A hot week's tiling

The tiles on the terrace (over the silo) are finally finished. It was very warm work, but working with cement, with grout, and buckets of water is a very effective exfoliant, so now I have nice clean hands. With nice clean blisters.

It was a good thing that I left the hump untiled until after I'd worked out how to tile it. In the end it only needed four easy cuts to produce a tiled area that is a couple of centimeters higher than the surrounding area. Like this (these are all clickable thumbnails - click on them for high-res pictures):



I was surprised to find that the grouting was such vigorous work, even though I didn't do much at a time. It was quite difficult to leave the grout long enough to dry sufficiently in the gaps between the tiles, but not so long as to be impossible to clean off the surface.



In the background is the man from the supermarket come to fix our 9-week-old washing machine (bearings shot). The grouting took me four days, though of course since it was so hot I wasn't exactly working full-time (though I do remember one evening when I finished at 8pm). In between I was getting the red car imported and legal and insured in France. I had to replace its shock-absorbers which passed an English MOT but failed the French one - where they actually test them. In the UK they just check to see that they are present and not obviously leaking.

But the finished result (of the tiling) does look pretty good (the car still looks shabby but with French number plates):



Of course most things look nice with pots of flowers and sunshine, and what's more the peaches over the terrace are ripe and ready to pick (and not wormy either, unlike the apples). It's possible to see a small puddle in the middle: I flooded it to see where the water stayed. There was a similar puddle before I started tiling, but I tell myself that this one is smaller. In any event the surface is now pretty certainly waterproof. If there's rainwater getting into the silo now it will only be through the walls.

And in the background of all three pictures you can just see the youngest grandson's nappies on the line: he's on his way home today, but right now he's having a swim.

The blockhouse is now nearly done

After two days of very hard work in hot weather, the blockhouse is just about done. After putting up the rafters and nailing on the planking I discovered that a small roof like this is normally held on to the building just by its own weight. So I tied it down by using metal strips, fastened to the rafters at one end and to the concrete belt on top of the wall at the other. Hard work with the masonry drill. I then thought that it might be a good idea to seal up the bottom edge of the roof - to discourage plants from coming in - with a concrete infill. This is it:



The tops of the metal strips just show above the concrete. They aren't really heavy duty angles - I'm using up the hangers for the suspended ceiling, as I had to buy two large boxes of them, and I had most of the second box left over. However the concrete is going to help weight down the roof.

The concrete goes all the way along on top of the wall - I did have to fit wooden strips to stop it falling straight out on the ground, and these too will make the roof a bit more solid. They are fixed securely into the rafters. Here's a general view of the concrete infill:



After that I screwed the missing planks into place - all the rest are nailed but I didn't want to hammer right next to the wet concrete. I didn't think it would harm the mix per se, but that there was a risk that I might dislodge the shuttering which is only wedged in place. So here we are:



Apart from shifting the tools and general builders' mess, there is one more job to do, which is to put a bit of roofing felt over it. In a week or two there will be metal sheeting over it, the final layer below the solar panels (which have still not even been ordered .... )

work in progress

The blockhouse is still as it was - summer visitors, and it's now August, so not a lot gets done. But I have started tiling the silo outside the front door, so here is what progress I've made over three days:







The gap in the tiles is where there was a concrete trapdoor down into the old cistern: that part is now two or three centimeters higher than the surrounding area, so I will have to dissect the tiles to make them sit as flat as possible.

It is possible to lay tiles when it is raining, as it was on Sunday, but it's more difficult. The adhesive doesn't stick to the ground, so when you try to spread it, it slides around in a lump instead. It doesn't wash away though, so the tiles are well stuck down.