Starting the Kitchen

Aside from removing the floors in the house and using the resultant hardcore we have also started on forming the kitchen area in terms of its structure. From the earliest picture above you might be able to see that the front wall in the barn area did not go above ground floor level and it was frankly in a shocking condition. The simplest solution was to take it down completely and replace it with a new and much more stable block wall.

Simpler said than done though. The roof structure left by our previous French builder was tied in to the wall in a most 'awkward' fashion making the removal problematic. So a good deal of head scratching was done until a solution was found involving stabilising part of the wall with concrete and the use of a number of acrow-props.

The result in terms of building up the wall can be seen in the latest picture above. The hole in it is the size of the door that will be inserted – a triple conventionally-opening door giving as much light as possible into the room as it is over 9 metres long from front to back.

Overall therefore a good start on completing this side of the house. It won't be finished to a point where we shall be able to use it for Christmas but we can reasonably confident, fingers crossed, to be in full use by Easter. Watch this space.

Part Way to a Patio, Terrace and Summer Kitchen

As indicated in the previous postings we have generated vast quantities of hardcore from removing the old barn roof in October and the floors in the second part of the house. Piled up at the front of the courtyard it has been something of an eyesore and a concern as to what we might do with it given that none of our neughbours seemed interested in using it for their building projects – removal by skip here in France is dreadfully expensive and the alternative of many, many trips to the local tip did not bear thinking about.

The answer has been to create a patio under the barn next to where we shall step out of the new kitchen – this is four blocks high from the ground which will enable us to see over the garage roof to the Pyrenees. From this patio a terrace has been formed across the whole front of the house leading onto the remaining area which had been pigsties and which we shall turn into what is called here a 'summer kitchen'. So foundations for the walls were pulled using the mini-digger and the blocks laid leaving us the task of back-filling the area with the hardcore. It has been a back-breaking effort made worse by the knowledge that had we made the decision to create these areas before we cleared the floors we could have put the hardcore straight into them – a painful lesson to learn.

From the pictures you can see the prepared areas where the next task will be to have pre-mixed concrete delivered and laid. After which the major problem will be to keep the dogs and cat off, footprints are not wanted!

The Second Half Starts

Three linked posts here to deal with the work now in train.

Firstly the progress on the garages has been 'rewarded' by the work on the second half of the house commencing in July. Though the first thing that was achieved was the renovation of the back half of the roof over the garage area; it is now all weather-proof which is a reassurance given how much 'stuff' we have crammed in to the garages!

The next step was to clear out the existing floors in what will become at ground floor level the kitchen and the dining room. We started with this as we need to sort out the levels both for the ground floor and then with that as a reference we can fix the first floor level. We have made things much easier for ourselves by deciding that over the kitchen we shall have only one very large bedroom with en suite bathroom meaning that we don't need to have quite so much headroom as was originally planned. Thus the floor does not need to be lowered which would have meant lowering the ground floor in turn and that would have been difficult given that there are no foundations to speak of under the walls, we would have had to do underpinning with all the extra effort that would have entailed.

The ground floor had been used as pigsties/cattle pens and the floor was formed in concrete and we started by simply breaking it up manually with a sledge-hammer and pickaxe. But we reached a point where the concrete was so tough that it proved impossible to break it. So off to the local tool hire place we went where the only thing they could provide was a compressor and pneumatic drill. I then spent the next day using this beast to break up as much of the floor as possible within the time we had it for. I have never before used a drill of this sort and it was, to say the least, a testing experience – I had no idea that the drills weighed so much, the drilling down was relatively easy but the hauling it back up …......... At the end of the day my arms, shoulders and back were complaining bitterly!

The result of all this effort was a huge amount of hardcore which we heaped up against the front wall of the courtyard as well as putting it in place for the patio we shall create outside of the kitchen under part of the barn. After the concrete had been removed we still needed to dig down into the subsoil to get the necessary depth. Fortunately a friend has a mini-digger which we were able to use and with it large amounts of earth were dug out and removed to be piled up round the edges of our field. The result of all this effort in terms of the floors can be seenin the first picture above. But of course this earth also had within it many, many stones which we took out and added to the hardcore heap. This reached such an enormous size, see the second picture above, that we asked of one our local farmer neighbours whether he would be interested in using any of it for the building work that he is presently doing. He took one look at all the broken up concrete and declined the offer, though he did say that he would try to discover if there was anyone else who might be interested; thus far, very fortunately as will be revealed in due course, no one has come forward.

