Month: April 2023

One of the things that’s absolutely essential down here is a trailer. You need them for picking up goods for the house and garden, getting rid of house, garden and building waste, picking up wood for your wood-burner, transporting your ride-on mower and all manner of other things. Just about everyone has one and I’ve got two, actually, a smaller two-wheeler and a larger one with four wheels on two axles. The pair of them have been god-sends over the years.

When I acquired the larger of the two, new to me but not new, it had a marine plywood floor. Given how I use my trailers I didn’t think that this was a very good idea at the time, but I have to say that it gave me six years of good use before the problems began to become serious enough to warrant some kind of attention. And wouldn’t you just know it, things came to a head when I needed the trailer the most to help me move out of my old house.

I had to take an old ride-on mower to the ‘déchetterie’ (the local tip) and as I loaded it onto the trailer, it’s floor finally began to give in. I made it there and back but emergency action was required and I saved the day by cutting up some part-used roofing sheets that I had in my garden shed and nailing them in.

I knew that this could only be a temporary solution at best and kept my fingers crossed that I’d be able to transport the heavy items that I needed to construct a concrete base for the new tool store that I had planned for my land at Fleurac before the floor finally gave out. And it almost made it, but not quite.

While I was returning from Brico Depot with a big-bag of sand the weight proved too heavy for it and the bag fell through the floor. Luckily it was prevented from falling right through by wedging on an angle against one of the trailer’s horizontal floor supports and I made it back without further incident.

I still needed more heavy items for the concrete base and I had the brainwave of laying the reinforcing steel I needed in the floor of the trailer with other stuff on top of it, so the steel acted as a kind of temporary floor. It worked fine and I managed to pick up everything that I needed for the job.

It was then time to take a closer look at the floor of the trailer and the results were not good. Not only was the original flooring totally rotten but the roofing sheets that I’d put in as a temporary measure to help me move out of my old house just weren’t up to the job of supporting anything of any significant weight whatsoever.

So to all intents and purposes my large trailer has been out of commission since the middle of 2021, shortly after I moved onto my land at Fleurac. I couldn’t allow this to continue because as soon as the house is ready for me to move in, not only am I going to need to pick up all kinds of building and other materials but I’ll also have to start acquiring things for the garden – plants, small trees, bushes and so on, and these definitely will require the use of my large trailer.

So with this in mind I had to decide how to go about repairing its floor. I looked at two alternatives – just replacing the original marine plywood floor or upgrading it and going for galvanised steel. Surprisingly, the costs were not hugely different. Yes, 1mm galvanised steel plate was more expensive but not unduly so, and performance-wise it will far out-perform wood, so for me the choice was a no-brainer.

An internet search even found me a supplier who could deliver the sheets I needed already cut to the required dimensions and after arriving a week or so ago, today was the day to do the job, starting by ripping out all of the old wood.

It wasn’t my idea to make this into some kind of a ‘how-to’ so I didn’t take lots of photographs as the work proceeded. The sheets had been pre-cut to the width of the trailer and the spaces between its floor cross-member supports so it was just a matter of laying them onto the bare bed of the trailer, lining them up so they fitted square on the bed and tightly together, making one small adjustment with a grinding wheel and pop-riveting them all to the frame.

A total of 72 pop-rivets were used, 18 per sheet, which I hope will help in giving the floor maximum rigidity. Then it was just a matter of refitting the front and side panels and the rear tailgate

The job isn’t quite finished. I’ve got to drill two holes in each corner to take internal tie-downs and also repair a bolt hole on each wing which has split out. I originally bought some stout aluminium strip to do that but the more I think about it, the more I feel that a repair consisting of large washers (or pieces of the ali strip) bonded to the underside of the wing using fibreglass mat and epoxy resin would give a far better repair.

Trouble is, that means I can’t get hold of the necessary materials until Tuesday, after the bank holiday, so the job will have to wait until then. I found a few loose pop-rivets on one of the tailgate latches, so at least I can replace them tomorrow. After that I guess I’ll take the day off. I’d like to have gone flying but yet again the weather looks like being unsuitable. Typical 🙁

My new satellite dish. Just look at the colour match!

The electrician kindly fed lots of cable through the wall for me and left plenty for me to play with to make the connection to the dish. However, one of the idiots in the ‘Crépi’ gang cut all of it off, and more, without telling me leaving only a shortened tail sticking out of the wall. I was worried if there was going to be enough but only by luck and pulling as much more as I could out from inside was there just enough cable to connect the LNB.

I don’t think I pulled too hard to disconnect the cable from the living room wall socket but I’ll be sweating a bit until I can test the system and confirm that it works. Luckily I was able to hide the cable where it emerges through the wall behind the dish bracket and I sealed the hole with a generous blob of white mastic to keep water out.

The dish is also approximately lined up to connect to the Astra 2E satellite (Satellite Name: 28.2E ASTRA 2E | ASTRA 2F | ASTRA 2G, Distance: 38476km, Dish Setup Elevation: 31.6° Azimuth (true): 144.0° Azimuth (magn.): 142°) but I’ll complete the setup either once I’ve got my meter out of storage or I can borrow my friend Victor’s 🙂

Now I’m just waiting for the porch light to arrive. Once I’ve got that fitted that’ll be all that I’ve got to do, for the time being at least, on the outside of the house. My plans now are to move inside and start by sealing and undercoating the angles where the walls meet the ceiling in the living room and corridor. Then I can mount the coving in those areas by which time, if not before, the floor tiles should be down inside the whole house.

If the coving is then only partially up, it won’t matter because it’s a job that can be done at any time, even after I’ve moved in. The priority once the floor tiles are down and the plumbing connections are available will be to install the kitchen, a job which I thoroughly enjoy doing actually 😀

Not quite, because the house hasn’t yet been connected to the mains supply but after today the wall-mounted outdoor lighting is all up and ready to be switched on when the time comes. This is the first lamp that went up onto the wall, over the front double-doors facing the road.

