Month: December 2023

Maybe, maybe not. The following image shows my original plan for the main wall in the utility room in my new house.

I wanted a worktop under which I’d have my washer/dryer and my freezer with a 60cm wide floor mounted unit at the end butting up to the heat pump. The floor unit wouldn’t have a back so as to give free access to the hot and cold water pipework.

Three 60cm wide wall-mounted units would be mounted directly above to provide ample storage together with the floor-mounted one for household items, tools and suchlike and a small sink would be fitted in the worktop immediately above the floor mounted unit.

There was a problem, however. The heat pump was installed further away than I’d anticipated from the wall on the right of the above image and the main pipework, including the main supply into the house, extended much further to the left of the heat pump unit than I’d ever imagined. This meant that there was not enough room for the 60cm wide floor-mounted unit, thus throwing out my whole plan.

The space available was more than wide enough to take a 40cm wide floor-mounted unit but although units of this width are readily available, an internet search revealed that it would be almost impossible to find a small sink that would fit into it other than something very mickey-mouse that would be well-nigh unusable. The space would, however, take a 50cm wide unit – just!

But there was a problem with that. Not that many suppliers offer 50cm wide wall and floor-mounted units, and Brico Depot, my preferred kitchen unit supplier, offers none at all, just 40cm, 60cm and 80cm if you want the wall and floor-mounted to match as I do.

There are some suppliers that do, the most notable being Ikea, but I have a problem with that. The closest Ikea depot is a long way away in Bordeaux and not only that. I’ve only ever fitted one Ikea kitchen, the one for my friend Val in the Languedoc, and I wasn’t at all impressed by either its design or quality, so I didn’t want to go that route if I could avoid it.

So I was left with a quandary that found me searching the internet ever more frantically, a search that eventually yielded a surprising result. Brico-Depot is part of the Kingfisher group based in the UK that has another subsidiary in France, Castorama.

I’ve known for some time that both Brico-Depot and Castorama offer kitchen furniture ranges which have some overlaps but what I was very surprised to find was that whereas Brico-Depot offers no 50cm wide units, Castorama does, and specifically the units that I’ve fitted in my kitchen.

My original plan was to install less expensive units in my ‘cellier’ but this was of minor importance compared to having units of the size that I needed. My internet search revealed that no Castorama store within any reasonable (unreasonable even) distance from my home was declaring any 50cm wide stock except Castorama in Limoges who not only had several of the 60cm wide units in stock but also one each of the 50cm wall and floor units.

So after making one final check yesterday morning to ensure they were still there, I headed off up to Limoges not long after sunrise to make sure that I’d be the first in line to grab them. But I was to be thwarted. In true French fashion, the reported stock of 50cm units was found not to exist after all and given how long I’ve now lived in France, I was not wholly surprised. But all was not lost, however.

I was told that I could order them (which I could have done on my computer at home if I’d known) and they’d be available for me to pick up in 10-12 days time. This won’t be a disaster as instead of working on my ‘cellier’ I’ll now switch to building my cloaks cupboard, which was to be my final construction job after my ‘cellier’ work.

And the other thing was that one or two other items were the odd euro or so cheaper than in Brico Depot, so I picked them up while I was there, as well as a slightly damaged plinth for the floor-mounted unit which I got at a huge discount.

No problem there, as it’s long enough for several floor mounted units and as I’ll only have the one 50cm unit, most of it will be discarded anyway including the damaged bits. So on balance the trip was worth it, but I’ll have to wait a little bit longer, unfortunately, to finally finish off my utility room.

I just re-jigged the washing machine waste and replaced the manifold that was too long in the utility room and now things are exactly as they should be. I wasted a couple of PVC fittings in the process because the new adhesive that I purchased from Leroy Merlin was flashing off much to fast.

You only had to touch the parts being joined together and they immediately became locked rock solid. I had to replace the two bends making up the offset for a third time as when they locked they were not on the correct angle. Luckily I still had some old adhesive that I got from Brico Depot a long time ago which cured much more slowly and allowed me to do the job.

The washing machine waste is now positioned far lower with a longer inlet and now there’s no chance that it will ever overflow.

