Six long days ...

One of the problems of doing something important for the first, and possibly the last, time in one's life is that there's no body of knowledge, no experience, no way of knowing if this is the right way to do something. That's what employing somebody to do something gets you. After Gérard had finished the roof Adam said to me "We could have done that". Well, quite possibly we could but certainly not in the same time or to the same standard and consistency - that's what experience and learning from twenty years of doing the same thing provides. Oh, and there's no way either of us could have walked up the roof unprotected either.

Transferring the orange lighthouse into a smooth insulated sub-floor with electric and water services running underneath took a long time, a very long time.Laying the 80mm thick tongue and grooved polyurethane boards was straightforward enough when the floor was flat and it was a big area but, despite the way our  architect saw the world, the walls in a 200 year old building aren't straight and laying the service ducts was very slow. So, in the end, it took us five days to get all the 120 square metres of the ground floor covered:

 

The next job was to lay the 650m of underfloor heating cables, fortunately we had a plan provided by the supplier, unfortunately I'd omitted to give them a few critical pieces of information like the layout of the utility room and that we had moved the stairs from the architect's plan. However a bit of elementary maths and some imaginative cable routing meant that we got all the heating runs in successfully:

Division of roles was important - Adam turned out to be a master at unrelling the cable so it laid flat on the floor.

Are you sure we've got enough?

The full length of the barn seen from the door into the lean-to

And looking the other way from the house

 

 

 

The cabling team in action - we do take commissions for this sort of work

It seems to be a fundamental law of building that when you are working inside the weather outside is great and so these five days carried us through the warm end of March weather that the UK has been experiencing. The continual sunshine however did enable us to realise how much more light is coming into the barn through the new doorway and opening above the barn doors. There are still two big windows to go into the north wall which will allow more light in and so we hope we will have got rid of the curse of many old barns which is very restricted outside light.

Last Wednesday Steve the electrician came along and took measurements of all the seven heating cables to ensure that they hadn't been damaged during installation (they hadn't). Steve then changed hats and plumbed in the new underfloor water pipe which means that, at last, we can deconstruct the Heath Robinson arrangement hanging from the barn ceiling and walls that has brought water to the house for the past two years.

An Orange Lighthouse Arrives

The road from Noyal Muzillac to Limerzel and Questembert runs along the far side of Dominique's field where the milking herd are currently installed. It's about 500m from our house and so, normally, we don't see or hear any traffic unless it's big or very loud. Last week an orange lighthouse drove slowly along the road, it then turned left at the crossroads and came back into sight passing Dominique's elevage and stopped at our entrance gate. It was the underfloor insulation I'd ordered from Leroy-Merlin the week before, each board is 1.25 by 0.6 metres and there were 180 of them. the orange was the wrapping each pack of five came in and the lighthouse effect was caused by the way the driver had needed to load them high on his truck with lots of straps and ties.

 

It's the fourth time we've had a lorry delivery from L-M so I'm getting to know the driver a bit. Normally he's friendly and wants to know how the work is going, this time he was a bit cold and wouldn't put everything where I wanted it (he said he couldn't but he managed OK the last time). I think he hadn't enjoyed the slow 30km trip hoping  our orange lighthouse would stay on the truck .....

Barbara and I have now fitted 159 of the panels (I did a stock-take this afternoon ....) and need to finish the last few tomorrow so the underfloor heating can be laid and tested before the floor screed arrives on Thursday.

First across the line

After a close finish when it seemed that first the Nectarines and then the Peach were going to win, the first tree into flower at La Basse Cour was the Almond:

How to make a new doorway

The major building work at La Basse Cour at present is the construction of the new doorway in the south wall.

Opinion is divided about the best way to put a new opening into a stone wall. I've read in a book that it's as simple as making an arched hole in the stone 2x as wide and 1.5x as high and then building back in - no acroprops, no supports are necessary as the stone wall will support itself for the time required. Adam doesn't agree with this approach and prefers to use lots of supports and props - a fortunate approach as it turned out.

The new doorway takes the place of a small window and Adam started by removing enough stones above the window to push through two big wooden supports:

The original window

The first wooden support is installed

Then the stones are progressively removed until the doorway starts to take shape:

The walls at La Basse Cour are 75cm thick and a mixture of small and very large stones held together by clay

Adam constructed the doorframe using a mixture of old stones from the original window, stones that were recovered from the site and re-dressed and a custom cut new lintel stone. Even Adam's old stone friends from the original lucarne that was taken down, Frank and Henry, were found a place. (I'm not sure if, when the stonemason starts naming individual stones, that's a good sign or not ....)

The vertical doorway stones are installed

When the doorway is built to height the next stage is to install the stone lintel, Adam had carved this to match the existing doorway stone:

The lintel weighs about 250kg, the top of the doorway is 2.13metres high - that's a lot of stone to lift! We took it up using a winch hung of a scaffold bar and, with the winch taking the load at the top, moved it onto the new pad positions at the top of the stones:

The final stage of preparing the new opening was to remove some stones from the top of the archway to open up enough space to move the lintel in.