Next was the one on the front of the house at the bedroom end.

Then the one on the gable at the living room end facing south.

Then the one on the back of the house at the living room end, facing east, followed by the one on the back at the bedroom end.

Now a couple of shots of the front facades.

Finally two shots to finish off showing the living room end and the back of the house.

It took me a long time to decide on what lights to go for and I think by going for a trad-modern design I made the right choice. I also think going for white was a good idea. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the satellite dish up tomorrow and who knows, if the porch light arrives I’ll be able to fit that as well. Then I’ll be able to move inside, although what’s holding everything up are the floor tiles and I still have no idea when they’ll be going down.

This weather is now beyond a joke. At a time when we’re usually getting warm, dry days with the temperature climbing through the 20s, instead we’ve got cold, wet ones often starting with mist, like this morning. So clearly not a day for working outside, meaning that putting up the outside lights on the house, repairing the floor of my large trailer and cutting the grass, which is now thick and knee-deep, would have to wait.

But I had things that I could do indoors, so the day would not be completely wasted. I had to go around the house’s interior walls with some fine filler where the plasterers had left nail holes showing and some rough bits, mainly around the corners of the window frames, and there was also a large patch needed where the electrician had initially positioned the heating thermostat too high and had then lowered it. It should really have been a job for the builder but what the heck.

I then moved onto another job that I couldn’t do until I knew exactly what colour the ‘Crépi’ would turn out to be. The satellite dish that I sourced from the UK because its design is much better than the comparable French versions that are available came in the usual matt black, or anthracite if you’re fussy. That didn’t matter when I fitted a similar one to my old house in Plazac but I didn’t much like the idea of hanging such an eyesore on my new one. So I decided to paint it to match.

I bought the paint that I needed the last time I was at Leroy Merlin – white undercoat and a fetching shade of ‘melon’ that looks like a dead ringer for the colour that my walls have now become. So I took everything I needed into the house’s living room, including two large sheets of packing cardboard that I laid on the floor, and did the job this afternoon. And it turned out pretty well as the following photographs show.

Très chic – very stylish. So now as soon as the weather allows I can put up the five wall-mounted outdoor lights and the satellite dish all at the same time, making the outside nearly complete. I’ve also now ordered a ceiling mounted light for the porch and with that up that should be it for me for a while.

As I mentioned at the time, the gang that applied the ‘Crépi’ annoyingly cut and shortened the satellite cable without telling me, so I just hope that the electrician left enough in the roof space to compensate. I should soon be able to find out … 😐

Three examples, one of which shows how NOT to do it. Yes, I know that I’ve talked about this before but it doesn’t do any harm to call out poor or badly done customer service when it happens because if nobody did, things would never get better.

I was expecting two deliveries to my house today, well at least one in the afternoon anyway. The first one I wasn’t too sure about. I ordered some exterior wall mounted lamps a few days ago and although it said that the delivery might happen today, the order confirmation gave a small range of possible delivery dates. I decided to go and check if any post had arrived approaching midday and to my surprise I spotted a box that had been left on my house’s doorstep.

This has happened a few times now and I don’t mind as things don’t get pinched too often in these parts and I’d rather get a delivery than a note in my post-box saying that as there was no reply the delivery couldn’t be made. It also helps to know most of the delivery drivers who are happy to leave boxes without a signature as they also know me. So good customer service in my book.

The box contained the 5 lamps that I’d ordered and here are a couple of shots of one of them.

They are the Philips ‘Creek’ model and I like them because they are made out of powder coated aluminium so should last well. I also think that their neo-traditional design and their colour will go well with the house and I’m looking forward to putting them up this week if the weather allows.

I’d already received confirmation that Geodis would be dropping by with a delivery later today, several actually. The first message said that it would be between 1.30 and 4.30pm and the second said that it would be between 3.15 and 4.15. I’ve always been very pleased with Geodis’s service as they’ve made several deliveries over the past couple of years all without any hitches. And, more surprisingly, all by the same driver who, having arrived early, at about 1.30pm this afternoon, took the trouble to walk down to my caravan to let me know he’d arrived.

He’d brought with him a delivery of galvanized sheet metal that I’d ordered to repair the floor of my large trailer which has been unusable for the best part of two years since its original wooden floor rotted through. I’ll be needing it more and more over the coming months to collect stuff needed for the house and garden, so I was pleased when it arrived.

And what great service by the Geodis driver who had already unloaded the demi-pallet and left it outside my tool store, which coincidentally he’d also delivered when I had first moved into my caravan. And he was very complimentary about my house too 😉

Now onto the last customer service shocker. I mentioned in a recent post that when I unloaded the pallet of items that I picked up from Leroy Merlin a week ago, I found that two cartons of wall tiles were smashed. Five minutes after I’d dashed off a message together with some photographs I received a call from LR customer services to drop back into their SAV (‘service après vente’, after sales department) where I would receive replacements or a refund. So far so very, very good.

After I’d received the Geodis delivery I thought it would be a good idea to go back to LR today as there was nothing doing either in or on the house and I needed a couple of things as well. My first stop was in the LR SAV where things began to go wrong almost immediately.

I gave them a copy of the message that I’d received from client services, a copy of the original order and photographs of the broken cartons and the smashed tiles. The young lady said OK, I should get a trolley, which I did returning with it empty. She asked where the tiles were. At my house, of course, I replied to which she said that she couldn’t do anything without the broken cartons and tiles.

I looked at her dumbstruck… well, not quite as anyone who knows me will understand. I asked her what she wanted to do with all of the pieces, and as she couldn’t give me any kind of meaningful reply, I said that I refused to go away to get the pieces and come back again and expected to receive replacements as nobody had told me previously that all the broken tile fragments were required.