I removed the 4-outlet manifold and replaced it with the 3-outlet version.

This has allowed far more room for the freezer which can now be pushed closer to the wall so it will not protrude from under the worktop.

I can now go ahead and order the floor and wall units, worktop, small sink and a mixer tap to finish the room off and make it exactly as I want it 🙂

Having painted it, I’ve been pressing on as fast as I could to complete the work in my ‘cellier’ (utility room). The main reason for this is that until all of the preparatory work was completed I couldn’t install the floor and wall units that I have planned and until the storage that they will provide is available I can’t empty out all of the items that I have in storage that I’ve now been paying for for 30 months.

As well as painting its walls and ceilings, the plumber left me with something of a problem in the far corner of the room where I want to have my washing machine. The pipework he left behind was a bit of a mess to say the least because he’d committed the plumbing sin of having pipes crossing over, as shown in the following image.

He’d included a ‘P’ trap for the washing machine waste to feed into but I’d told him that I also wanted to fit a worktop with a sink along the same wall that would also need a hot as well as a cold supply. He evidently hadn’t thought at all how best to arrange these together with the shared waste outlet to the septic tank and what he left behind was actually pretty awful.

He placed the pipe for the sink waste on the left whereas the sink will be off to the right and by having the washing machine waste crossing in front of the hot and cold water supplies not only would it be tricky to run the three connections up to the sink but it also meant that it would be impossible to push the washing machine as far back against the wall as one would want. This would leave a lot of the machine protruding from beneath the worktop which would not only be unsightly but would also make the front of my lovely new Indesit washing machine prone to knocks and potential damage.

So before I could continue on to fitting the floor and wall units and the worktop I had to address this problem and come up with a completely new layout of the piping. The next image shows what the pipework in the corner now looks like.

In fact I’m thinking about altering it again because by placing the washing machine ‘P’ trap on top I’ve had to cut down the tube that the rubber outlet pipe from the washing machine pokes into to a point where the water surface inside is closer to the top than I would like. By redoing the arrangement and dropping the ‘P’ trap in question down lower I could avoid any possibility of water overflowing when, say, the machine is pumping out and the sink is being emptied at the same time. So that’s what I intend to do after Christmas and it’ll only take a short time to accomplish.

As the image shows, I’ve completely separated the cold and hot supplies to the sink and here’s a shot of the ends of them to which the mixer tap flexies will be attached. When I cut the pipes to do the re-jig I kept the connectors that the plumber had fitted to save a few euros and also have connectors that I knew wouldn’t leak.

Here’s a view of the complete new arrangement.

When the plumber fitted out the separate toilet we agreed that we should abandon the outside tap that I’d originally proposed to have on the front corner of the house and move it further round to the side. The original connection at the manifold in the ‘cellier’ was therefore abandoned and he ran a new connection for it. Whether this was the reason I do not know, but one manifold outlet now remains unused and blanked off, as shown in the next pic.

The problem with this is that the manifold has four outlets when it only needs three and extends further to the left than it needs to just preventing the freezer from being pushed back against the wall. I’ve found that Leroy Merlin offers a suitable smaller replacement for only 9.50€ so that’s another job I’ll be doing as soon as Christmas is over.

But that’s it for now and I’ll be taking a day off tomorrow like everyone else in France. But Christmas only lasts for one day here so like everyone else (almost) in France I’ll be back to work on Tuesday.

Happy Christmas everyone. Enjoy the break and I’ll be back next week.

I began fitting ceiling coving throughout my new house in June and began painting the interior starting with the kitchen in the last week of that month. Since then I’ve installed the complete kitchen, the hand-basin in the bathroom, a couple of wall-mounted bathroom cabinets, the shower screen, the floors in all of the bedrooms, a floor-to-ceiling fully-fitted wardrobe and storage unit in the larger two, 6 exterior lights and 43 LED spots throughout the whole of the interior.

I’ve also had to paint the ceiling and walls of every room with a sealer-undercoat and top coat and today is special because at last almost exactly six months to the day, I’ve now completed the task by finishing off the ‘cellier’, the utility room that houses the heat pump unit and will also be the home for my washing machine and freezer.

