In Sapa, Vietnam

In Sapa, Vietnam

About Me

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Sharing time between Southampton and Noyal-Muzillac in southern Brittany. Sports coach, gardener, hockey player, cyclist and traveller. I studied an MA in Management and Organisational Dynamics at Essex University in 2016-17. Formerly an Operations Manager with NEC Technologies (UK) Ltd.

Sunday 23 October 2011

Walnut Harvest

Our walnut harvest is in (see Blog post 4th October).

This is what 56kg of walnuts looks like!

Monday 17 October 2011

Molecatcher !

Elemental Building

As the barn renovation has continued and Adam has started to rebuild some of the walls we've begun to put some really large amounts of material back into the barn. So far we've bought or used:
  • 3.7 tonnes of sand (sable)
  • 650 kg of lime (chaux)
  • 600 kg of gravel (gravier)
  • 2.8 tonnes of stone (pierre)
  • 1.8 tonnes of wood (bois)
Of course we've used some more modern materials as well - steel brackets and concrete lintels - but the common feature of much of the building work has been using things that are close to their original state. There aren't really more basic products that sand, lime, stone and wood. The roof will be in slate as well although we'll use modern products (concrete, steel and polystyrene) for the floor.

There are two challenges in buying building materials in France: finding sources of things that we are familiar with and finding sources for items we're not familiar with. In the latter category are sable, pierre and chaux.

Buying lime is simply a matter of finding the cheapest bulk source - sand and stone are a bit more interesting.

We buy sand from a quarry about 10km away where it's dug out of the ground and transported about 300m. I'm on cordial terms with the man who operates the weighbridge - he asked me how the work was going this morning - and I've managed to load exactly the same amount of sand (1080kg) into the trailer on the last two trips. This is exactly 140 shovels of sand.




Stone comes from a quarry 10km in the opposite direction where it's cut out of the ground in huge pieces and then worked into shape in a large workshop - and stone workshops are really large. Martial, who runs the office was a little cool when three brits walked in to order some very specific pieces of stone but he's warmed up a lot and is very helpful now.

It's probably not too different from when the barn was built; then they used clay rather than sand and lime, the stone probably came from a very local source and the trees provided the wood.

Tuesday 4 October 2011

La Chasse a commencé and an attack of insomnia for the cats

The last weekend of September is marked by two loud and noisy traditions in our part of rural Brittany.

La Chasse (the hunting season) starts and the weekends from now to the New Year are marked by a volley of gunfire, men in combat clothing creeping along our bottom fence, wary looking lean hunting dogs prowling the fields and the sight of the ubiquitous white vans beloved by farmers and artisans around here furtively parked in the corner of fields at dawn. I don't know what sort of firepower they use but last Sunday I counted five successive shots immediately after each other on one occasion - I did understand that if a pheasant escaped both cartridges discharged from a twin bore shotgun it was allowed to fly free but a gun capable of firing five shots seems to tip the odds a bit too far towards the hunter. However the advantage of all this activity is that we have no damage in the garden from rabbits, there are no grey squirrels to raid our walnut trees and the only fox we ever see is so petrified of humans it runs away at 500m (in Fleet they used to come and peer in at the windows of the house to see what was on the table .....). Red squirrels seem to be immune or protected from hunting and so we get the occasional visit from our local resident one.

It's often possible to hear a sharp retort from the direction of the Grange (our open stone built outbuilding) which sounds like a very close rifle shot. Actually it's our ancient walnut tree dropping its crop of ripe walnuts onto the metal roof of the Grange store, gusts of wind can produce a sound like a machine gun - fortunately we haven't had a gale yet as anyone venturing out in that would surely need ear protectors. Something terrible has happened to the walnut tree in the distant past as it has a huge 2m gash in its trunk and leans drunkenly to one side. The gash is so big it has acquired a pocket of soil in the bottom and now has its own mini plantation of oaks growing within the circumference of the walnut. As if anticipating its future demise the walnut has responded by producing huge crops of walnuts to try to maintain a juvenile walnut presence on our land. The cats' cages were moved out to the Grange when the work on the barn began and so they get the full effect of a rifle shot above their heads every ninety seconds or so through the night. They emerge bleary eyed in the morning and sidle off to get their heads down for the rest of the morning somewhere quieter. Cats seem to have have little sense of time (unless it's time to be fed) and Jess appears to have no memory following an unfortunate accident in a tree when she was younger so it's not easy for them to understand that they will shortly get back to an undisturbed night's sleep.

In the meantime we have a lot of walnuts to harvest from the ground - 50kg last year and more this. Fortunately we love them and they are popular with friends and family as well.

Monday 3 October 2011

Update - One Month Into the Build

I'm late posting this weekend but we've been at work for a month now and lots happened last week so here's an update.

Following our three day break as the fumes cleared from the barn after Rolland des Bois had treated the wood, Adam started by securing in the new lintel beam in the wall and then building up the new walls above it. Morbihan had the same hot and sunny weather as the UK last week and we erected a sunshade on the scaffolding as the wall is fully exposed to the sun.


The new window isn't quite the size that the architect has designed - but we are finding lots of M. Palou's design that look good on paper but can't be built within the dual constraints of a 200 year old building and our budget. However, the opening looks very good now, rather like a hayloft door above the main barn door and looks (to our eyes) very in keeping with an agricultural building. Adam's worked hard on getting the new stones courses consistent with the existing ones so that the new stonework will blend in with the old and for the first time in three weeks the scaffold is down and the whole new façade can be seen.



Adam let me do some stonework myself - only knocking out entries for the third steel beam but I have made my own hole in my own stonework without the wall falling out :o)



 Today (Monday 3rd) we installed the third steel beam through the hole I had made in the wall. When she wasn't helping with the lifting Barbara was on photography duty:





 Either we are getting fitter or smarter (or possibly both) as the beam was installed in just over an hour.

We then put up scaffolding inside the barn and started work on dismantling the existing lucarne:
Adam starts work on the roof



Removing the existing stone lintel - this is the one with the date carved in it


lintel and stones removed