I further suggested that given the amount that I’d spent at LR over the last couple of months, a not inconsiderable sum, I didn’t need to steal a couple of cartons of tiles and that perhaps it would be a good idea to refer the matter to someone a bit higher up.

I don’t mind making a fuss that everyone can overhear in a French customer services because firstly they are not used to it and everyone listens intently to what’s going on and secondly, because they expect compliance, the customer service agents are always more intimidated by the situation than I am.

I got my tiles, but shame on Leroy Merlin for allowing such a situation to arise. I have to say that after their impeccable record to date, it has somewhat dented my attitude towards them and I hope that it’s just a one-off occurrence 🙁

I’ve got plenty of work ahead of me, both in the garden and indoors, when my house is ready. The grass is way, way overdue for cutting and although the unpredictable weather hasn’t helped, the main problem stopping me getting my ride-on mower out and doing the job has been the amount of stone that was left behind after they’d finished installing the septic tank. Some of the pieces were quite large and as I found to my cost in my old house at Plazac, if you leave them and they go through the mower blades they can do quite a bit of damage. In fact I lost two mowers for just that reason.

So the day before yesterday I spent quite a bit of time clearing away as much as I could. It took quite a bit of effort too as I had to rake the stone pieces into a heap, some of which had to be prised out of the ground as they were sticking up to just the right height to hit the mower blades, shovel them into a bucket and then carry them away to dispose of them. And after I’d done that I did a bit of essential hand landscaping to remove the worst of the humps they’d left in the ground and contour the land a bit around the tank access covers and so on.

As I’ve not done much heavy work for going on a couple of years, I’m trying to build myself up again at a reasonable speed and to not overdo it. So yesterday I took it easy with the aim of getting stuck in a bit more today, which I did in the form of rubbing down walls and ceilings inside the house ready for painting. As I’ve got a lot of preparation work and painting to do, I wanted to use today as an exercise if you like, to see how much I could get done in a given amount of time.

And I was pleasantly surprised. Starting in the late morning and working right through non-stop, except for occasional rest breaks, I got the walls and ceilings done in the whole of the living room and corridor. And this was in spite of having to use the ghastly Stanley rubbing down tool with the extension handle. In fact despite my attempts to try to prevent it, it did cause some minor damage when its stupidly designed head kept flipping over which I’ll have to go back and repair so I’d recommend to anyone reading this, avoid the wretched tool like the plague.

The amount of space that I prepared today is by far and away the largest in the whole house so the rooms that I do later will be a doddle in comparison. The living room and hall are now ready for spraying with surface sealer, a job that I’m really looking forward to doing. Beforehand, though, I have to mask up the windows and doors which I think could take some time to do properly. I think also that on the evidence of the following photo, I’ll need to acquire some more protective clothing and equipment because the items that I already have are inaccessible in my storage.

I’ve cleaned myself off a bit now but I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t somewhat knackered after I’d finished. In fact I took a little nap after which I felt much better. I’m hoping that they’ll be along very soon to lay the floor tiles in the house but one thing I’m sure is a racing certainty. We’ve got a forecast for rain the whole of this week which will mean that inevitably, as usual, they’ll be along to fit the shutters to the outside 🙁

After having done the long drive to Biganos on Sunday I did it again yesterday to pick up another 6 cartons of Frosty ‘wave’ pattern tiles.

The reason was that I’d been thinking about my wall design. Previously I’d settled on having a single row of ‘wave’ pattern tiles right around the bathroom as Leroy Merlin showed in one of their promotional images, below.

This was OK for the bathroom and the separate WC but as I want to have the same theme in the kitchen and a part of the ‘cellier’ as well, I was always less sure that it worked in those spaces. In both the kitchen and the cellier I will have worktops with storage underneath and wall cupboards above. The space between the worktop surfaces and the bottoms of the wall cupboards will be exactly the height of two tiles only one of which was to have been ‘wave’ pattern.

The more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve leaned towards having the whole space between the worktop surfaces and the bottoms of the wall cupboards tiled in the ‘wave’ pattern as shown in the following image.

I think it makes more sense and I didn’t have too much time to make up my mind. There’s no stock of the ‘wave’ pattern tiles in any Leroy Merlin store locally, which is why I had to go to Biganos, and I’m of the opinion that the product is going to be dropped. When I went to Biganos last Sunday, the stock there was over 80 cartons and as I write this the figure is down to just over 40, so it looks as though others are doing the same as me and going there especially while stocks last.

The decision means that I will need twice the quantity as previously. It also means that I’ll now have too many plain tiles, but that doesn’t matter as I can return those afterwards for a full refund. On the other hand, if I’d dithered over the ‘wave’ tiles, I think I could have ended up being disappointed. Anyway, the decision is made and that’s it – I’ve other things to think about!

I timed my departure yesterday until after a delivery I was expecting had arrived and sure enough the local postman drove his little yellow van down to my caravan and beeped his horn right on cue. The item I was expecting was an airless spray gun.

I didn’t even know such things existed until I began to research wall and ceiling painting on the internet when it became very clear that with the amount of painting I’ve got to do, not just walls and ceilings but all the shutters as well, I really needed one of these as it’ll probably more than halve the time that I’ll need to complete all the work.

These machines work at very high pressure, so high that if you put your hand in front of the nozzle while it’s working, the spray can penetrate your skin.

They come with a pistol and an extension tube, at least mine did, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to spray all of my ceilings using it from floor level without the need to use steps.

I’ll write more about it when I actually get to use it, but the principle is fairly simple. You dip the ‘supply’ tube into the container of whatever it is you’re wanting to spray together with a ‘return’ tube as the pump delivers more product than is sprayed out of the nozzle. Then you just switch on and start spraying until either you’ve finished or the container empties.

