Shutters

As the weather is now beginning to feel autumnal, and rain might actually be a possibility soon - it's been a very dry summer - I've started to renovate the shutters on the farmhouse. The shutters are oak, and when new back in the 1920s must have looked pretty good. Now they are in very poor condition.



The picture above shows one of the corners, which are of course the most damaged areas, and the picture below shows one that I have dismantled:



The bolts on the hinges had to be ground off with the angle-grinder before I could take the framework off.

Here's a shutter in the course of being glued back together, though the original construction doesn't seem to have used any glue, just wooden pegs through the six mortice & tenon joints. The holes for the pegs can be seen in the picture above: the pegs knock out surprisingly easily with a drift. Quite a few were missing already.



The shutters below - a pair I did last week - could be dismantled without taking the hinges off, as the joints were open at the ends: the cross pieces could simply be slid out, either up or down, and reassembled with the four vertical planks of the shutter still together.



These have come up quite nicely, and should be good for a few more years - the weatherproof treatment will help, anyway. I am not so sure about the pair I am currently working on, as the wood is in worse condition. I will need to use some filler on a couple of the corners, but the resin-based stuff works very well, even though it shows afterwards: it doesn't take a stain.

The hardware shop didn't have any black japanned bolts for the hinges, so I am painting the mushroom heads, which will sit directly onto the wood, before fitting the bolts in place. That way I should be able to avoid getting paint onto the wood:



and I've put a coat of paint on the hinges too. I'll paint the other end of the bolt, the end with the nut that will be tightened up onto the hinge, when I've cut it to length and the shutters are finally back together.

Before starting today's shutters, I finished wiring up the lights in the workshop, so I should now be able to work there at all hours of the day. It's been quite cloudy today so without the lights it would have been too dark inside to see what i was doing.

Back to work - on the workshop

After a break for summer visitors (and to let my back recover) I've been getting my workshop fitted out. A lot of it is still temporary. I hope to build a proper woodworking bench when I can persuade our next-door neighbour to cut me some thick oak planks. And I also hope to replace the metalworking area with a bench on proper supports rather than concrete blocks stacked rather haphazardly. With a vice, too.

Here's what the workshop looks like now:



I have also been able to use it to make something - a bracket for the chimney. I made a form by filling a plastic drain-pipe with concrete, then bending the bracket to size (150mm diameter) around it. Here's the finished bracket:



And this longer shot shows where the bracket is in relation to the stove. Before installing the bracket the flexible pipe (which you can't see, in the chimney above the ceiling) prevented the stainless steel pipe from the stove from sitting straight (too many joints). It had a permanent flex in it near the top. The bracket seems to hold it all quite rigidly now.



I have yet to transfer the remaining contents of the old workshop - this one:



and thanks Alan, it's a lovely painting - over to the new one. And in fact there's at least one more shelf to go in, to complete the Heath Robinson effect. I tell myself it is because all the shelves are fastened to the ceiling rather than standing on the floor, but no doubt I could have done better. Still, virtually everything is re-cycled. Palets were very useful, and left-over roof timbers.

Stage management

With welcome help from my son-in-law Mike and from Jim and Lydia, together we got the mezzanine floor put back into the hangar.

The first part was to add solid wood at closer centres (40cm centres, though Lyd says I should call it 400mm) across the existing oak beams. These can be seen in the picture below, which shows the finished floor from underneath. We drilled through the new wood and even then found it hard to get the nails into the old oak.



This involved a certain amount of balancing on joists while hammering hard. In the middle of it, our elderly neighbour had a fall (Caro went to help) and the doctor was called out - he has sent her off to hospital. The doctor asked after my compression fracture (of an upper vertebra) but sensibly Caro said it was a lot better without mentioning what I was actually doing at the time.

We then heaved the floor panels up (18mm OSB Kronoply - chipped and oriented plywood) and screwed them down - it was a surprisingly quick job and it was all done well before lunchtime:



This is the last time ever it will look like this, as I hope to shift a large quantity of old timber up there over the next few weeks, with a view, eventually, to getting a concrete floor down on the main part of the hangar. The loose dry dirt there at present is diabolical stuff: drop anything small and it's lost.

Thanks to Mike for the pictures - a wide angle lens.....

The new workshop

A hot and dusty day today. Meteo-France's website has been assuring me that it has been raining gently all day, but in fact there's been scarcely a cloud in the sky - almost a month since we had any significant rain. Working in the new workshop is a dusty job too, but I have now put up the first shelves.



These are 100% recycled (all except the screws holding them together). The uprights are floorboards from the old ceiling, and the shelves are dismantled pallets. This is "power tool corner" and it's good to get the plastic boxes finally up off the earth floor where they have been for the last three years.

