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.

Wednesday 11 December 2013

Pointing the way

On 11th April we started the pointing of the old building. This consists of raking out the old clay jointing, removing any loose stones or pebbles, cleaning out any gaps and then ramming the lime and sand mixture into the deep holes, filling any wide gaps with galettes (small biscuit sized stones) and building out the pointing to the original stone lines. With cement the process is to get the surface as flat as possible before leaving it to set, there's a much more beautiful and fulfilling process with lime that takes much longer and consists of leaving the jointing surface rough until it has gone firm and then brushing it with a stiff bristle brush to expose the grain and let the jointing surface flow smoothly flow around the stones. The final effect really integrates and brings a sense of consistency to the varying sizes, colours and shapes of the stones and makes the walls look as if they are a single entity. In reality of course they were built at different dates, have been patched, repaired and neglected in equal measure and stone is a natural material with great variability.

We stopped pointing on the south wall in June when the temperatures made it impossible to keep working - lime goes off too quickly in hot sun. Adam re-started the work at the end of October - really very late in the year to try to point with lime which doesn't like cold or frosty weather either. Apart from one disasterous night - when driving rain washed out all the previous day's work - the weather has been on our side and today the final area was finished and the wall signed off.




Saturday 7 December 2013

Four Years On

I found a picture that the architect did for our Permis de Construire in October 2009. It was his mock-up of how La Basse Cour would look at the end of the work.



Here's how it looks today at the conclusion of the pointing:



Thursday 5 December 2013

Tonight's Sunset at La Basse Cour

As the UK was being battered by gales and threatened by floods we had a quiet and gloriously sunny December day that even tempted out a couple of lizards to bask on the barn wall.

The sunset was spectacular and, with all the frantic work we've been doing we rarely take the chance to stand back and enjoy the surroundings. The south-western sky was a great sight this evening with Venus at nearly its brightest close to the new moon - the pictures don't really do it justice .....



Tuesday 26 November 2013

A Warm Day

It's nearly four years since we bought La Basse Cour - four years, how did that happen?!!

It was the Saturday before Christmas when we collected the keys aftera long and difficult drive across snowy Normandie - thanks again Honda CR-V four wheel drive system  It was a sunny day and, even in mid-December, we could feel the warmth coming back off the south wall and we sat on step and had lunch. The building runs east to west and the south wall collects all the heat so today during a sunny spell in late November some summer insects came out to soak up the sun and admire the new lime pointing.

A red admiral warming itself

Red-veined Darter Dragonfly
The last leaves of the Blueberry have turned scarlet

Some more common creatures were out enjoying the sun as well:

Jess warming herself on the terrace wall

Pip was unimpressed at being woken up by the photographer for this picture  ....

26th November - not sure if we'll get any later sightings of butterflies this year ......

Monday 25 November 2013

Board Lines

After over two years on this build we've had lots of experience of jobs over-running; things go wrong, seem slower to do than we could possibly have imagined, nothing lines up straight (it's an old building ....) and we just do things wrong and have to repeat things. Of course, craftsmanship and experience are just the result of making (usually) controlled mistakes and learning from them. As I've written before, lots of things on this build we are doing for the first (and quite possibly the last) time so often our process is missing a whole feedback loop.

Sometimes, just sometimes, jobs go better or faster than we expected. We had allowed a week to get down the rest of the upstairs wooden flooring - we finished at 3pm on Thursday afternoon, fully 20% ahead of plan. The upstairs now has about 50 square metres of wooden flooring running seamlessly from mezzanine to corridor to bedrooms and even into the built-in cupboards. Are we pleased with it - you bet :o)

Bedroom 2 with underlay down and part boarded

Cupboard in Bed 2

Finished floor bed 2 i

Finished floor bed 2 ii





Main bedroom floor part way down

Adam fits the final board

Cutting and board preparation area

Main bedroom finished

Main Bedroom finished

Just 80 metres of skirting board to make, stain and fix now .....