I just hope that it will be easier to use and more successful than another tool that I’ll be using to prepare the walls and ceilings, a Stanley sander on a long pole.

The concept is simple. As it’s on a pole, you can reach up to the ceiling without needing to balance on steps or whatever and then you can just use the sander like a floor mop to get a smooth surface ready for painting. Or at least you’d think so. But no, what they don’t tell you before you buy it is that the wizard designer at Stanley has given its head a universal joint.

So what’s wrong with that you ask? What you find in reality is as you’re ‘mopping’ from side to side, the joint flips over and you end up dragging the back of the head on the surface that you’re trying to make smooth, with the real danger of digging into it and making tram lines. Crazy. If this isn’t the worst, most over-engineered, tool that I’ve ever bought, it certainly must come pretty close to it.

My collection of tools and materials on the floor of bedroom three is growing by the day. Now that the floor screed is down, I was looking forward to being able to empty the storage that I’m paying for monthly and bring all of its contents into the bedrooms. At the rate things are going, though, there soon won’t be enough space.

In order to use the airless sprayer, things have to be carefully masked up. I’m going to fit coving around the tops of the walls throughout the whole house that will be painted white, the same as the ceilings. The walls, though, will be mainly coloured differently and so the coving and edges of the ceilings will have to be masked up before the walls are sprayed. This would be a tedious and time-consuming chore and in the hope of making the process less so, I’ve treated myself to a 3M professional masking machine.

The machine comes with a ‘starter’ roll of plastic film but I’ve already purchased extra rolls of masking paper to use with it as I imagine that I’ll be needing quite a lot of it.

Also shown in the above pic is a Stanley hand plasterboard sander that I purchased at the same time as the version with the extension handle. Luckily it’s so simple that apparently the Stanley design wizard couldn’t think of any way to over-engineer it and make it as difficult to use as the other one 😐

A bigger one this time, but from much closer to home, from Leroy Merlin in Chancelade to the west of Périgueux. As last time when I picked up the interior doors for my house from there, I decided that the best course of action was to hire a van from Leclerc at Trelissac, and just as well that I did because the whole pallet, that fitted nicely inside the van, must have been well over 800 kg in weight with the tiles alone coming in at just under 700 kg. My car would never have taken the load!

After my experience last week-end when picking up 6 cartons of tiles from Biganos and one of them was damaged, I thought that as there were 36 this time that I couldn’t check because they were wrapped on a pallet, it’d be a good idea to take a close look and some photographs before I left the warehouse.

As shown above, several cartons looked a bit suspicious and were worth having pictures of in advance of unpacking them. I found one more while I was unloading them, that someone had stepped on for goodness sake, although as far as I could tell the contents were undamaged.

But a couple or cartons weren’t so lucky as the next few shots show.

Here they are after I’d set them to one side while I carefully unloaded and stacked the rest on the floor of bedroom three.

The next shot shows the polystyrene coving (‘moulure’) that I’ll be putting up around all the tops of the walls throughout the whole house (50 x 2 metre lengths) and the plinths that will eventually go around the bottoms of the bedroom walls after I’ve laid the laminate floors. I put those in bedroom one.

And here’s the floor of bedroom three as the volume of stuff being stored in there gradually grows. I want to get the interior doors in there as soon as I can as well so I know they’ll be safely indoors, but I’ll need to get some help because when I carried them all down to the ‘tonnelle’ where they now are I strained my elbow which still hasn’t fully recovered.

Here’s some bright news to finish off . I sent a message to Leroy Merlin with a couple of photos showing the two damaged cartons of tiles. Within about 5 minutes my phone rang and a lady from SAV (‘Service Après Vente’, after-sales service) told me that if I’d like to pop back to the store they’ll either replace them or refund me. Now that’s what I call excellent customer service!

Biganos is to the south-west of Bordeaux on the edge of the Bay of Arcachon. It’s on the road to San Sebastien just over the border in northern Spain and during the summer holiday season the road is packed with traffic heading to the north of Spain and beyond. Although still busy, there was far less on it at this time of the year, though.

Nevertheless it was a really beautiful spring day, except for the chill in the wind that’s taking a while to shake off this year, and the day had a holiday feel to it with quite a few vehicles heading south from Belgium and Switzerland. But not, so far, from Holland.

I always say that you can tell when spring has arrived by the ‘grues’ (cranes) heading north from wintering in southern Spain and North Africa and the Dutch heading south after wintering in Holland, but so far they’re notable by their absence. But not for much longer I’ll wager 😉

When I arrived at the huge, sprawling commercial area in Biganos in which the Leroy Merlin store is located it had a surreal look to it. Apart from Leroy Merlin and a few small eateries, everywhere else was closed, so there were hectare on hectare of empty car parks bordered by hundreds of attractively designed, modern, low-rise stores of all types and of every colour you can think of. The French do these places so well, but not surprisingly given the weather in this part of the country.

As usual, I found the Leroy Merlin store very easily using Waze on my mobile phone and parked in a bay in its pick-up area. After queuing to register my arrival I went outside to wait for my tiles to be delivered. Maybe the weather had brought people out, but the car park was very busy and I took the following photo while I was waiting.

My six cartons arrived on a pallet on a small forklift and the young driver gave me a hand to lift them into the back of my car. The last one obviously contained some loose pieces so he said that if I wanted I could keep the pack, in case any of the broken tiles could be used for cut pieces, and he’d get me a replacement, which he did. I then left for home and left off checking until I got the packs unloaded and placed safely on the floor in bedroom three.

The next shot shows that the damaged carton contained 5 broken and 2 undamaged tiles, so a win for me as each tile costs just over 3€.

Here’s a shot of a carton that the tiles come in.

