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.