We did it!

EDF switched on our electric supply on the 4th January, we ran around like headless chickens moving everything in and........

....we moved in on 9th January, 23 months after swinging the first pick axe for the foundations!

We're absolutely knackered but very proud of our little house.
No rest for the wicked...now ripping out a bathroom in one of the gites!

Electrics Inspection

To get everything prepared for our electrics inspection we had to finish all the ceilings. A total of 15 days non-stop fitting pieces of tongue and groove between the beams, every piece unique in size!

Once we had completed the ceilings we made the request for the dreaded inspection. Very, very efficient the rendez vous was made for a few days later and voila Monsieur L'Inpecteur arrived. Our biggest concern was that our earth was good enough, the inspection demands an earth reading of less than 100 ohms, we had planted 3 earth spikes, 2 metres down and were relieved when his equipment measured 45 ohms...we were off to a good start. He was very thorough, crawled over everything and eventually to our absolute delight said it was a very professional installation and it had passed!!!

There was nothing stopping us now! Just the last few jobs to finish!

Still working!

Tiling, tiling and more tiling! Two bathrooms and a kitchen later and we've done it! As the first floor bathroom is an odd shape being in the roof space we have decided on fitting "built-in storage".

The plasterboard is all in place, filling and sanding the joints wasn't very enjoyable and was very time consuming...not to mention messy!

Our biggest shock has been the cost of the flue system for the woodburner at more than twice the cost of the actual burner itself! It took many hours of planning to make sure the flue met all the safety requirements and looked right as we wanted it to be exposed internally but we're really pleased with the result we're just waiting now for some chilly weather to test it out!

As we will need to have an electrical inspection the next job is the ceilings, this will mean we can fit all the lights and be in a position to request a visit...scary stuff!

Plasterboard

We are now sick of seeing plasterboard! It has kept us busy for the past few weeks and has been a quiet job we can continue with during the season. The ground floor was made more difficult by having to cut the board around each joist as we want to keep these exposed (seemed like a good idea at the time!) If only plasterboard came ready painted! The endless plastering and sanding of the joints (on average 5 coats of jointing compound with sanding in between on every joint!) seemed to take forever followed by days of painting although this was a little more therapeutic!

One day I asked Tony to make the bed and he did quite literally!!!

A neighbours brother, who is an electrician, came around to help and advise us on some of the electrics questions we had, he was completely perplexed by the extractors we had put in each bathroom. “Ou est le VMC?” he said “Quoi?” we said! Turns out it is very fashionable (and obligatory in new homes) to have a centralised ventilation unit which normally sits in the attic connected by several ducts which run to each room. It runs 24 hours and ensures the home is ventilated without the need for opening windows. We would rather just open a window we said but he told us it was unlikely the inspector would pass the installation without it, so now we are the proud owners of a VMC!

The plasterboard is all but finished so now onto bathroom tiling...what fun!

1st Floor interior

We feel as if we have achieved very little in the past couple of weeks, of course, this is our busiest time for our business and it really is "all hands on deck" most of the week to make sure our guests have a great holiday. We are also very mindful of only working when our guests are out for the day...hence progress is slow.

We have started work on the 1st floor walls. To allow light into the ground floor kitchen as well as some into the first floor bedroom, we fitted two small velux windows very near the base of the roof. In this way, we were able to allow light to flood downwards by keeping the first floor joists open over the kitchen and using glass bricks on the first floor. We are really pleased with the affect.

The majority of the remaining walls on the first floor (which are really the inside of the roof) are going to be covered by "lambris" or tongue and groove. The rafters are going to remain partially exposed and coloured white and the lambris is going to have a white wash and be fitted in between each rafter. It is a painstakingly slow process as each piece of lambris has to be cut to size then fitted. We have tried really hard to limit the amount of plasterboard going up as we are keen not to creatE a "white box" effect. As the house is very straight and simple we are endeavouring to keep any of the unique characteristics, such as the timber, exposed to inject some "soul" into the building (as well as the blood, sweat and tears which are already in it!!!)

We've also started to fit some of the wardrobe doors which has been a bit of a nightmare as the timber rafters are obviously all slightly different but there you go..we have come to expect all jobs to be difficult!

The 1st fix of electrics are now in place at last and we have mounted the "Gaine Technique de Logement" or in English, a massive great big space where all electrics, aerial cables, phone lines and internet lines should meet.

So onwards we plod!

Onto the interior!

It turns out that the external work was probably the quickest part of the housebuild to achieve! The interior is proving trickier than we anticipated. The steel frames are now in place for all the internal walls but this has meant we needed to buy the kitchen and bathrooms to make absolutely sure we had the walls where we wanted them (6 hours in IKEA trying to order the kitchen when their computer crashed has not been a highlight of the build!)

On the ground floor we have insulated the walls with polystyrene cladding and rockwool, on the first floor we have used a layer of multi-foil insulation to help keep the heat out of the roofspace in the summer months with another wadge of rockwool.

Sometimes having a fairly blank canvas is not always an advantage as we have spent many hours intricately planning layouts only to change it the following day when we realise something that means it won't work!

Definately the most challenging part of the build so far has been the electrics...trust us when we say the French are just as good as the English at writing regulations that are incomprehendable! Trouble is, as we are fitting our own electrics, we are going to be inspected so not only for our own safety but to avoid a hefty second inspection cost we have to get it right first time. We have a number of books detailing every regulation, however, some are not clear whether they are advisory or compulsory and, trying to maintain our budget, we clearly need to try and avoid as many non compulsary costs as possible. Even trawling through the French electricians forums do not prove conclusive as they cannot agree on the regs, so hey ho we are just hoping for the best. We have ordered all the electric components off the net which are due to arrive tomorrow (a little concerned that the company normally use the postal service to deliver orders but have informed us that our order will be delivered by lorry!!!)