Just before leaving for Biganos a delivery from Leroy Merlin that I’d been waiting for arrived in a white van. I’ve not heard of Sunday deliveries before but Leroy Merlin uses a delivery service called Colisweb that delivers within 24 hours seven days a week using independent delivery agents. I think it’s great and the two items in the delivery that were out of stock and unavailable for pick-up next week with several other items I’ve ordered arrived next-day, on time and with no hassle, so no complaints from me.

You might be wondering why it was so important for me to go to Biganos today. The reason was that Biganos was the closest store to Fleurac that still had stocks of the tile I wanted with the wave motif. Others said that more would be available but on no specific date and one Leroy Merlin store said that the item was no longer available. As another supplier had told me the same thing, I couldn’t take the risk of placing an order, waiting for delivery and then being told that the product had been dropped, so I thought it best to seize the opportunity while I could.

The other reason for going today was that Didier told me last week that men would be along tomorrow to fit the shutters and if I could, I really wanted to be here while they were doing it. And now after clearing my decks today, I will be 🙂

The floor levelling screed went down over Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, so by today had had three days to cure. Typically for my house-build, we’ve had terrible weather since then, while the team was applying the ‘Crépi’ finish to the outside walls and it’s a huge surprise that they managed to end up with such a fantastic result.

It took them two days and by the time they’d finished on the second day it was raining hard so unfortunately they didn’t spend as much time as maybe they might have, clearing things up afterwards. One result of this was that they’d left a slab of hard Crépi in front of the main entrance that was up to the height of the doorstep. The problem with that was that if it was left, at times of really heavy rainfall, the water could flow down the entrance roadway and straight onto the doorstep.

I did go into the house yesterday, in my socks in case the floor screed was not fully hard enough to take my weight (it was), and because of the weather, the water coming out of the screed as it dried was causing a great deal of condensation inside the house, as the first image below shows.

Today was windy but dry with some bright spells, so I wanted to go inside, sweep the floor throughout the whole house to remove the many small concrete fragments that were left on its surface and in the corners and open all of the doors and windows to get some air passing through. Before I could do that though, I needed to remove the slab of Crépi in front of the main entrance, which I had to do with a pickaxe, and clear it away.

I also replaced the bridge that the builders had been using previously to enter the house so as to prevent as much muck as possible being walked into the house when work resumes next week.

Now shots of the interior as it now is with the new levelling screed down starting, as usual, with the living room. The house’s true proportions are now much more apparent.

Now the kitchen.

Looking across the living room towards the main entrance door, the separate WC and what will eventually be the cloaks cupboard.

Looking up the corridor towards the bedrooms.

The ‘cellier’ (utility room).

The bathroom.

Bedroom two. Now that the floor screed’s down, all of the windows are at a much more comfortable height, as they were planned to be, than previously.

Bedroom one.

The alcove in bedroom one that will be fitted out with an Ikea full height storage cupboard with mirror doors. Bedroom two has a similar alcove that will be fitted out in the same way.

Bedroom three. As can be seen in these final shots, I’ve already begun to use this bedroom for storage, at the moment the bathroom handbasin, its column, its mixer tap and two special keyless door locks for the bathroom and WC.

I was pleased to see that some good progress was made last week because it means that I’ll soon be able to start doing work inside the house myself. Because of this I needed to place a large order on Leroy Merlin for collection next week when the floor screed will be good and hard so I can store the items inside the house. They will include the wall tiles for the bathroom which will need to be available when the tiler arrives and so are very important.

I tried placing the order last night several times and to my astonishment, it was declined on each occasion. My bank, Crédit Agricole, operates a ceiling system for my account debit card and bank transfers and when I looked into it, I found that the problem was that due to the number of orders I’ve been placing recently for things to do with my house, I’d hit my debit card ceiling.

This was annoying but there was also another problem. I ordered the goods some time ago but left them in my Leroy Merlin pannier and now that I was trying to process the order, I found that there were no ‘wave’ motif wall tiles available at Périgueux. And I need 6 cartons. More worryingly, when I checked around other Leroy Merlin stores in the area, in the whole of Nouvelle Aquitaine actually, not only were there none locally but one store stated that the product was no longer available.

Bearing in mind that the supplier that I’d originally chosen for the same, or a similar, tile had told me the same thing, this was a cause of some concern. I searched further afield and lo and behold, I found that 80 cartons of the tile I need are available at Biganos, which is on the other side of Bordeaux. But there was another problem. If I couldn’t use my debit card to snap up the 6 cartons that I need, they might also sell out and I’d be left with a hole in my plans.

I dashed off a message to my bank asking for my ceiling to be raised thinking that nothing would happen until Monday at the earliest, or probably Tuesday as banks here are closed on Mondays. So imagine my surprise when I received a call from a customer service agent about the problem who arranged for the increase in ceiling that I’d asked for.

But that wasn’t the end of it. When I again placed the order it was declined yet again and when I logged into my bank account I found that the ceiling increase hadn’t gone through. While I was logged in I noticed that the CA customer service department is available until 5.30 pm on Saturdays and as it was around 5.00 pm I began ringing. All I kept getting after several tries was a ‘leave a message’ message so I was just about to give up when, at about 5.25 pm I got through.

It transpired that the previous customer service agent had increased my limit for bank transfers, not debit card transactions, and after the second one had taken the appropriate action I was at last able to place the Leroy Merlin order.

Two actually. The first one was for items that I will collect from Périgueux/Chancelade next week which had to exclude the tiles that that store could not supply. The next one was for six cartons of those tiles that I’ll be picking up – from Biganos. Tomorrow, so I hope the weather will be nice, because I’ll be making a trip towards the west coast 🙂

As expected, the ‘Crépi team’ were back on site this morning all set to finish the job off. Yesterday I noticed a small area at the bottom of the bedroom end wall where I thought they could have taken the level of the Crépi a bit lower and before they’d started I asked if they could add a little bit more by hand. Later on I noticed one of them doing just that and I found later when I put my drone up that he’d not only done what I asked but also a little bit more, so kudos to the team!

