tiling ..... and .... tiling

This week I have mostly been tiling. Every now and then I have been doing some grouting for a change. Then some more tiling. As a result I have hands like sandpaper (about 80 grit) and the two downstairs bathrooms are fully tiled. And grouted. Finsihed in fact. Maybe a picture later - bathroom tiles look pretty much like bathroom tiles everywhere.

I've re-started on the upstairs bathroom, but by some act of providence I have finished the tile cement so there will be a short break before I buy some more. It's been very cold - well below zero - and there's about an inch of snow all round, so although it looks very pretty, driving to Mr Bricolage will be a rather slow business. For that matter I don't have enough tiles either, even with the extra ones on order (due maybe next week?), so it will no doubt be a while before it is all finished.

Here's the snow:



I am telling myself it is just the sun that has melted the snow on the rook, rather than a lack of insulation. Or perhaps the wind blew it off.

another nasty job

but the worst bit is done. We're putting up the ceiling in the boiler room, and as the boiler makes a constant groaning noise when it is feeding fuel in, we want to insulate between the ceiling and the floor above, in the hope of soundproofing it. With fibreglass (laine de verre over here). The fibres get everywhere when you cut it and when you try to get it up between the pipes and plasterboard supports. Then the fibres come down into your mouth, nose, ears, eyes ... and they prickle maddeningly. For that matter you also get the loose whitewash off the beams to, a really attractive combination of unpleasant materials.

Still, here's what it looks like while in progress:



This view shows how we've had to build in a step, to get round the lower pipes. It won't be a flat ceiling, but hey, it's a boiler room. There will also be an inspection hatch, as many of those pipes have valves allowing different parts of the hot and cold water system to be closed separately (to do tapwashers, etc).



Putting the plasterboard up doesn't bring much more dust down, and there's not a lot more to do anyway. I hope.

It has made a substantial difference to the noise level upstairs. Downstairs won't change much until I can install a door on the boiler room. And on the bedroom, for that matter. A couple of jobs for later.

A day on the tiles

For reasons I can't explain, tiling a small area of bathroom wall made me lose my temper. The crosser I got, the more reason I had to be cross, as the ready-mix adhesive sloshed from the spreader onto the floor, onto the other tiles, onto the bathroom fittings, onto me, and in fact onto anywhere but the wall where it was meant to go. Slowing down, breathing deeply for a minute or two, helped reduce the splatter, but trying to keep that way was very difficult. It might be because there is a difficult edge to finish - postponed for another day - which I feel won't be quite satisfactory whatever I do. It was a case of "not starting from here" - half the wall is already tiled, but it would have been better to have started from the other edge.

So I am sitting down with Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt instead.

Bathroom tiles aren't very interesting.

filling up drafty holes

up a ladder, of course. These gaps somehow got ignored by the professionals, but it is hard to ignore the drafts, which blow under the eaves and out behind the insulation into the main room.

Here is an (almost) before picture, showing the gap and the battens I put there to take the plasterboard. The triangular cut piece of wood will fill the top corner - otherwise the filler/mortar just pushes out behind and leaves an opening. You can't cut plasterboard to a fine point and expect it to stay in one piece.



This is the plasterboard in place - it'll need to be smoothed off and cleaned up before painting, but at least right now it keeps the drafts out.



And this shows where I have been working - the green plasterboard just shows in the top left-hand corner of the picture, above the suspended light fitting. We moved the desks to get the ladder up, and of course I banged my head on the oak beam just in front of the gap.



In fact there are still drafts, where the old roof timbers are exposed, but this has certainly reduced them - when the wind blew from the north-east you really noticed them.

We started the day dealing with the heating fuel (chipped wood). Water flowing down over the door of the silo had made the door swell and jam, so I couldn't get in. So I took the hinges off (torx screws, of course, lucky I had the drivers) and prised the door out. Then it was a simple matter of raking the woodchips from the ends where the mechanical sweep doesn't reach them, into the middle, and that got the boiler going again. Mind you, the boiler still turns itself on (noisily) at 6am each morning. I've decided to inflict a minor deception on it about the time of day - persuade it that it is living in England - and with a bit of luck we'll be woken up at 7am instead.

books do furnish a ... barn

While Caro was painting the roughcast walls a colour almost indistinguishable from cement (but they look very nice, I hasten to add, really they do), I was sawing up bits of pine cladding to stop the books falling out of the end of the bookshelf. I cannot imagine what the design spec was for this bit of furniture: perhaps the designer had never owned a book? The shelves are wide enough for us to put books in from both sides, as we have, but the bookshelf relies on diagonal wire struts to keep it rigid - it's meant to go up against a wall. These do look just slightly odd.

Here it is:



Luckily the book titles are too small to recognise (I hope) as it is a very random collection, grabbed from anywhere. Books in the farmhouse get a little damp in the winter, so this is rehab for them. They are drying out.

Tiling the blue bathroom

Today I finished off the floor tiles in the blue bathroom, grouting them and cleaning it all up. I found that in the three months since I last did any grouting, I'd forgotten such vital matters as how long to leave the grout before washing the tiles, and then how long before I could clean them off with a dry cloth. What a good thing there's the internet out there.

So this is what it looks like, with the floor finished and the walls and other surfaces all to do later:



The area by the door isn't quite right - you have to finish putting down the tiles in the doorway - if not you can't get out of the room. But that means that the last ones go down into a space where three sides are already in place. It's OK if the gaps turn out a little larger than they should be, but both times I ended up a little tight at the end. But it only shows if you know what you're looking for.

When we drove back from England last week, we called in on our friends Jo and Alan Taylor. Alan had just finished a painting for us, showing the outside workshop as it was in September last year. This is what it looks like - click on the picture to see a larger size version.



It's now hanging in our room in the barn, and looks very good there. Even though, as Alan pointed out, everyone will be able to see we have a problem with woodworm, to judge by the industrial size tin of Xylophene visible there. And that's only the most recent of five or six of them.

Interlude (winterlude?)

We went off to a warmer climate - the Lakshadweep Islands - for a spot of scuba diving over Christmas. It's very unspoilt. This is the dive hut:



And this is the dive boat, made of wood sewn together with rope:



We stopped over in Cochin, where the latest fashions were on display



They go in for Christmas there in a big way.

But now we're back in France and the work has started again.