Clearing out the crud

..... lots of it, too.

More work on the ceiling for the new workshop. Up there the previous owner kept her chickens, along with faggots for burning in the bread-oven. The result of many years of neglect is a laminate of thin twigs and larger sticks, stuck together with thick layers of chicken-poo. Very dry and dusty, with an unmistakeable smell.

First task was to get the access up there organised. With full concern about health and safety, I constructed the temporary access:



It's secured to a bit of rafter with blue polypropylene rope, and in fact turned out to be really quite steady. The stepladder wasn't quite long enough, but I think the concrete blocks work very well.

I was then faced with this:



The pile of twigs and droppings conceals a floor that is full of woodworm, not nailed down, and missing in places. An ideal location to be working. I shoveled it all up into a plastic dustbin, and hauled it down the steps and out into the woods to be burned. This added a new dimension to the smell.

After the first day it looked something like this:



And substantial amounts had fallen through into the workshop below. Rather too late, I wished I'd put the tools away (or at least covered them up). For the final bits I put the wheelbarrow underneath and raked the muck straight down, and I now have very little floor and a large pile of ashes in the woods:



The boards on the left hand side are loose and only temporary. In the next week or two I am hoping to remove all the old flooring, cross the existing oak beams with joists at right angles (on smaller centres than the 100cm for the beams) and panel over with ply.

I will then have a dust-tight workshop and a storage area where I can admire the view out of the door formerly used for putting the hay up:



Solar heating

It's almost exactly six months since I installed the solar panels, and the electronic controller tells me that the pump has been running for 680 hours. That's a measure of how much useable sunshine there has been since December: an average of about 3 and three-quarter hours each day. It's not a record of the amount of sunshine, as the panels gather some heat even if it's slightly overcast - equally, there are a few hours each day when the sun doesn't fall on the panels (early morning and late evening between the spring and autumn equinoxes). Since April we have only had to use the boiler for hot water on three or four days at most, for a total of less than ten hours.

The New Atelier

The workshop I am using at present has a number of disadvantages, one of which is the absence of a wall. I'd probably mange well enough with that but it also has a dirt floor and little chance of changing it for concrete, as the open side of the building slopes a good half-meter down to the inner side. Put down a concrete floor and I have a pool when it rains rather than a workshop.

Here's a picture of the present workshop taken one night when I forgot to turn the lights off:



The new workshop will be at the other end of the hangar, in what was previously a row of stables. So far I have installed an electrical distribution board (there was no electricity supply for the horses):



This provides a convenient way for turning off the elctricity to the old atelier (previously I had to go inside the farmhouse to do that) and lets me wire up the sockets in the new workshop one by one (there is a socket just to the right of the board for the circular saw).

It's also possible to see in this picture that I had to replace one of the ceiling beams, using a spare bit of the balcony structure. Fortunately only one of the beams was rotten (something to do with keeping chickens up on top of it).

It is a bit tricky fixing the electrical works to the walls, as they are schist and it's hard to get rawlplugs and screws in where you want them. So I've opted for hanging everything (almost) from the rafters:



with the intention that later I will add a shelf along the top which will be at a convenient height for small tools etc. Even with this arrangement it's not easy to fasten the blue conduits to the wall (luckily they run in concrete under the floor most of the way).

The bench on concrete blocks is very temporary (well, I hope so) and the ceiling has to be re-done entirely as the boards are visibly rotten and it provides a floor upstairs for bulky (but dry) storage).

I have also re-plumbed the solar heating for the pool. I found that when the pool heat-exchanger was in operation, it cooled the solar circuit so much that the water in it circulating through the domestic hot water cylinder was cooling the cylinder rather than heating it. Now the heat exchanger for the pool is on the return side of the circuit, after the solar-heated water has gone through the cylinder, and this works much better though it isn't quite as neat as the previous arrangement (see April blog).



I hadn't expected the heat-exchanger to be so efficient, but in fact solar-heated water coming into it at 80 degrees left at 22 degrees, or whatever the pool temperature was.

Finishing the solar heating

I've been finishing the solar heating, by connecting up the heat exchanger for the pool to the solar panels. The idea is that surplus solar heat can be used to warm the water in the pool. I'm not expecting the pool to reach blood temperature - as the area of solar collectors isn't big enough - but it should make some difference, and maybe let us swim a little earlier, and later, in the year. But whether that will be months earlier, weeks, days or minutes I've no idea.

