light rain when it had eased off a bit, I did manage to do that and also got a few barrow loads dumped in the trees before it got just too wet to continue.

So I’m now poised like a coiled spring (ha ha) ready to leap into action as soon as the rain stops, although I don’t know when that will be. The forecast indicates that we’ll have persistent rain tomorrow and Thursday with more rain on Friday afternoon. If Friday morning at least is dry I might be able to get all of the leaves and acorns cleared and dumped, but that remains to be seen.

It may also be dry over the week-end and before the weather turned pear-shaped I’d hoped to get in my first flight of the year. But that now looks doubtful as Malbec’s runway will undoubtedly have become too wet again. But such is life in France with my ULMs at this time of the year. And we do need the rain if we are to avoid a drought in the summer. It’s just a pity, though, that its timing should be so ruddy inconvenient 😐

Surprisingly, we had some rain last night but it soon turned into a beautiful day and it was time to do a bit of gardening after the sun came out and dried everything up. The area around my caravan at the top of my land became plastered with oak leaves and acorns during the autumn and as well as being a bit of an eyesore, they’ve become a real nuisance, especially when they’ve become wet, as it’s then been impossible to stop the leaves walking into the caravan.

I collected my wheelbarrow amongst other things from storage yesterday so today was the day to start clearing them and dumping them in the trees. There are so many that it’ll take more than a day to finish the job but I knew that I’d be able to make a good start today, as proved to be the case. And lucky that I did get cracking, because a very large number of the acorns that have been on the ground since the autumn have started to germinate and have already sent shoots some 3 or 4 centimetres into the ground, so if I’m to avoid having thousands of oak saplings shooting up all around, they needed to be removed, even though I’m bound to miss a lot of them.

I looked around in the trees and found a suitable hollow where I could dump everything that I collected and then I got going. There was no need to rush in the beautiful sunshine so I took it reasonably easy and enjoyed the time out in the fresh air. Here are a couple of shots that I took after I’d cleared the first area up at the top and you can see from the line where the green of the grass starts how much of a difference it was making.

And the next three shots show how far I’d got when I stopped for the day at the back-end of the afternoon.

There’s still a bit to do in the area below my new ‘abris’ (I think ‘abris’, meaning a shelter, sounds better than ‘garden shed’) as the next few shots show.

And I also want to clear the area behind my caravan so I can go and get my outdoor tables and my plant pots and store them there.

So I’ve broken the back of the job and should get it finished tomorrow. It would be impossible to remove every leaf and acorn but what I have managed to pick up today, several dozen barrow-loads, has already made quite a difference. But whether fewer leaves will keep finding their way into my caravan when it rains, only time will tell.

My house builder put himself on the hook when I last contacted him a week or so ago because he said that the results of the G2 soil study for the groundwork would definitely be available by last Friday and that subject to no problems being found, work on my new house would get underway in the following two weeks. This means that unless there’s a very good reason to the contrary, I’m expecting work to start by the 18th of February.

We’ve been through another rather dismal period of cold, rainy weather which I’ve just had to sit through and do practically nothing, but what the heck, unless we have the rain we’ll possibly have a drought declared during the summer with all that that entails, plus the ground could dry out creating other possible problems with my house build.

But although we have a couple of chilly nights forecast for the beginning of next week, it looks for now that we’ve turned the corner and the weather is going to stay dry, so as it’s perfect right now, it’s time to get back onto my fencing project.

I want to have the land behind my new house fully enclosed so I can have a dog that can run freely there without any chance of deciding to run off as soon as it gets the scent of a boar or a deer, which would otherwise be more than likely. But although I want to have a boundary fence all around my land, I want to keep the front open for easy access and for a more eye-pleasing aspect.

I’ve worked out how I’m going to do it of which more later, but for now I’ve got to create a boundary fence all along the long south side of my land as I have along the north and east sides and that meant getting hold of a lot more fence posts. When I went to the sawmill yesterday we established that they only have around 25 left so I decided that I might as well take them all as a job-lot

We agreed a highly attractive price for me to take them off their hands as they have no plans, at least for now, to make any more, and lucky I did as I’ll go onto explain. In fact there turned out to be 28 available so today I picked them all up and loaded them into my trailer. Here they are after I’d laid out the first few of this batch in the positions on the ground where they’ll need to be thumped in.

And here’s a shot that I took while the work was in progress.

So why was it lucky that I took the lot? Well, I was thinking that although the bare ‘anti-sanglier grillage’ is fine for the land behind the house because I’ll be able to plant bushes etc to hide the wire mesh, I didn’t much like the idea of having it in the front of the house where it will be less of a pretty sight. When I picked the posts up today, the sawmill had stacked a large quantity of rough sawn timber lengths outside, for a contract I expect, and this got me thinking about having timber lengths between the posts in the front, so when I got home I did some calculations.

After lunch I decided that rather than try to explain over the phone, I’d go back to the sawmill and talk things over. And lucky I did, because whereas I’d been thinking about acquiring timber in lengths of 3 or 4 metres, the sawmill only works in lengths of up to 2.4 metres. I was also shown some timber which was much more suitable for my purposes than the rough cut lengths that I’d originally been considering, so armed with my new knowledge I headed for home to do some more sums.

And it turns out that to achieve what I’m after, using timber in 2.4 metre lengths, I’ll need all of the posts that I picked up this morning, so that was incredibly lucky. I need to contact the sawmill again tomorrow to finalise things and I’ll go through my plans in more detail in another post, but after measuring and drawing everything out very carefully, things couldn’t have worked out any better 🙂