"Tim, you ought to have a look at this ...."  -  Oh dear, another "Houston, we've had a problem" moment.

Adam had found a big gap behind the beam where it was bedded into the stone wall. Birds and mice had also found the hole and so it was full of old nests and rubbish. The result of this was that the weight of the half the beam, all the stone above it, the roof A frame and the roof above it was bearing down on a small padstone on the internal wall underneath the end of the beam. Some signs of the strain this stone was under were visible on the inside in a crack running down the wall. It's a bit of a mystery as to what happened here as this isn't built to the standard of the rest of the building - "someone's bodged this up" was Adam's opinion. The beam is one of two very regular ones next to each other and I have wondered previously whether these are replacements. The good news was that it enabled us to closely inspect the end of the beam which, apart from the usual insect attention at the ends, seems to be in good condition. Adam had already jacked the beam up on an acroprop and so he was able to build in under and around the free beam, when the acroprop comes out the weight on the beam should transfer down via the new stonework into the existing wall. We've now seen the ends of four of the five beams at close quarters and, as a precaution, we will open up the wall around the fifth one at some point - just to make sure we don't have any other "Houstons ......".

European Integration .... ?

I had some principles when I started this blog including no xenophobic "Why can't France be more like Britain" posts. Hopefully this one doesn't cross that line!

Our car is a Honda CRV, it was built in the UK in Swindon and registered in the UK before gaining its French lights and plates. It's exactly the same car as is sold in France with the same engine and the same service schedule

So why does it cost £224 (with a free courtesy car) for a major service at the Honda dealer in Southampton and €425 (£378) at the Honda dealer in Vannes for the same service (plus €15 for a courtesy car). That's 69% more (excluding the courtesy car),

Guess in which country the car's next service will be done?

Allez les Blancs!

"I like English beer. I like your Queen. I can even sing your national song. How do I become English?"

The hockey club was watching the France-England  rugby international in a bar in La Baule after losing 0-1 to Carquefou in the morning - a result that almost certainly ends any thought of winning the league. J-C may have been influenced by the rugby score - 14-3 to England after 20 minutes when he made his first request to change nationality. A good game was greatly enlivened for Rosbifs and French alike by a camera shot of Nicolas Sarkozy at the Stade de France looking even more miserable than normal.

24-22 to England at the final whistle - at least the two Brits in our team took some comfort from one of the day's results. Second year running les blancs had triumphed.

The last thing J-C said to me was "Red roses really are my favourite"

Hockey sur Gazon - ou boue .... ?

Boue is mud in French for my English readers ;o)

Time for an update on the hockey season: Back in England Camberley have nearly reached the end of their season, in France La Baule haven't yet started the second half of theirs - it's hockey Jim, but not as we know it!

We play home games on grass - the real green stuff - whereas everyone else in the civilised world gave that up in 1990 and plays on artificial ("astroturf") pitches. Actually, apart from the first couple of weeks of the season, we really play on a bumpy, sticky mixture of mud and divots (our pitch is shared by the rugby club). Normally this is worth about two goals a game for us as no-one likes playing on it and all their pre-planned practice drills fail when the ball bobbles all over the place. We don't like it much either but it's the place we call home ....

La Baule started the season in September having convinced ourselves that, based on second place last season, we were going to win the league and get promoted to the unlikely sounding Nationale league 3. This confidence lasted 67 minutes of the first match until we managed to concede our fourth goal to lose 4-3 (having been 3-1 ahead with ten minutes to play).  Collective shock provided the spur to a decent run of form after that as we went on a five match winning league and cup run and then, just as we were getting going, the season stopped and the indoor version of the game took over. We had great ambitions indoors and had entered two teams for the first time ever. Due to the great distances involved and some unimaginative scheduling from the league the two teams had to cover 4000km between them to fulfil their fixtures and, possibly unsurprisingly, managed to come bottom of both leagues. That's a long way to travel to lose .... but mostly people seemed to enjoy themselves despite the massive frustration of losing.

I got some good pics of the second indoor team playing.

 

Outdoor hockey started last weekend with a cup game against Angers II, we'd already beaten them in the league and improbably defeated their first team 8-0 in the previous round (explained in part because they only had eight players including a Czech girl who spoke more English than French). This time Angers II turned out with a number of Angers I players who hadn't been in the eight (we recognised them from indoor). The game got to full-time at 2-2 and after 20 minutes of extra time we were still at 2-2 and so on to penalty strokes and a great example of the French love of rules and regulations - or not. Despite the best efforts of a couple of our players the teams were tied after the first barrage of five strokes and so on to sudden death. That means that the rest of the team take a penalty each until someone goes ahead - or so we thought. Suddenly it was spotted that the player who had just put away Angers seventh (or perhaps eighth, to be honest I'd lost count) had already taken a penalty. Cue a ten minute break whilst everyone argued about what the rules were, what people thought the rules were and what the rules really ought to be. Of course, no-one actually had a copy of the rules .... Eventually the argument was resolved somehow and the competition continued and we came out the winners. Our prize is a home game on our grass/mud pitch but this time we won't have much of an advantage - it's against Entrammes, the only other team in our league who play on grass.