The pipe-work for the connection had to contain a two-way diverter valve, so that in the winter, and in high summer, the solar heating need not go into the pool heat exchanger. This valve - a manually operated one, as I am not a great believer in automated systems and electric valves always go wrong - had to be supplied from the US where I think it is normally used in very high pressure applications. Also in the new section of pipes is a stop valve (which will let me work on the solar panels without draining the rest of the circuit, a pressure release valve, and an expansion tank. The last two provide for very hot sunshine: the expansion tank supplements the similar one at the top end of the circuit (in the barn), and if despite the extra expansion capacity the pressure rises further, the steam can be vented off, I hope safely, close to the hottest part of the circuit (the collectors).

This was the pipe-work before the connections to the solar circuit were made. The loop of black insulated pipe is the temporary route of the existing circuit. The light blue tube at the bottom is the Bowman heat exchanger.



I thought it would be best to pressure test the new pipes before making the final connections, as I didn't want to have to drain down the circuit more than once. So I connected it up to a garden sprayer, and pumped it up to 2.5 bar (the most I could manage):



Using soapy water I was able to find a couple of leaky joints, and I fixed these. The pressure still dropped slightly overnight but I couldn't find where the leak was, so I decided that air might leak out where water wouldn't. Or at least that if I had a water leak, I'd be able to see where it was. In the end, there weren't any leaks in these pipes when the circuit was refilled.

It's been very sunny weather for the last few weeks, and I didn't wish to have the solar collectors empty and in the sun, as I didn't want them to overheat. So I covered the panels with a blind:



It's a section of the cover from the pool, the old cover which one of Jean-Louis cows walked on and split. I've found the bits of the spoilt cover extremely useful before, and for this it was almost perfect, just a few inches too narrow. And it kept the temperatures down quite nicely.

I then drained the circuit and made the connections. I also replaced two sections of copper pipe at the base of the collectors on the outside (where I hadn't had the proper fittings back in December), and it goes without saying that it was one of these soldered connections that leaked, so I had to drain it all down a second time, cut out that section of pipe, and replace the soldered joints. The second time it was all leak-free.

Here's the finished pipework inside the garden shed:



The blue conduit held on with orange tape contains the electrical connection to the temperature probe at the top of the collectors (it runs up to the barn and into the controller for the circuit pump). I haven't got the right size pipe clips for it, so that's a job to be done later.

Recommissioning the solar circuit was a nail-biting experience. The top of the solar collectors is only a little lower than the filling point in the barn, and as a result there was a substantial airlock in the circuit. I could tell it was there, as I knew how much fluid had come out, and it hadn't all gone back. I tried to push the air out with the garden spray, but the 2.5 bar testing pressure had burst a seal, and I couldn't get the fluid to displace the air. I thought that perhaps the electric pump for the solar circuit might shift the airlock, and to get that working I uncovered the panels (it relies on a temperature difference between the collectors and the hot water cylinder in the barn). Alarmingly it didn't, and the temperature of the fluid in the collectors rapidly got to over 100 degrees and the automatic air vent at the top of the panels started venting out steam.

Eventually by turning the pump on and off, and opening and shutting the valves in the barn I succeeded in getting the fluid circulating again, and the temperature went back down to something safer. I tell myself it was a useful test of what might happen if we have a power cut on a hot day. There's still quite a bit of air in the circuit, so I am gradually venting it off whenever I can, but it isn't enough to stop the circulation.

So far what I have found is that the pool heat exchanger does what it is supposed to do, and remarkably efficiently too: solar heated fluid goes in one end at 70 degrees or more and comes out the other at 20. I can't say the pool water is perceptibly hotter, but the heat must be going somewhere. We'll see what it's like after a week or so. The trouble is, fluid at 20 degrees doesn't heat the domestic hot water in the barn. I'm hoping that when the pool pump isn't circulating pool water through the heat exchanger (and it goes on and off on a timer) there'll be enough solar heat for the hot water in the barn. It might help if I insulated the heat exchanger too.

If none of that works, I can try putting the diverter valve into an intermediate position, so that the pool and the barn share the solar heat.

What we do when the sun shines

What we do when the sun shines is, of course, put down five and a half cubic meters of concrete. It took several weeks to get the three locations prepared, which was hard work but not very interesting - which is why I've posted nothing recently.

But at 2.30 on Friday afternoon the lorry arrived, and started manoeuvring to get into place for the first pour. This usually results in a lot of churned-up mud, but today, despite all the rain last week, it wasn't bad at all:



The first load went into the stables at the end of the hangar, straight out of the chute, where Paul and his father spread it out. The second went by barrow to the bit of terracing by the barn, and this warmed us up. But what got us all really hot was the last load that went into the farmhouse cellar.