Rendering and wood cladding

As we are now only 4 weeks away from the arrival of our first guests and the weather has turned particularly Spring like we felt it about time we made the exterior of the house presentable and waterproof.

We decided to wood clad the top triangular part of the gable ends to add a little more character and to try and blend the house in a little more with it's surroundings. We researched the different wood available and suitable. Although red cedar is beautiful we are not great fans of the "grey" aged look of the wood but we were very aware of the need for a hard wood and one not particularly attractive to wood boring insects (we have had a 15 metre fence eaten this year by long horned beetles!!!) Consistently Douglas Fir rated very highly as being naturally resistant to fungal and insect attacks and also retaining it's red colouring with an annual protection coat. So that decided and ordered the frame was built with an under lay of breathable membrane.










The rendering was a little more back breaking!!! The scratch coat was applied with a "multibat" mix (a mixture of lime and cement) with sand and the final coat with a hydraulic lime and sand mix. We added a fantastic waterproofer to the scratch coat which also contained a plasticiser (normally impossible to find in France), unfortunately, the builders merchants had no further stock and with the typical French shrug of shoulders by way of response as to when the next stocks would arrive we had to resort to another brand which sadly did not contain a placticiser. However, our good friend and ever patient goat expert bought us a great replacement known as washing up liquid and that happily did the job!!!


So now the house is waterproof we can start on building the internal walls and adding insulation. We are currently researching the best options for insulation. Regulations are very stringent and demand that we have a minimum of 260 mm of rockwool in the roof. Trouble is, we really want to expose the rafters (and having painstakingly sanded them are not very keen to give up on it!) but to squeeze 260 mm of rockwool into 100mm gap which would be left between each rafter maybe pushing it a bit...we don't want the slates popping off under the pressure!


"Building Control!"

Flooring

We're working for a bit on the inside....hooray!


Flooring, flooring, flooring! We created our own race as Tony laid the floorboards on the first floor and I tiled the ground floor...it wasn't a fair fight but he won!!! At least, however, tiling one large space was easier than waiting until the dividing walls were built, saved a lot of time messing around with cutting. As ever though, the grouting also took an age but we are pleased with the finish. Once all the flooring was complete we started to fit the staircase. We always knew the staircase would be too tall for the rise between the floors but in the end it was only 10 cims out...very frustrating as we had to cut off one comeplete step from the timber staircase and build our own concrete step!


Now the weather is warming up, it's onto the rendering...yippee!!!

Doors and windows

Another stage closer to making the house watertight was to fit the doors and windows. This went fairly smoothly (bit of a miracle!) and certainly stopped the draughts! The masking tape isn't in case of hurricane damage...we have always fed wild birds around the house and read that wild birds will instinctively fly towards doors and windows where there is no clear obstacles, so with that in mind the book suggested adding tape to the openings until the little birds worked out it would hurt if they flew into it!

Laying the mains electricity cable

And now.... to try and connect the main services to the new house. The house is 60 metres from the roadside and, therefore, the 60 metres from the new electricity meter...a very long trench to dig! To begin with, we dug by hand (with a shovel!) around the areas we knew there maybe existing service pipes and cables. Giving that up as a bad idea, we borrowed a mini digger from a good friend and started to seriously dig. A very big mess we have made which hasn't been helped by heavy rain and clay soil.

The trench has to be 60 cm deep where laid under garden and 80 cm deep under pathways and 50 cm wide. 60 metres of 2 x 35mm2 cable is very, very heavy and trying to pull this through the conduit was a nightmare not to mention extremely tiring. The conduit was laid in a bed of sand and covered with warning tape (for the next time we dig up the courtyard...that will not be anytime soon!!!!). The most frustrating part was trying to refill the trenches, the soil that had been excavated was very rocky and nicely glued together with soaking wet clay soil. We couldn't get the digger to move it without making even more mess so we elected to move it by hand.....

So the electricity cable in now in place and we have started on the trenches for the water and drains. After that it will be digging the drains to evacuate the water from the gutters into the field. We can't wait until we can start putting some things back together, at the moment, it feels as if we are just tearing everything up!

The Roof is on!

The roof is on!!!

Having battled the elements (not to mention fitting vents and velux windows) we now have a roof over our heads!

We bought 5400 slates and have 40 spare so not bad estimating. The zinc "Nantaise" gutters were very expensive but we think worth the expense and are guaranteed for 30 years so will probably outlive us!

We now leave the house for the next project which is digging up the courtyard to lay the trench for the mains electrcity. We are able to lay it at a depth of 50 cm so not too bad but the courtyard is compacted to a concrete state after years of heavy agricultural machinery using it.

The biggest obstacle with the trench is that it will need to pass two mains water pipes, at least one drainage pipe, and another mains electric cable. We hoped we would be able to dig it by hand to help us avoid tearing up the existing networrk but after two solid days of digging we only managed 5 or 6 metres and with a trench of 60 metres to dig and needing to keep our back muscles intact we have decided to borrow a friend's digger. We will have to use the digger very carefully to avoid any mishaps...watch this space!!!

Felting, battening and slating!

Very frustrated wiating for a relatively windless day to start laying the felt we eventually managed to get started. The weather has been relentless, either snow and ice or wind and rain makes working on a roof very uncomfortable! Once the felt was in place we started what seemed like the endless process of nailing on the battens....lots of them.

Battens in place, we have now made a start on the slates. We are hanging the slates on hooks and not nailing and are very pleased with the rustic look of the beautiful slate. The amount of weight the roof is supporting is worrying! First velux window is in now just the rest of the roof and the other four velux windows!!!