It didn’t take them long to get a coat of Crépi on and after that, like yesterday, it was all about getting the right finish. The weather started off dullish but chilly but went downhill from there and at times there were periods of quite heavy rain. Under the circumstances I think they did very well to produce such a fine quality job yet again.

I had to go out early on in the afternoon and by the time I returned at about 5.00 pm they’d cleared up and left. I took some shots but it was in the pouring rain, so not the best conditions in which to see the finished job for the first time.

To finish off with, here’s a close-up shot of the edge of the wall near the front door that shows the texture of the Crépi and also how clean and sharp this and all of the other edges on the building look.

They’d left a couple of unused sacks on the step of the living room front doors and of course they were soaking wet. I don’t know whether they contain a plastic sack inside the paper one. I hope they do, but in any case I moved them into the porch where the rain couldn’t reach them.

There’s an awful lot of mess left on the ground in front of the house which will all walk inside if it stays this wet, so it’ll have to be cleared away as best as possible. Quite a lot of sand has been left over after the ‘screed guys’ finished yesterday so I think I’ll see if I can put that into a ‘big-bag’ over the week-end rather than just let it be lost in the earth.

There’s a big-bag of crushed stone ‘gravillons’ left over as well and if I can get the builder to leave that too, it and the sand will go a long way towards being what will be needed for a new concrete base when I can get around to moving my tool store. It seems silly to waste them as it’ll only mean that I have to bring some more in and as I know from the last time, full big-bags weigh quite a bit when being towed in my trailer 😉

Right at the start of my house-build project, just after work began on the foundations, it rained. It bucketed down. When they were putting up the walls, it not only rained but snowed as well and when they put the roof on, it poured down. When the window sills and door thresholds were installed it rained and when the windows and doors were fitted, the weather was so appalling that afterwards, because the roof still wasn’t finished, the house ended up half-flooded inside.

The team who were laying the floor-levelling screed turned up to continue their work this morning, augmented by an additional member who would help speed up the process. And then this lot also showed up out of the blue.

I knew they’d be along some time, I expected next week, but they were a team of four who’d come to apply the ‘Crépi’ to the house’s exterior walls. And guess what, after a week or more of lovely, warm weather that would have been perfect in which to do the job, today it rained.

But they persisted and got the end gables and the whole back of the house done and as I type this, they are still working away giving the walls the rough finish that I asked for. Luckily, for now at least, although it’s windy, it isn’t raining and I just hope that it holds off for long enough so the walls can dry enough for their surfaces not to be damaged if it starts up again.

They started by adding metal corner profiles to all of the window and door edges and masking up all around to protect every surface except the walls.

This was the scene in the front of the house with the ‘screed crew’ busy using their cement mixer just before the ‘Crépi team’ fired up their machine to get going on the walls.

The ‘Crépi’ mix is poured straight out of the bag into the mixing hopper of the machine where it is mixed to the right consistency with water. Then the mixing hopper is tipped up through 180 degrees so the mix pours into the machine’s pump hopper from where it is pumped down a tube to a nozzle that is used to spray the mix onto the wall. While one batch is being pumped a further one can be mixed and added to the pump hopper before it empties thus making it a continuous process.

Here’s what it looks like as it’s applied to the walls. The nozzle operator sprays the mix onto the wall to the required thickness and as he moves on, a second worker follows screeding it down flat with a long straight edge.

Here’s a shot of the mixer man who was also responsible for moving the tube at the other end near the wall from time to time as the nozzle operator moved along.

While two men were working on the wall, the last member of the team was busy masking up the areas that would be covered next.

In the next shot, the whole of the back of the house had been coated and while one of the men screeded and then trowelled it off, the nozzle operator got ready to move onto the southern end of the house.

In the next shot he was clearing the gun ready to start and in the following one he was applying the ‘Crépi’ in earnest.

The task now on the back of the house was all about getting the surface right. It was to take a lot of time and was not helped by the weather which became showery and quite windy.

Here’s another shot of the mixer man.

The same two then repeated what they’d done on the back of the house on the southern gable and then on the gable on the bedroom end.

In the meantime, the screed crew were moving ahead at a brisk pace as they had one man mixing non-stop and the second running the screed mix in to be laid by the third. When I popped my head in at around 11.00 am they’d already finished the corridor, were working on the kitchen floor and were already running in mortar for the living room.

This meant that whereas I thought they’d be coming back tomorrow, they were able to finish the job around mid-afternoon before I’d finished typing this post. This meant, unfortunately, that I didn’t want to go inside the house to take a look in case there was some kind of accident and the screed they’d laid got damaged in some way. Also, when I went to look, the whole of the front of the house was sealed and masked up ready for tomorrow.

So the ‘Crépi’ team will be back tomorrow to finish off the front of the house. I’ve been very impressed by their work as they’ve spent as long, if not longer, finishing the wall surfaces as they did applying the ‘Crépi’ and I think it shows in the results.

Notice the smooth band with a sharp edge that they’ve applied all along the bottom of the walls.

I like that 😉

I was in the garden late this morning and beginning to think that today was going to be yet another lost day when a large truck came round the bend. As it was lumbering up the road I was wondering if there was any possibility that it might be heading for my place and it turned out that it was.

When I went up to investigate I found that it was a load of sand and the driver confirmed that it was for my house’s floor-levelling screed. First he unloaded a pallet of cement using the Hiab hoist on the back of his truck and then he moved the truck a bit so he could drop the sand to one side where it would be convenient to mix concrete and close enough for it to be manually barrowed into the house.