This needed a number of executive decisions:



and quite a bit of careful consideration:



With an occasional break when the lorry hiccupped and the concrete got held up inside:



From time to time it was possible to stand up and stretch:



The concrete then had to be tamped, and afterwards smoothed off with a large plastic float, getting it just at the right point when it was firm enough to walk on but still soft enough to be levelled.

The end results were pretty good. The stables now look like this:



with conduits for the eventual cabling set into the concrete floor, hopefully in the right places for the long workbench that will occupy the whole of the right hand wall.

The cellar was previously earth sloping gradually up away from the doors. Now it is three separate flat areas, one of them very small right by the doors which inconveniently open inwards. It now looks like this:



and it seems a lot bigger than it was before (though strictly it must be smaller, after putting in a couple of tons of concrete). Probably that's because for the first time in 80 years the cellar has been cleared of all the junk. Just the septic tank and the stairs showing. The stairs now have a new concrete bottom step instead of a surprising large drop after the last wooden tread.

And the final bit of terracing looks like this:



This morning we spent some time sifting and shifting the pile of earth to get a level surface, ready for seeding. That should get finished off tomorrow.

It was very heavy work (my back is still complaining) but it's a great improvement in all three places. There'll be quite a bit more to do fitting out the workshop, and some small bits of additional home made concrete to finish off each of the locations, but there's a real feeling of achievement.

clearing the stables

Not quite a Herculean task (did Hercules have to worry about rabbits under the floor?), but a very dusty one just the same. First I chucked everything easily moveable out:



Then it was a matter of shovelling up a half-century's worth of dirt and rotten boards. The rotten boards went straight on the bonfire and the dirt is now filling holes in the embankment and should look very nice once if the grass seeds germinate.

Here's how it looked when it was finished:



I plan to take up the stone floor and put down concrete, in the hope that this will sufficiently deter the rabbits living down there before the walls collapse. In a couple of places the stones dropped suddenly under my feet (though only about six inches) when I trod on a bit with a burrow under it. The cats had a field day, and indeed they had a rabbit for supper last night as a result of the newly accessible burrows (I locked them out after they brought it in to play with).

These stables will eventually become my workshop. Whether they will include a woodstore or not is something I've yet to decide.

Working outside

No major projects at the moment. Maybe I'm just recovering from the visiting grandchildren and their first attempts at skiing:



I decided that it was a pity that I couldn't open the silo (wood-store) door when the silo is partly full, without having a cascade of wood-chips all over the floor. So here is the new modular and progressively demountable version:



My first attempt had the bars on the heavy oak outer door fouling the strengthening cross-pieces on the removable planks (which are in fact 1cm plywood). So the bottom one was raised a few centimeters and the top cross-piece dropped a few. Now it's also possible to shut the door.

I also had a go at straightening the line of a dry-stone wall I built down by the solar panels. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture until the work was half way through, so I don't have a proper "before":



But the "after" picture is definitely after:



I was lucky enough to find a very large rock to fill a gap in the new wall. Or perhaps unlucky - I was only just able to move it, by rolling it into the wheelbarrow and levering that upright. The new wall will give us a bit more space outside the shed door. Oh, wait a minute - what shed door?

Still the next small task will probably be clearing up this lot -



Kindly left us by the previous owners. In there is a car door which probably dates from the 1920s or very early 1930s, and I'd guess it has been there since the 1950s. It's not actually on our land but it's an eyesore just the same.

Where did I put that sink?

I've done the tiling. The epoxy grout fully lived up to my expectations. It was very difficult to do. And as I didn't have the right type of spreader I've managed to leave some little bits of black rubber embedded in the joints. The only surprise was that it has taken fully 24 hours to harden completely. I'd expected something that set like concrete after half an hour.

This is what it looks like now:



I've not been able to put the sink in as this is a complicated bit of plumbing. The hot and cold pipes are in an inconvenient location and I need to approach it with plenty of time to spare. I think I will have to drain down the whole piperun for the house. And I am missing one or two cheap but essential items (the trap, for example). I would have photographed it with the sink in place, but once it's in it will be very difficult to get out. The sink is very slightly flexible, and this makes putting it in easy, but pushing it back out risks knocking half the tiles off.

Here's a detail of the pretty inset panel. The new white tiles are called 10cm x 10cm, but in fact they are 9.5cm square, to allow for a grouted joint of 5mm: that way ten fitted and grouted tiles measure an exact meter. The picture tiles actually are 10cm, so they couldn't be put simply into the tiled wall without some cutting of the surrounding tiles. Nevertheless the end result is very attractive.



