Inside and out

Yesterday I had loaded up a trailer-full of earth from our soon-to-be neighbour's building site. This is hard work, so I left off the task of unloading it for today.



It perhaps doesn't look all that much but I would guess it's a ton or more: the car felt pretty heavy with the full trailer, and it's a good thing that the round trip isn't much more than half a mile (or for the metrically inclined, substitute a tonne and a kilometer).

It's going to smooth out the slope at the edge of the grassed area by the terrace, so that I can eventually mow the grass up the slope, rather than let the weeds grow on it until I can get the strimmer out (once a year, maybe). I don't quite have a "before" picture, as I had already dumped one trailer-load in there earlier in the week. I'd also removed, this morning, some lumpier bits at the top to get a better slope. So this is what it then looked like:



and then the picture below is definitely "after". I also cut away a couple of the apple-tree's lower branches, as I didn't want to be poked in the eye while standing on the trailer to shovel out the earth.



After that I had a go at a bit of tidying up in the kitchen of the farmhouse. The corner where the dustbin sits ("poubelle corner") usually has a small wooden table to cover the dustbin. Without it, there's a nasty gap at the end of the tiling, where the pipes all showed, and a hole in the tiled wall originally giving access to the stopcocks (and drain valves) for the bathroom water supply. All pretty ugly.

So I slapped up a bit of plasterboard over the gap in the end, and, preparatory to putting a small cut piece of plasterboard in the access hole, I glued in a tile behind it to stop the plasterboard just falling through the hole. Like this:



The tile is almost the same size as the hole, but it goes in diagonally and fills enough space to do its job. The glimpses of blue in the top corners of the hole are the new PER water pipes feeding the bathroom: the black mould at the bottom edge is, I imagine, due to the drain cocks soaking the chipboard a couple of times a year for the last thirty years.

Now the corner looks like this:



and, yes, it is a pity I couldn't find enough of the original tiles to fill the gaps completely. But normally it's a dark corner behind the dustbin. I was lucky to find a very dusty and even more cobwebby box in the attic with the few tiles to do the more visible bits. But, maybe, next time I might use white tiles instead?

The wall isn't very vertical, is it? It'll all look better with some grout and a dab of white paint.

On the floor ....

... there is now a cement screed (it's actually a 6:1:1 mix: sand, cement and lime).
It seemed like a good idea at the time to bed in the first few blocks of the wall:



this will form the side of the shower and the back of it is where the washbasin will go.

I've been trying to make friends with the feral cat (kitten, really) that arrived here a month or so ago. It is now almost tame - probably tame enough to be treated for fleas. We caught him, as he then was, in a trap a week ago, and took him down to the vet for a little snip - it'll never miss what it now hasn't got. We were told to keep it in for 24 hours after the operation, so we shut it into the boiler room. Little did we think it could climb:



Judging by the smell afterwards, he (as I suppose it's kinder not to make too much of his new not-quite gender) left us a small present up there. The smell has now gone. There was of course no way of cleaning out inside the ceiling.....

Getting a new bathroom ...

Having polished off the last of the shutters, it's now time to get serious with the bathroom. All the fittings were showing their age (early 1970s I'd guess), some were cracked, and the bath was beyond repair. So I turned off the water and took a sledgehammer to the bath, a cast-iron thing that really must have weighed a third of a ton, and shipped the resulting pieces to the tip.

The bathroom then looked like this:



The holes in the floor were my efforts at finding where the drainpipes went: successful too, as I did find them. The hole in the back wall was the previous plumber's access to the tap connections for the bath, though how anyone could have worked on it through that hole is beyond me. Not very nice for anyone using the bedroom on the other side of the wall, either. So I bricked it up and put up the framework for the plasterboard:



Surprisingly, the metal structure is all nicely vertical or horizontal - it's the camera that's lying this time. The one bit that looks absolutely askew is a bit of gaffer tape holding a pipe away from the structure.

The new plumbing is plastic "PER" pipe, which I'd not used before, but it has seemed quite easy to get good watertight connections. I've run the new piping back as far as I can towards the mains, down into the cellar, as the copper pipes are not just very small diameter but are also in poor condition - odd leaks in various inaccessible places.

Putting up the plasterboard was something of a struggle by myself, but it went up with only one regrettable gap on the lefthand side: all nice and tight to the walls and ceiling elsewhere. There's a handcrafted hole built into it for the soap and shampoo in the shower area, though I am now wishing I had measured the height of a standard bottle of shampoo. It'll be OK for the soap, at least.



The fitting for the shower taps etc is likely to pose another problem. I now know that I shouldn't have taped the pipes to the metal framework, as it restricts the amount you can move the pipes: after the fittings go on, they are supposed to be pushed back into the wall. They are presently not easily pushable. I may have to play around with a long thin (curved?) knife and cut the gaffer tape by fiddling about through the little holes.

Next thing is to put down the new floor, ready for tiling. Though before the tiles I have to build the wall between the washbasin and the shower, then build a support for the washbasin, tehn box in the suspended WC and ..... well, quite a bit more I suppose. And it would probably be best to get the ceiling smoothed off before starting work on the floor - and do the electrical work so I can have lights in there. Hmmm - a week or two to go yet I think.