Monday 18 November 2013

A Good Year for the Roses - II

And it certainly has been a good year for the roses at La Basse Cour. Our Anglo-French collection of roses has, after two years growing, really got going this year. Shaking off the freezing winter and cold spring the produced a fine show of flowers. Here are some of the highlights:

"Mme Ghislaine de Féligonde"

"Altissimo"

"Mme Isaac Perriere"

"Lady Hillingdon"

"Jacqueline du Pré"
Interesting that most of the names are aristocratic or talented women ....

Sunday 17 November 2013

A Good Year for the Roses - I

"And, it's three top ten hits in ten seconds for Elvis Costello"

"Red shoes ..... The Angels Want to Wear my Red Shoes" - that was my contribution (memorable song from my first year in University).

"Watching the Detectives" - that one from Adam.

And, and .......... time running out ........ "Good Year for the Roses" - just got that one in before the time ran out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

During the long periods working on the barn - especially the interminable plastering - the radio provided a distraction and background for us. We started with Bleu Armor and managed to listen to that for several weeks until we finally twigged that, with the absence of anything apart from news bulletins and adverts, it ran on a loop between 10:00 and 4:00 (so maybe that's why Phil Collins is on French radio so much).

Then we progressed to internet radio - there are thousands of stations available and we toyed with Absolute Radio 80's Hits (the music of the '80's is a sort of neutral ground between my age and Adam's; then we tried Abacus Radio '80's Hits (an American station, I suspect just an iPod on shuffle connected to the server); brief forays with Dutch stations, RFM and MacJingle 80's hits (a german station, again an iPod connected to a server) followed. Finally we gravitated back to BBC Radio 2 for Ken Bruce in the morning and Steve Wright in the afternoon (but Jeremy Vine between 12 and 2 caused us to shout at the radio too much - not good for getting a smooth plaster finish).

And so the popmaster game has become a continuing focus of the morning for us and it's concluding "3 in 10" competition.

Wednesday 13 November 2013

We bought a garden

A new garden arrived at La Basse Cour yesterday. We took advantage of a 50% reduction on all stock at a local Nursery that's moving to site to buy an entire trailer load of interesting plants. We'll post pictures of them being planted over the next week or two on the La Basse Cour Grounds PicasaWeb Album - if you're not on the update notification list for this album but would like to be please email me and I'll add you to the list.



Monday 11 November 2013

Le "Big Match"

Cyrille, the captain of Entrammes, our opposition last Sunday, greeted me with a single sentence: "Hello Tim how are you yes very fine thank you".

I've always had a good robust tussle with Cyrille in our matches (below in a cup match); last season he also came over to apologise for drilling a ball into our goal past my head. His English may be only slightly worse than my French but I appeciated his effort.




Probably the hockey team didn't really understand what they were getting when they asked me to be the captain - "Will you captain the side on the pitch - you're the only one who talks to us during the game". Quite ironic really as my sporting French vocabulary is still pretty sketchy.

So, we now have the team huddle before the match in English:

 "Are we here to look pretty?" - NO

"Are we here to have a nice day out?" - NO

"Are we here to win?" - YES Allez, Allez, Allez La Baule


 (Marianne spoke for most of the team I suspect when she said "I've no idea what you're saying but I know I have to shout NO, NO, YES")

But as well now the players know which position they are playing before the start, only one person talks at a time during team talks and I do spend a lot of time talking to them during the game. I'm even slipping into sporting clichés as I realised I'd asked at half-time for 110% effort in the second half.

And, despite a pitifully thin squad and erratic availability, after defeating Entrammes 3-0 our keen little team is now top of the table by six points. And the old guy at the back is still shouting at them in comical French ;o)


Tuesday 29 October 2013

Build Update

It's been a long time since my last update on the build. It's not that we've been idle - far from it !