It wasn’t a job that I was relishing or looking forward to mainly because if I’d known how much pipework would be associated with the heat pump I’d have painted the room before it was installed. But I left it too late and was left with the unenviable job of trying to paint around all the plumbing as I just couldn’t face leaving any part of the room as bare plasterboard. It took a lot of masking but I’ve managed it to a point where I’m pleased with the results.

The room isn’t finished – I’ve got to install at least one worktop and wall and floor storage units as well as make some alterations to the plumbing to connect a small sink and allow the washing machine and freezer to fit closer to the wall than they originally could. But with the painting done the worst is over (I hope!) 😕

Here’s another one for all the heat pump cynics.

I can’t do an exact date-wise like-for-like comparison with my old house at Plazac and my new house because the former’s billing ran from mid-September to mid-November (2020) and my new house’s will be running from end October to end December 2023. However, I can make some very accurate estimates.

Here are the actual units consumed for two periods for my old house.

19/11/20 – 18/01/21: 1771 units
19/09/20 – 18/11/20: 1557 units

A good assumption is that the units consumed 19/10/20 – 18/12/20 will be the average of the above: 1664 units

My new house has a smart meter and exact figures are therefore available.

29/10/23 – 18/12/23: 636 units
Estimated 29/10/23 – 28/12/23: 763 units

763 units for the new house is 46% of the figure for the old (1664) and this at a time when the major demand has been for heating and the house has been toasty warm the whole time with the indoor temperature never falling below 22 degrees C day or night.

My old house (a poorly unsulated converted barn) was never uniformly warm and although I had background heating using electric convector heaters, the main source of heating was my wood burner. Obviously the cost for this was over and above the cost of electricity which was only used for lighting, oven cooking, hot water and running household appliances.

The figure for my new house is for everything – lighting, heating, cooking, the lot.

These are the numbers for energy input and output since installation.

Electricity input: 387 kWh
Energy output: 1607 kWh
Ratio: 4.15

So the heat pump is delivering over 4 times the amount of energy required to run it, which I find astounding. The numbers speak for themselves and it goes without saying that I am delighted with how the system is working 😀

Is what I now have, all usable. I had to do quite a bit of ‘rearranging’ of stuff, moving materials and tools around and disposing of rubbish before I could get working on bedroom three. And when I eventually was able to, it turned into a nightmare as I’ll explain. But first a couple of pictures of the results.

Once again, the camera hasn’t quite caught the colour which has a slight dusky pink tinge to it, making it colour-coordinate exactly with the floor covering and the wall plinth. But you might like to know why it was a nightmare getting to this point, so I’ll explain.

Regular readers may recall that two plasterers were involved in finishing the internal walls and partitions in my house, covering nail heads and the joints between the plasterboard drylining sheets. I wasn’t that impressed when I first saw their work and quite honestly I’ve become less happy with what they did the more I’ve been involved in decorating over it.

Apart from areas that they missed entirely (there’s an area from floor to ceiling in the ‘cellier’ for example) it’s now evident that for much of their work they used old, dead plaster. Unlike fresh plaster straight from the pack that sets very quickly, old plaster takes much longer to cure but usually eventually does so.

Dead plaster, on the other hand, mixes with water and looks like fresh plaster even when it has dried. However, it doesn’t undergo the chemical reaction that makes it cure and becomes soft again if water or a water based material, such as paint, is applied to it. The result is that if the paint is applied using a roller, the roller’s suction removes the ‘plaster’ as it passes over the surface.

This has happened in all of the rooms in which I’ve painted using a roller and I’ve had to make good areas of both the walls and the ceilings. However, in bedroom three the areas involved were huge, both on the ceiling and the walls and especially on the coloured wall.

This is why after making the coloured wall good, it looks patchy in the above pictures. It was made worse because I achieved the colour by adding white and a dash of red to a can of beige and over the two or three days in which I did the work it was impossible to keep the mix and therefore the colour totally uniform. It will have to do however.

This is the price you end up paying by sub-contracting work out to sub-standard workers but at least now I’ll be ready for when I can expect the first visitors to stay over in my new house.