not strictly building

but just about as hard to do. I've been re-assembling the walnut armoire. It took about an hour to knock it apart and bring it from the farmhouse to the barn. It took pretty well all day to put it back together again.

Partly this was because re-assembly involves getting every part loosely in place before tightening up any of the joints. And as there are four large sheets that slot in place into grooves in the structure, it's not that easy to do. Then new pegs had to be shaped to fit the assembly holes (creative use of an electric drill and some sandpaper), waxed and then whacked in.

And in addition there were some repairs and reinforcements to be done as part of the assembly: drawer runners that had broken away, through woodworm and long use, split panels in the base that needed new wood to hold them together - see here -



where I am in the process of knocking the very last peg in. But then the main beam had to be chipped away to allow the wardrobe to go right back against the wall. With some further work on the beam and the top of the wardrobe to enable it to be levelled, and - finally - cutting away the cornice to shape it around the beam. But I'm happy with the finished result:



It does need a quick squirt with the Mr Sheen and some serious polishing, though. And the four front peg holes, which don't show in the picture, have to be filled with special wax. Probably a good idea to push some of it into the capricorn beetle holes too, and then it will look a lot better than it has for a good number of years.

toys for the boys

Yesterday I bought a new sliding mitre saw, and now - having spent a couple of hours assembling it - I am looking for things to do with it. Apart from making doors, of course, which was why I bought it. It was surprisingly cheap and I will probably find out why. All I still need is a pillar drill to help cut the deeper mortices. I'll see if I can sneak one in soon.

In the meantime I've finally finished putting in the filler round the ill-fitting doorframes. This is an unwarranted slur on the menuisier, who made them and did his best. What really doesn't fit is the openings the frames go into. They are simultaneously out of square and not vertical, guaranteeing some interesting gaps at one point or another. Or at one point and another. And another....

So now we'll be able to treat the doorframes (linseed oil again?) and paint the walls. Which will make the room look a lot better. Regrettably the doors really need an architrave to cover the (filled) gaps between doorframe and wall, and that won't be easy, given that the walls are not vertical but the doorframes are. Some other time...

Tomorrow it will be tiling.

oh yes, that old chestnut

I've made - a bit amateurishly - the first of the five internal doors. As this one is the door to the boiler room, I wanted it thick, and it is, two layers of chestnut.

The door frame still needs filler round the outside, and then finally it will be possible to paint the wall and take the sticky-tape off. I still find it odd that the menuisier will supply and install the door frames, but doesn't regard making the door frames fit properly into the openings as part of his job.



I was pleased to find a builders' merchant in Aurillac with a load of planked chestnut, varying widths but all 2.1m long and 20mm thick, which is a good size for a door. The rebate in the door frame as installed a long time ago is 40mm, so two thicknesses fit it nicely. The wood has polished up well, just using a sander on the sawn surface (OK, I used a plane on the worst bits), and it's treated with linseed oil, so it's both shiny and it smells good too. The sawmill's original saw-marks show up better in this flash photograph than they do in ordinary light, and what look like gaps at the top and bottom of one plank are actually where there is a little bit of much darker sapwood and bark (so, just not a photogenic door then). The planks all had a degree of warping in all three directions, so getting flat surfaces was a bit of a chore. I hope they won't warp too much more.

There isn't a door handle (and maybe one day there will be), but that's largely because I've used the same style of latch as found in cottages in Kent:



You put your finger through the hole to lift the latch. I've seen them with a string from the latch, through the door to a bobbin on the outside (these have the finger-hole as well), presumably to help the old and arthritic (or perhaps just for children with short fingers?) My largest drill was 25mm (or an inch on the other side) and ideally the hole should be just a little more, maybe an inch and a quarter.

This is a rather clumsy version, and for the subsequent doors I'll hope to make slimmed-down versions. Most of the parts are oak, so they would be strong enough even if they were only half as thick. They are made from offcuts from planks I have salvaged from the old barn floor, which is why they show the much darker colour at the two outside edges.