What has happened is that the work content has become rather more standard - it's hard to make painting and tiling sound too interesting.

Anyway, here's where we are at present:

Downstairs the utility room is decorated and ready for installation of units and worktop and the cloakroom is finished (hooray!). In the main barn area the slate flooring is finished, the kitchen installed, all the electrics are working, the walls and ceilings painted and the beams (almost) fully finished and brushed off. The main work remaining here is to lay the wooden flooring in the lounge area.

Kitchen Installed

Slate Flooring in the Barn

It's a big room ...



 Upstairs we put a new door in between the house and the barn to allow us to use the final building as either two separate buildings or one big one.

It was a bit like breaking through the Channel Tunnel when Adam and I met each other from the two sides of the wall

New door installed

And nearly finished
All the upstairs rooms are painted and finished, the exposed timbers look good in the roof.




We've had some help along the way - Tim Jarrett came out fresh from Best Man duties at Adam's wedding and spent all week tiling for us:



Pip has been helping Barbara with varnishing the wooden doors:


We've lime rendered the end of the utility room (the stones here were very poorly built):


And, as of this week, we have two fitted bathrooms:

En-suite shower

En-suite tiled out

The shower in the main bathroom

Main bathroom
 
And we've started to lay the oak flooring upstairs:


Knots in the timber flooring - is it a dog, an Angel or Edvard Munch's scream ???

Sunday 29 September 2013

New member joins the team at La Basse Cour

We have adopted the cat who joined us; really he decided to adopt us as often happens with cats .....

Here is Tenzing (Pip to his friends) with his new French passport:

Sunday 15 September 2013

Dark Skies

One of the major differences about living here compared to our previous home in the UK is that we have clear and very dark skies. One of my "after the build is done" projects is to get a decent telescope.

In the meantime I'm limited to conventional photography - here's a picture of Saturn in yet another wonderfully clear evening sky (we've had lots this year).


Saturday 31 August 2013

Les Anglais qui marchent

"Ah yes, I've seen you in the mornings. Les Anglais qui marchent"

We were at Claudette's summer fete talking to Jerome (or Vincent) - there are two brothers who run the next but one farm to us and although I've met them on two or three occasions I'm never quite sure which is which ,,,,.

Our early morning walks started as preparation for Barbara's operation, continued as recuperation after the op and are now just part of our daily routine. We leave the house at 6.30 and on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we turn left and walk 45 minutes to Kervaquer and back; Tuesdays and Thursdays we turn right and walk 35 minutes to Bodrefaux and back. We've seen deer, hares, owls ands lots of other wildlife, found a lost new-born calf and we've been seen by plenty of our neighbours, including Vincent (or Jerome).

I was working in the garden when a delivery driver came down the drive - it was Wednesday and we were expecting our wooden floor to be delivered on Thursday ("The delivery company will call you first") so I was a bit surprised when the driver said he had three large pallets for me. I was more surprised when he asked me if I had a fork lift truck but was pleased I got back quickly with "No, haven't you got a hydraulic arm on your lorry?". Bizarrely it was a huge 44 tonne truck with nothing on but our three pallets hiding at one end.

"Hmmm, perhaps you could ask your neighbour the agriculteur if he has a tractor with forks on". Dominique was away but Yoann, his farm worker, looked a bit dubious when I said each pallet was 600kg but agreed to come over and help. Five minutes later Jerome (or Vincent) arrived with his tractor (Yoann said he wasn't sure his forks were strong enough so he'd called in help) and unloaded all the pallets and drove them down the drive.









And last week on one of our early walks a kitten jumped out of the verge and followed us for forty minutes, down the drive and into the house. No-one seems to know anything about him - Monique thought it had probably been thrown out of a car.

   

We don't know if we'll keep him yet, need to make more enquiries but unless we find an owner the gap left by Smudge's death in June may be filled ....

Funny what happens when you go out walking in the morning!