And yes, the grey border (5cm x 5cm tiles) over the picture went a little crooked there, but it is difficult to make such small tiles stay where you put them while the mortar is setting.

The wall above the grey border looks a bit messy, but once it has a spot of paint on the new mortar it should look fine.

And of course before this project is finished there are all the doors and drawers yet to make.

Starting the tiling

I've got some of the tiles in place. It doesn't look very tidy, but I hope that when the grouting is done it should look a bit more consistent.



I have bought some remarkably expensive epoxy grout. This stuff has a terrible reputation for being almost impossible to put on properly. In particular it sets completely hard within 20 minutes of mixing, and in that time you have to clean it off the tiles and make sure it stays in the gaps. But if it is put on properly, it's hard (harder than the tiles!) smooth and quite impervious. I shall give it a go, but if it turns out to be as bad as they say, I may restrict it to the area immediately around the sink.

still at it

I've cut and cemented the Wedi board. Cutting was very easy, cementing less so, and I used a surprising number of screws - a couple of hundred I'd guess. Anyway I ran out and had to improvise with plasterboard screws, which are not a good substiture. They don't penetrate chipboard at all well.



As I have a day or so to wait while the tiles and the special waterproof grout arrive, I've had a go at making one of the cupboard doors. I think this door took about a full day's work, so it's not likely I'll get them all done by the end of the week.

This is a haunched tenon joint:



The wood on the left is the vertical piece, called the stile, and the inner edge is grooved to take the panel. The "haunch" part of the tenon (on the end of the bit of wood on the right) is the raised section that fills the groove in the stile. A good carpenter would make the tenon a good deal deeper, but this was hard enough.

The thinner panel that goes into the groove was made from a thick unplaned plank (3cm): I put it through the circular saw to split in half. The circular saw has a depth of cut of only 7cm, and the wood to be cut was 9cm, so I had to take it out and put it back in upside down to finish the cut. I still have my fingers, but it's touch and go (as they say). After that I planed it down to one centimeter thick. The benefit of doing this is that the grain pattern matches nicely: one side is a mirror image of the other.

It all went together reasonably well:



but whether I'll have the patience to do the other four doors the same way remains to be seen. However, three of these are bigger, one a lot bigger and the other two a bit bigger, and they may be easier to do. I've had to work cutting joints in quite short bits of wood (the "rails") and gripping longer ones will be easier. I hope.....

self assembly

Self assembly as I can't get anyone to do it for me.

Here's the progress I've made so far. There are two coats of varnish on the wood, which is now finally glued and screwed in place on the framework. And I've cut the blanking piece in front of the sink. To the left and right of it I plan to have drawers with fronts from similar single bits of oak. Underneath there will be doors, which I expect to make framed with a recessed panel.



I went to Figeac to get the wedi-board this morning. This unlikely-sounding product ("I'd like some wedi-board please" "Wouldn't you prefer something more robust, sir?") provides a waterproof layer for tiling onto. I'll be cutting it to size next. It will then be both cemented and screwed into place on the chipboard. The cement is a special flexible type (or that's what it says on the packet).

Getting warmer

Still grinding away at the work surface - more correctly, sanding away. I've now finished both the interior framework and the exterior oak cladding, the facade that you'll be able to see when it's done. I assembled the facade loosely in place this morning, but without most of the framework. You can see on the left hand side there's one piece of wood that needs to be trimmed to length:



After this, I took it all apart again and cleaned and sanded all the surfaces that will show. This is in a sense the last bit of preparation. These bits of oak started off as 3cm thick sawn oak planks, which I have planed to 2cm and then cut to size. The joints were what really took all the time, though now I am almost finished (what about the cupboard doors and drawers, eh?) I can do them a bit quicker. Here is a flat-pack version, exploded view, after cleaning it all up:



I then spent the rest of the afternoon painting the inner surfaces with a first top coat, and tomorrow - after slapping some emulsion on the walls (I've just realised I'd be better doing this before assembling the wood, as I won't need to mask it all up first) - I should be able to do a second coat, with the final fix in place set for Friday. We'll see .....

A pinch and a punch

for the first of the month. February already. I did a bit more on the utility room, but I'm afraid it will be a case of "spot the difference": it doesn't really show much.

Here it is ....



I have swept the floor and moved the tools out of the way for the picture. This made me feel as if I was the kind of carpenter I'd prefer to employ. Apart from that, there's a bit more of the framework now in place. I'm not quite sure whether the framework supports the chipboard or the other way round. But it all holds together. And shortly I'll start painting the bits of the chipboard that won't be tiled.