I didn't spend much time with the sander and plane on the inside surface - this is the boiler room, after all. In the picture the construction method shows. It's a bit like those old church doors, full of nails (in this case posidrive screws), with the two layers of wood at right-angles to each other. I will try to be a bit more sophisticated with the subsequent doors. This one is very heavy, but that is just what was wanted, as the boiler is noisy. The door has cut down the sound from it very satisfactorily. It's now possible to sleep through the boiler start-up first thing in the morning. Before putting the door in, it was better than an alarm clock (as you couldn't turn it off).

no longer craning my neck

The ceiling in the room downstairs is now finally done, and I can try to get the twists out my neck caused by spending the last week working on the ceiling.

In progress it did have a resemblance to a conceptual art installation, though the theme - the transient value of what appears in newspapers - has already been overdone. Today it's news, tomorrow it's lining the cat's tray. In our case protecting the beams from the B&Q bargain value white emulsion.



Thanks to our fine electrician, Claude, the finished view now also has the lights installed, and the plug points and light switches finished too. The wall is only thinly painted, so the white should subsequently be a bit whiter, before we move in the wardrobe (it sounds better as an "armoire"). Though actually moving it in from the farmhouse will be a bit challenging, as I think it weighs getting on for a quarter of a ton. And the door-frame needs to be filled around the edge, and maybe an architrave too.



And one day, one day, we'll also have a bedroom door in the doorway, instead of a sheet of bubblewrap (or nothing).

the ceiling is filled

Not much to show for a weeks work, so I won't show it. The plasterboard is all filled, and smoothed off, and then filled again, and smoothed again. When I used the sander after the first filling session, it knocked out some of the less well-filled edges, and it was these gaps that needed the second filling. And the work has taken its toll - my sander died and had to be replaced. Plaster dust probably isn't very good for its electrics. My fingertips are particularly painful - sandpaper and splinters.

The last job was hoovering the beams to get the last of the dust off, which is a funny kind of job, involving a cricked neck and a lot of dust in my face.

But the ceiling is now ready for painting, probably tomorrow, as we've got visitors coming on Sunday and we're hoping the house will look its best.

It's been very cold indeed for the last week or so - daytime temperatures getting up to minus 3 - and the thin snow is frozen (as are the outside taps, the washing machine, and my nose after the first couple of minutes).

hitting the ceiling

I've been filling in the gaps between the plasterboard and the beams.
So I've been climbing up one or other of these:



The one in the middle was the one that got my knee a few years ago. I found it after it fell off (presumably) a builder's lorry onto the A20 outside our house in Kent ten or more years ago. The one on the left was inherited from the Moroccan builders, the next one was one of my first purchases in a builders' merchant in France (note the recent accident with a pot of paint visible on its lower steps), the white kitchen one second from the right belongs to Paul, who will probably collect it tomorrow, and the smallest one was inherited (a bit more literally) from my dad.

A trap for visitors (and other weighty matters)

I've made a "trappe de visite" (inspection hatch) for the newly plasterboarded, but not painted, ceiling of the boiler room.

This is it, before any of the tidying up started:



and this is where it goes:



It allows access to a large set of ball valves set into the water supply for each of the various rooms in the barn, allowing individual supply pipes to be cut off - for replacing taps, etc - without affecting the rest of the system.

We've finally got curtains up in the bedroom:



and the bathroom is actually finished, the tiling is done and Caro has been hard at work painting the walls, the ceilings, and herself. She now has a stiff neck, and I have tiler's finger-tip. I've repeatedly used the same finger to smooth down the tile cement and the grout at the edge of the tiling (and off the joints), and as both the cement and the grout are abrasive, and contain cement, I've burnt the skin on the end of that finger. But the end result is fine, and I'm sure the skin will heal:



Today I've started tidying up with a view to finishing the plasterboard ceiling in the hall. It need the gaps at the edges by the beams filled and smoothed, rather a dusty job. And Caro is still painting - the shower room, this time.

And we have also started work laying the very last bit of floor, the concrete slab in the workroom. It will have a raised plinth at the outer edge, supporting the worksurface with a sink, the washing machine, fridge, etc - because the existing concrete isn't level. It slopes up to that edge, and you need a good couple of inches to be sure it doesn't crack. So here is the raised plinth:



and possibly tomorrow the rest of the floor will go down. Then we'll be able to tile it and a major source of dust will have finally gone.