In Sapa, Vietnam

In Sapa, Vietnam

About Me

My photo
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.

Friday 18 January 2013

Different - but just the same



I still have the copy of L'Equipe from July 25th 2005, the day after Lance Armstrong had won his seventh Tour de France and gone into the record books as the most successful Tour winner in history. L'Equipe had maintained for several years a grudging respect for Lance's achievements whilst hinting darkly at the drug rumours that had accompanied his rise.

The headline was "Il restera a part" - "He will remain different". At the time I, like many other people, put L'Equipe's (and most of the French media's) obsession with sniping at Lance Armstrong as being due to:
  1. Not being French
  2. The collective angst at the state of French cycling and the lack for 20 years of a home winner of the Tour de France
  3. Being American (a slightly worse sin than 1)
Now, of course, after the USADA report and the slightly strange note of LA's appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show the truth (at least the version of truth according to Lance) is out.

And L'Equipe was correct and I was wrong - he will always remain different; but really just the same as the hundreds of other cyclists who felt they had to cheat to win.


L'Équipe lundi 25 juillet 2005

Wednesday 2 January 2013

Build update – end of 2012



We called a halt to the build last week for Christmas, whilst finishing the downstairs was subcontracted to eco-renovations, Adam, Barbara and I have been working upstairs. We’ve finished the boarding out and, for the first time, the roof lines and the exposed A frame roof timbers are properly visible. The look (though I say it myself) is very elegant, especially in the bedrooms and the mezzanine area where the ceilings run right up to the ridge line. 


When the barn was first cleared out the full artistic splendour of the roof was apparent – wavy old purlins and chevrons looked great but were not suitable to construct a roof on – at least one that wouldn’t leak. This view was confirmed when Adam and I stripped off the roof timbers and put our feet through several parts of the chevronage. Two hundred years and a rich variety of wood-boring insects eventually do that to your roof.

(One thing I find myself doing is mixing the English and French terms for things. So, if you aren’t an expert at roof construction, purlins (English - Bastaing in French) are the big timbers that run horizontally along the roof and chevrons (French – rafters in English) are the thinner timber sections that run from the walls up to the ridge).

However, that left us with a stylistic problem as the inclined roofs wouldn’t have any timber visible – a huge plane of flat ceiling running up to the old timbers wouldn’t look right. So – in a move that might have Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs sucking the air in through his teeth in that annoying way he has – we’ve faked it. Adam found a huge bundle (“fagot” in French) of offcuts at the local sawmill; these are the last cuts at the edge of a trunk where the round shape of the tree can’t be cut into a straight plank, where the wood has a knot or inconvenient split or where the saw operator just wasn’t paying attention after lunch (more common than you might think). This is normally sold off as firewoord but was perfect for our purposes and so we bought all 1.2 tonnes of timber and had it delivered to site. After a quick sort, some chainsaw work and some enthusiastic “distressing” with an axe we have a set of 1cm thick irregular timber lengths that, when fitted to the clean plasterboard, look all the world like 200 year old purlins that the ceilings have been built around. We’ve even had fun doing faux scarfe joints to make them look as if the original carpenter had joined lengths together.






One problem that plagues barn conversions is head height, often it’s necessary to dig out the ground floor to get enough headroom. One of the things about LBC that was apparent from the first time we peered into the gloomy old barn is that we don’t have any problems in that area. As the build has progressed we’ve (nearly) met the architect’s original specifications for roof height – our actuals are 2m40 downstairs (that’s 7ft10 in old money), 2m70 (8ft10in) in the bathrooms and 3m50 (11ft 6in) to the highest point of the bedrooms. Of course plastering and decorating at that height pose their own problems. I still haven’t quite worked out how we are going to change lightbulbs in the hanging light in the open mezzanine area which will be at least 5m (16ft6in) above the ground floor.

So, for the record, as we finished we’ve completed boarding upstairs (apart from half a bay where the second woodburning stove’s chimney will go) and we’ve plastered four of the seven bays. The false purlins are fitted and the big wall above the open mezzanine has been constructed. Amongst other things we’ve consumed 31 bags of UK plaster (three quarters of a tonne), 85 sheets of plasterboard (250 square metres), three quarters of a kilometre of jointing tape and over 8000 screws.

If we didn't know before we know now - it’s a big job!