Garages

As indicated in the last post the task for winter/spring was to create garages in part of what were the old pigsties; see the original picture above of how they were early on in our time here. There was an urgency to this as the space will be needed to store all the 'stuff' that is in the unrenovated part of the house prior to the work commencing on that. So I approached a number of potential builders who I thought would have been interested in having the work. It's a familiar tale now, as I noted about the barn roof in the post below, no quotes were forthcoming.

So in the end it was down to working with a friend to do the necessary work. Much slower going than I would have preferred as he had other social and family commitments to honour. On the other hand it was a very pleasant experience as we got along well and had fun whilst cracking on with the work on the days he was available. We were also fortunate that the weather was good on the days when the roof was renovated.

Talking of which our friend is none too keen on working on roofs, so as soon as we had completed the part over the front of the actual garages he stopped helping me. Which was what he had said all along. I was fortunate that my older son paid a visit just at that time and he helped me renovate the part of the roof which faces onto the road. And I have now completed the part of the roof facing into the courtyard from the garages to the house – this can be seen in the photo above.

The remaining work to be done therefore is the whole of the roof at the back, all seventeen and a half metres long of it. What causes a particular difficult here is that there's very little space between the back wall and the wall to the neighbouring garden which will make taking the tiles down and storing them a real problem. It is possible for me to do it but I think that I might wait till the friend who is going to help with the barn roof is on site and do it with his assistance.

Notwithstanding this remaining issue it is possible to use the garages and we are pleased with the way that they fit in 'seamlessly' with the rest of the property. With this space we can store all the things we need and get on with the renovation work in the second half of the house. Will this happen in summer/autumn? I sincerely hope so!

The Barn Roof - a Start

It has been a considerable time since we had any substantial building works done to the house largely as a result of needing to raise funds by selling our house in GB. That happened over last summer releasing the necessary funds but then we faced the same problem as we had at the start of the whole project - finding a reliable builder who was prepared to do the work at a reasonable price and in a reasonable timescale.

The most urgent aspect for us was, and is, the roof of the barn; the first picture above shows the state the roof was in early on in our ownership. Over the four years we have now had the property it has steadily worsened under the impact of the weather and various insects which have consumed the wood. By the autumn I had begun to have serious doubts about the ability of the structure to withstand another winter similar to that we experienced last year. If we had snowfalls of a comparable quantity then the weight might prove too much and the whole structure would then collapse. This would cause many more problems for us than trying to rescue as much as possible of what exists and might be re-usable.

We approached a series of builders, either people we have got to know or people recommended to us. And we were told that times are tough for builders in this region at the moment as there has been a considerable cutting back in the amount of work for them as people have stopped commissioning work under the impact of the financial difficulties both here and in G.B. Holland, Germany, etc. Hence we thought that we should have no trouble finding someone to take the work on. Wrong! Despite several people visiting, discussing the work, taking measurements and promising to provide us with quotes we had virtually no takers. In the end we have secured the assistance of an English friend with whom we shall undertake to do the work ourselves - not what I had hoped as I am a little tired of working flat out on this project, but needs must.

So at the start of winter we took the old roof off - the tiles and the battens that is - exposing the bare bones of the structural members. You can see this in the second picture above. Two surprisingly things emerged from this work. Firstly that the majority of the timber is in quite reasonable condition. Certainly there are plenty of places where timber will have to be replaced with new or reclaimed timber, but there is far less of this than we had expected. The other aspect is that the barn was not put up in one piece; from the way it has been constructed the original part dates back beyond the eighteenth century, the newer part nearer to the road is probably a nineteenth century addition.

In taking off the roof, the tiles what we could reclaim were carried down to ground level and stored under the barn area, you can see this in the pictures. What was unusable for reconstructing the roof we have kept in a heap to be used as hard core for the terrace we shall put in across the front of the house.

But we are not able to carry on for the moment and finish off the re-roofing as our friend has to be elsewhere for some time now. So as a temporary measure to protect the structure from, the weather we put weather-proof sheeting over it. I tried hard to acquire ‘proper’ tarpaulin but it seems that it is not something that is sold in France. What you can see in the third picture above is not as durable and we are hopful that it will be able withstand the force of the weather for a sufficient time till we can finish the job in late spring.

Between now and then we shall also work on the pigsty area to create a double garage and workshop. Initially this will act as a storage area only so that we can clear out all the ‘stuff’ that we have stored in the un-renovated part of the house. And once the barn roof is completed we shall turn to finishing off this part of the house. This will be a substantial piece of work but we are hopeful - do we never learn??!! - that by the end of this year the structural work will be completed and we shall be facing ‘only’ the finishing tasks. Watch this space!