one more day ....

.... and it looks like this:



The next job is to cast a reinforced concrete beam all round the top edge, linked in to the corners (which at present are hollow and which take a square reinforcing framework). So on top of the lintel over the door there will just be concrete, not block-work. The lintels over the windows have been finished slightly unconventionally, with a 10cm block put in sideways. Normally these would have cast concrete on top too. We'll presumably need to make the concrete quite a dry mix to deal with the 45-degree edges. This beam will ensure that the walls hold together. I rather imagine that it will be pretty well blast-proof too: Paul did say that the French norms for any kind of building are over-engineered.

The hole in the bottom of the front wall will eventually be filled in, but below it there is a corresponding gap in the foundation slab (there's another one that doesn't show on the right). This is where the pipes from the pool will enter, coming in through a trench. The invisible gap on the right will give access for the well-insulated pipes going back to the barn to heat our hot water.

The rafters (chevrons) for the roof then sit on top of the hoizontal runs of the concrete beam, notched to stop them slipping, the rafters are then close-planked, with some kind of watertight roofing on the planks and under the solar panels.

I cut the blocks myself over the lintels, and where they needed to be shorter to fit in the sides.



Oddly enough this was just about the first cut I did: after this one I went and got my safety goggles, as the concrete really does spray out in all directions.

The work - of mixing cement and cutting and carting around the blocks - has messed up the grass quite a bit, but there's plenty of rain on the way to wash out the cement, and I expect the grass will be knee-high before we get around to the next phase, in a couple of weeks time.

solar heating on its way - in September

Today I was working with Paul to make the walls of the building that should - god willing, and much later this year - have the solar panels on its roof and the pool machinery inside.

My role is builders' labourer - fetching the blocks, sometimes mixing the mortar, bringing the sand and cement down from where they are stored, cutting the concrete blocks to size. Paul does the skilful stuff - getting the blocks level, upright, at right angles - in fact all the real building work.

But this is what it looks like now:



The long wall at the front is now at its finished height (80cm). The solar panels will be angled back at 45 degrees to slope up to the other long wall, which when finished will be about two and a half meters high.

The building site is being inspected by the youngest grandson Isaac (asleep as usual, but he is only nine weeks old) with his mum, Jane. The walls you can see were just one day's work, and - as we also had to go down to the builders merchants to get more sand, more cement, and the timbers for the roof - it was really quite a good day. On the other hand I'm going to have to get yet more sand tomorrow (though we do probably have enough cement now).

By the end of the day the sun had come out and it was pretty hot, so I rather hope we've finally got to the end of this rather rainy patch we've had for the last week or so.

Some work is progressing ... a bit

The windows all went back into the farmhouse in varying states of finish, and we painted and varnished them as time allowed for the first summer visitors. About the best I can say about these windows is that the more I have repaired, the better the standard of the repair. But "better" regrettably doesn't mean "good".


Here is a window whose bottom edge is now a good deal more solid that it was. In fact, before the repairs the bottom of that frame was loose and could be wobbled several millimetres back and forward - with a correspondingly loose pane of glass.



The picture below shows the inside of the same pair of windows. The glazing bar at the top of the picture of the right hand window was similar to (or perhaps actually is) the one shown previously (May 25th) with a large amount of rot at the joint. The joint is now filled with the resin-based filler, and strengthened with a metal T-piece. The left-hand window was one I repaired last year and needless to say the repairs are much more visible.



The glass is now all in one piece, instead of several, and the putty is a good deal more secure. In fact, as we have now painted over the putty - previously it had all been left unpainted, and had cracked away - there is a chance that the glass will stay where it is and rattle a good deal less in the winds.

We have finally got around to starting the building for the solar panels at the end of the garden. I know that putting them at a distance from the house is not ideal, but I have some hopes that the extra distance will be compensated by the larger area, 10 m2. Eventually I imagine we will find out.

Yesterday, in pouring rain, Paul and I dug out the foundations and shuttered the hole - mostly Paul I'd say. By the afternoon the rain had made the ground so slippery that Paul was only just able to get his van up the lane behind the barn, and the pouring of the concrete was deferred for a day or two in the hope of better weather. I spent the afternoon shifting the concrete blocks for the walls down to the site - they had been delivered up by the farmhouse.