Just as he was getting ready to leave a white van carrying two workmen and towing a concrete mixer arrived and it turned out that they were the ones who would be mixing and laying the concrete.

After the truck had left they moved their van and got themselves ready to start work.

A while later, I went up to see how they were doing. It turned out that they’d started by attaching protective plastic tape all around the bottoms of the walls to prevent them being wetted and damaged by the concrete. Having completed the floor in bedroom two, they were busy in bedroom one and while the younger man was mixing and barrowing the concrete in, the older of the two was painstakingly laying the screed by hand.

They’d finished and gone just after 5.00 pm leaving the site clean and tidy and their concrete mixer and tools behind ready for tomorrow.

Here are a couple of shots of the protective plastic tape that they had attached to the bottoms of all of the walls.

Today they completed the floors in all three bedrooms and the bathroom and had made a start on the top end of the corridor.

It’s a very labour-intensive job and I think that it’ll take them at least a couple more days to complete the whole house as there’s a heck of a lot more to do. I’ve seen floor screeds being laid on Youtube and they’ve been made much wetter and allowed to find their own level using a vibrator.

It’s slower and must be more difficult to do it by hand and get the level right (the original floor slab was much lower at the bedroom end, especially in the far corner of bedroom one) and it will be admirable if this workman gets a perfect level throughout. I’m sure he will…

Three more videos that bring my house-build project into the new year. Some progress being made but still not much closer to getting the roof problem sorted out.

More instalments coming soon.

As I was going up to check on my post this morning I was surprised to hear the sound of a truck engine. It turned out that it was parked in front of my house and the driver was just in the process of completing a delivery.

I hadn’t been told to expect anything although I’ve been waiting for the floor levelling screed to be laid for over a week so I expected that the delivery was of the materials for that. I was under the impression though, that a special machine with a pump is used for that which arrives on site with the material already contained in it as it’s fairly liquid.

Here’s what I saw when I checked on what had been dropped off.

When I took a closer look, although the packaging had been enclosed in waterproof plastic I could see the writing and codes on it. The maker’s name was Parexlanko and the product was Monodécor.

That didn’t mean anything to me until I did a search on the internet, which made everything clear. These bags contained the material for the ‘Crépi’, the special plaster that will be applied to the outside of my house. I spotted the code ‘R20’ printed on the bags and when I did a more detailed search I came up with the following colour chart and sure enough, R20 corresponds to the colour that I selected for the walls of my house.

The square on the colour chart is a bit small to get an impression of how the house will look so I created the following image.

Allowing for the colour variation that any screen on which the image is viewed will be subject to, it gives a pretty good indication of what the colour of the house will be. It’s called ‘Sable Rose’ and when I chose it I was a bit concerned that it might be a bit too pink but now I see it again I’m a lot happier.

I’m wondering if this delivery means that the ‘Crépi’ will be applied before the floor screed goes down but I think not. I’ve got a suspicion that the screed will be laid right after the Easter break and while it’s being allowed to cure for a few days the builder will take the opportunity to do the ‘Crépi’. It would make sense but stranger things have happened as everyone knows by now 😕

I mentioned a week or so ago that I planned to install a small (8.2 x 4.7 metres) ‘hors sol’ swimming pool in my garden below my house once the build was finished. I posted a picture of the model I had in mind and below is how things look now, with the garden in its present state, and how they would have looked with the house finished before the bare earth was made into a grassy bank.

The pool in question was on offer until 2nd April with its price slashed by 1100€, about 20% off its usual price, so was a bit of a bargain. I hesitated but thought, ‘What the heck!’ and placed an order last Sunday before the deadline expired. Then I went off to bed.

I awoke on Monday having slept on it with the thought in my mind that I must be crazy and alarm bells ringing. The pool kit weighs not much short of 2 tonnes and would have been delivered in 10-15 days time and then what would I have done with it?

It would have been dropped onto my land and with all of the essential work ahead of me, things like relocating my tool store and building a garage on top of all the work I have to do indoors, decorating, tiling, furnishing, laying floors, putting in a kitchen and much more, there it would have stayed for many weeks, if not months. I doubt that I’d even have been able to install the pool before the end of the season, making buying it pretty pointless.

So reluctantly I made my head overrule my heart and bowed to the sensible decision to call the pool company and cancel my order. They were very understanding and did so after a young lady called me to confirm that that was what I wanted to do. When I checked their web site a short time afterwards the price of the pool had already returned to normal so there was no going back.

Not this year anyway. I have no idea how the price of the pool will change by this time next year but by then I should have all of my main jobs behind me and be in a much better position to take on the task of installing it. So in my heart I haven’t given up on the idea of having it – far from it – but for now I’ve had to listen to what my head tells me 🙁

It’s now been over a week since any work was done on my house which is very frustrating given how close it is to being finished. However, I think I know the reason why.

The builder I’m employing heavily uses sub-contractors and probably only has a few direct employees of their own to perform basic functions. When it comes to more specialised activities – roofing, plumbing, electrical work, possibly even the groundwork for foundations and putting in septic tanks – they call in outside firms.

One of the reasons for this is the French system of employment which, unlike those in northern and other parts of Europe, makes it difficult and costly to fire people – for example, to reduce a firm’s workforce and costs if business falls off for some reason. This means therefore, that firms like my builder are very reluctant to take on new employees, even when their volume of work is expanding, for fear of getting caught out should business fall away again.

So that’s why they try to reduce their risk by hiring in sub-contractors. The problem though, is that the sub-contractors have the same mindset and are also reluctant to take on extra employees, even when business is booming as it seems to be at present with the orders that were placed for new rural houses post-Covid. So builders like mine who want to call in sub-contractors as and when needed either have to plan ahead very carefully and risk not being ready when the sub-contractor turns up to do their work, or are placed in a queue.

