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.