My work in France

Select wish year you would like to read:

2007 - The beginning
2008 - Using the light
2009 - For the Owls
2010 - And then there were Mice

2010 - And then there wore Mice - 8th July - 17th July

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I ain't looking forwards to the two weeks in France. I have the rest of the plaster boarding to do.

Upon arriving we do our usual sweep and clean, turn on the water and electric and uncover everything. In the settee we use, we found a dead mouse and the damage it had caused. The settee needed a new covering, all the filling was leaking out. Wanting to sit down we use duct tape where the leaks are and cover the whole thing with a duvet cover.

A trip to Bricó is in order before we start anything. I work out how many more plasterboards we need and off we go.

I soldier through the rest of the boarding between the truss beams. Its slow and boring work. Finally I finish with a victory scream only to change to a cry when I notice other parts of the cottage need boarding. The wall in the bedroom, the landing stairs wall and ceiling and a small part of the stair well. Some electrics are a welcome break for the landing light.

All the plasterboarding complete. Time to turn to what i do best, woodwork.

I set about making a small cupboard to cover the consumer unit. Good job I hadn't thrown the jig i made for the larder door, it comes in handy when i run up one more door for this cupboard. Fitting the cupboard was eventful. While using a tool called a multimaster near the electric meter, the electric trips. I think I have cut through a wire. Turns out I hadn't and upon using the tool around the same place again the electric trips. I come to realise the vibrations are causing the board to trip.

I turn to fitting the now warped larder unit. It isn't to badly out of shape but does require some feckling for the filler strips to fit nicely. The real issue with the larder doors are the hinges. These are flush hinges but carry on the French tradition of drop pivot design. I believe they use these hinges so you just have to lift the door out of place when decorating and once finished just drop them back on the pins. The problem with the flush type is they only have two knuckles so if your hanging the door from the right the door just falls off. You can release the pin but there are no configurations where it will let you use the hinges on the other side as true to flush hinge designs the knuckles are bent in one direction. A trip to Bricó takes a couple of hours but we do find the flush hinges suitable for hanging on the right hand side. Its obvious now as the more I visit France the more I recognise there language.

Time is nearly up. It don't seem like much has been done this visit, with the plaster boarding taking 60% of the time we start looking for small jobs to occupy our time.

We fit an satellite dish and run cables to the TV. The bath didn't come with a side panel so the client asked me to cut one from ply. He also wanted some more tiles around the sink. I also do some cutting from a beam where the landing cupboard will fit and fit some support for the gas bottle under the larder cupboard.