My own experience suggests that builders like mine are not that good at planning ahead so that’s why their clients, like me, end up constantly seeing work on their houses starting and stopping and being subject to constant delays. And that’s why almost every morning when I look out of my caravan nothing is happening on site.

Living in my caravan for the last 21 months has been a miserable, depressing and isolating existence that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But the last few weeks have been absolutely ghastly. Right at the very beginning I invested in two gazebo-type tents called ‘tonnelles’. These were planned to perform two functions, namely to house furniture that I’d otherwise have had to pay for to put into storage and to provide space where I could continue entertaining and meeting with my friends during the summer months while not otherwise having the space to do so.

Unfortunately I lost one of them almost immediately, destroyed by high winds shortly after I’d erected it and then had to leave to go to England, and had to replace it by yet a third one. The two which I then had performed well in both roles and it was a source of sadness to me when the weather deteriorated at the end of the summer and the fun side of things had to wind down. Things then became more serious and the emphasis moved to just finding ways to defend the two ‘tonnelles’ from the weather which became ever more threatening to their very existence week by week.

Having lost one of them already to high winds, in the autumn the second of the first two that I’d bought suffered serious roof damage from a wind gust. Luckily I had kept the roof covering from the first one and although it had also been damaged during the fist incident, it was comparatively unnoticeable and I was able to swap it over. I then had to keep a weather-eye open and if any strong winds were forecast I found that the best way to mitigate against them was either to partially unzip all the side curtains of both ‘tonnelles’ to allow the wind to pass through them or, in extreme cases, to fully open the curtains and tie them securely to the structures’ support legs to stop them being ripped.

This worked well up until a few weeks ago when we had a day of high winds culminating in a final tremendous gust that had a devastating result, getting under the roof and ripping the guy ropes of the second of the first two ‘tonnelles’ that I’d originally bought out of the ground, turning it completely over and smashing it against the side of my caravan. It took me a minute or so to get out as the ‘tonnelle’ was jammed up against the caravan door and when I eventually did I witnessed a scene of total disaster.

It was raining, the wind was still blowing with enormous force and the ‘tonnelle’s’ curtains were still being blasted around in all directions. The roof was still on but I could see that several of the structure’s metal tubes were either badly bent or broken and that there would probably be little hope of saving it. Nevertheless, I managed to struggle to remove its curtains and also eventually its roof covering and I decided to leave the framework where it was, upside-down outside my caravan until I had time to make a better inspection to see if I might be able to repair and maybe save it. Unfortunately it’s still there to this day in the mud in front of the caravan.

But that wasn’t the end of things. As a result of the above experience, I decided that it would be a good idea to tie down the last of the three ‘tonnelles’ still standing with heavy rope, which I did while still maintaining my policy of partially unzipping or fully opening and tying back its side curtains whenever strong winds were forecast.

This worked well as before but even so, was still not enough to appease the weather gods who decided to send in another wave of storms and high winds over the last week or so.

Unfortunately, the last ‘tonnelle’ is of a design which includes a top roof vent which has its own fabric cover (see images above and below). It’s attached by the four rods forming the vent’s framework merely sticking into its four corners and stretching it into place and I’ve always had my concerns that this would not be enough to resist any really strong winds.

Unfortunately these were proved right when during storm-force winds last week the two corners of the fabric that were taking the greatest battering finally gave up the ghost and allowed the rods to rip right through them.

I managed to save the cover before it was eventually either blown away or totally destroyed and had to decide what to do next. With the side curtains tied back and the roof vent cover off, it’s almost like having nothing at all covering the ‘tonnelle’s’ contents, which of course is the case for the contents of the ‘tonnelle’ that blew over and which are now standing in the open air, albeit with a plastic tarp over them. This isn’t too important as the items affected are mainly garden furniture that would normally be outside anyway, or garden chairs that are fairly weather resistant.

But this is not so for the contents of the last ‘tonnelle’ for which the implications are far more serious. This is because thinking that it would be weather-proof enough, I decided to store the interior doors of my house in it until the floor-levelling screed has been laid in my house and they can be taken back inside and mounted in their frames. I took the precaution of wrapping them in yet another new waterproof tarp but I’ve no idea up to now whether this will be enough to protect them because at times when the ‘tonnelle’s’ top vent cover was off and its curtains were tied back, they were being directly lashed by the strong winds and heavy rain.

I could do nothing about it until a couple of days ago when I repaired the ‘tonnelle’s’ vent cover by hand-stitching some short lengths of strong tape over the rips in its corners. Up to now the repairs have held against the strong winds that we suffered for two days up to yesterday, and for now the curtains are also all back in place. So if I’m lucky, the rain holds off and the floor screed goes down soon (I was told it would go down during last week) I might get away with the doors not getting wet and warping. If that happened it truly would be a huge disaster.

But in any event, I am utterly sick of living in my old caravan. The upside is that it has saved me a lot of money, literally thousands of euros, that I’ll be able to spend on the house and its contents, but it has been a soul-destroying existence the cost of which has been high both spiritually and emotionally. I can’t wait to get out and back to living a civilised life surrounded by four walls and a proper roof and although knowing what I now do, I’d do another house-build project, I don’t think I could ever face living in a little caravan again. Certainly not for the best part of two years, anyway 🙁

The past few weeks have been utterly depressing living through awful weather and high winds in my caravan. However, I’ve managed to pass some of the time by making some more catch-up videos of my house-build, three of which are shown below covering the period up to just before Christmas, up to the first day of constructing the roof.

These are new videos but are not new material as such as their content was covered at the time by postings here and on Facebook using solely still images.

I like to produce these ‘shorts’ because ultimately I want to create a long video of the complete house build and it will be easier to stitch a whole series of short videos together rather than to try to create one long one from the huge volume of material that I’ll have at the end. So more videos like these will be coming up shortly, if you’ll forgive the pun 😉