Finally, at last, enfin .... back on line

After the long saga of the dying Dell laptop, I finally bought an HP desktop and set it up - still slightly hard to believe - in the barn. Of course there wasn't any internet access there, ossibly a consequence of the thickness of the stone walls in the farmhouse and in the barn itself. So I bought Orange's patent "Wifi Extender" and after a lot of trial and error plugged the remote end into a socket in the outside workshop, where the signal (just) penetrates to the computer. I think in principle if I could find a socket in the barn using the same electrical phase as the one in the fermhouse, I could bring it indoors. But the many trials around the barn yielded only a similar number of errors.

Which is all by way of saying that in the intervening three weeks since the last blog, the electrician finally put the circuits into use, and the plumber got the kitchens, bathrooms, and heating all going properly. So as winter gets going we have a warm and well-lit home where we can do everything except wash the dishes and sleep. The dishwasher has not worked once (thanks, Bosch), and the bedroom is still work in progress. I'm plasterboarding the ceiling. The plasterboard goes between the warped and knotty beams, so each piece has to be hand-carved to a rough shape. Most of that is done. Then filler has to be applied in substantial quantities (this is all to do). Then it has to be smoothed off and painted. After that the wardrobes can be put up and then - only then - can the bed be moved in.

But the lino upstairs is in place, though not quite fully laid. The installer is waiting for the seam-welder to arrive, so the joins all show quite a lot. And correspondingly when the family came to visit for the chestnut fair, they couldn't go into the upstairs bedrooms. The farmhouse was full. And the weather wasn't very good either. Of course, directly they went home, lovely warm sunny autumn weather - over 18 degrees this afternoon.

Pictures of work done recently will follow. This post is really to celebrate the internet connection. Proust has got as far of book two of Cities of the Plains, and this is quite an entertaining stretch too.

excuses, mostly

My computer finally died comprehensively, and of course at the most annoying time. So I've not been able to get back to my blog very easily.

However, the work has come on most impressively (depending, I suppose, on how easily you are impressed). The plumber and the electrician have now finished all they can do, and the main services are all working. For my part, I've almost finished the upstairs bathroom (a limited area of grouting and a few more tiles to do), and I've started work on the plasterboard ceilings downstairs. This involves fitting the plasterboard between the old barn floor joists. All of these have twisted and warped to a greater or lesser extent, which means that each bit of plasterboard has to be cut to fit. And then when, inevitably, it doesn't quite fit, it has to be shaped with a stanley knife to get it around the knots and bulges in the joists. As a result it is slow work. I don't yet have a cordless drill either (it should arrive next week) so it is all a bit of an effort using rather a heavy mains drill, designed more for holes in concrete than sharp screws into plasterboard and wood.

I've done about a third of one room so far, but this understates what has yet to be done. At one side of the room there are no joists to screw into - just a cement block wall. I'll need to find a way to get a support for the boards onto these walls. But I'll do all the rest first while waiting for inspiration to strike. And then there's also the area below the hearth on the next floor, where there is concrete rather than wood. And where the levels are all wrong too. More inspiration needed.

Perhaps Proust will help? I'm now close to the end of the Guermantes Way, having just read Charlus' insane outburst to the narrator. Oddly, my copy of this second volume of the GW is very roughly cut, as if the first reader was using anything except a thin knife - the edge of his finger, perhaps - in his haste to finish the volume. And I can see why (sometimes). The narrative of this book is rather like Jane Austen meets Samuel Beckett. Undeterred, perhaps? the next stop will be the Cities of the Plains.

still an Indian Summer

..... whatever that is. Opinions vary. But it's warm and sunny and dry and ... well, you get the picture. Or you would get a picture if I had a camera, but it too has died on me. So nothing to show, either in the line of late summer days, or shots of the building work, still continuing. No sign of either the plumber or the electrician, but who knows, maybe tomorrow. They've only got a couple of days work to do, and then the barn would be habitable.

I've been repairing the front edge of the silo (the former rainwater cistern) in front of the barn, which one day will be a tiled terrace. I've sliced off the decayed bit with the big angle-grinder and a diamond disk, and I've cast in place a new strip of reinforced concrete. I uncovered some of the old reinforcing rods - over an inch in diameter, lord only knows where they got those from - and I've tried to link my rather thinner reinforcements properly to the old ones. It looks good, and even fairly flat. But what's really difficult is not removing the shuttering too soon. Two weeks would be OK, and longer would be much better if I don't want the edge to break away when I take the wood off. But it's like having a scab to pick. You know you shouldn't, but it just itches so much.

I've also been deafening myself with the thicknesser. It isn't all that noisy when all you're planing is pine, but these are 100-year-old oak planks, and they are as hard as nails. When I went down this evening for a litre of milk from the farm below us, everyone commented that they had heard me at work. Time to get ear defenders I think. For me, that is, not for the neighbours.

And we had a visit from the previous owner: quite a milestone this, as he has previously said that a visit to his old home (the house where he was born) was too painful an experience now that we are living there. We showed him round and said how much we liked living here. And we now think he'll come again.