This is the present state of the work:



There are four and a half tonnes (=250 blocks) of those blocks, shifted five at a time by wheelbarrow, and it has to be said my back is complaining about the hard labour yesterday. But the forecast is for a dry morning tomorrow and I have every hope that we'll get the concrete poured and the first row of blocks in place. The corner blocks - which are different from the wall blocks - accomodate steel reinforcing to tie them together. It is possible to see just one of the corner blocks edge-on in the picture, a little to the right of the top edge of the wheelbarrow, with the square hole at one end only, and you can compare these with the end-on views of the other 8 or 9 wall-blocks.

The intention will be to get these vertical reinforcing rods cast into the foundation slab, and then up a couple of levels of blocks, at each corner. The first layer of blocks will - I hope - be set into the concrete foundations before the concrete starts to harden.

but I digress

I wasn't actually doing any building work - I just decided that the 2CV van needed some attention. Most 2CVs are easy to work on, as you can go from this:



to this:



in ten minutes or less. And then all of the engine is accessible. Regrettably, it turned out that what needed to be done was something I couldn't do. There were engine/exhaust smells in the passenger compartment, and I had supposed that there was some leakage round the heads that could be cured by re-tightening them (and I could do the tappet gaps at the same time). But the heads were OK and the gaps didn't need changing. Instead there was an exhaust leak where an almost-new part had failed at a joint. It needs welding or - perish the thought - a new exhaust cross-box.

Oh well.

That can be added to the "jobs to be done on the 2CVs" list. This now includes quite a bit of painting, and a new speedometer cable for the red car.

In fact there has been some work going on around the farmhouse. I've been attacking - one might say bodging - the window frames which are really quite rotten at the bottom in almost every case. I've been using a resin-based woodfiller to make good, together with T or L shaped metal repair strips. I've tried to get these below the finished surface, using a router wherever possible, and then put the filler on the top so the metal doesn't show. Of course what does show is the filler itself, which has a rough surface. Still hopefully when the starting point is this



almost anything will be better, and in fact the end results are not too bad. Or, to be honest, too good. I hope that the window frames will stay together for a year or two - after which new windows might be possible - particularly since I have replaced ten or more cracked panes of glass in the ones I have repaired. I even discovered that the ones with a suspiciously regular crack - a straight line across the middle of a pane - had been deliberately cut that way in order to give a "crease" in the glass, as the frames had warped so much that a flat sheet wouldn't fit easily. But by building the rebates up a little with the filler I was just about able to manage.

While you were away

I've been off in England since the beginning of April, and during that time there has been exceptionally little rain.

As a result, the grass seed I put down where the moat used to be (the trench outside the front door) managed to sprout - I'd been watering it - and then either wither in the drought, or perhaps get eaten by our neighbour's chickens. The end result was a lot of bare earth where I'd hoped for a pasture.

More worryingly, you leave your house unoccupied for three weeks and what do you find when you get back? Squatters!



This is the probably the same black redstart that raised a brood inside the barn last year, and is still annoyed that we have now shut the windows and plasterboarded over her previous nest site. You can still see the souvenirs she and they left behind on all our new woodwork.

As this mixing tray is hanging from the beam of my outside workshop, not quite above head height and close to the bench, I am going to have to be careful not to knock the nest out. And we'll have to hope I don't need the saw or the lead-light.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible ....

.... as I am off to England at the crack of dawn tomorrow (provided it's prepared to crack just a bit later than it usually does) to see my new grandson.

As the forecast was rain all day today, I limited my objectives, and just did one more pair of shutters.

This picture was taken first thing this morning - before the rain:



and this one in the afternoon, when in fact the rain had turned out to be a very light drizzle, hardly enough to wet the ground:



I'd welcome suggestions about the rusty door on the electricity cabinet. Do I leave it is it is - after all the rust blends in quite well with the colour of the stone? Or would it be better painted - and if so what colour?

The two other shutters in the picture are in very poor condition. I may well decide to replace them, so it's a good thing they will be staying open most of the summer. They are the shutters for the kitchen and breakfast room, and there's usually no call to shut them. In the summer the sun is off this side of the farmhouse by about 10 in the morning, before it gets too hot. If the shutters are left are open, visitors won't really notice what they look like, as they won't be able to see them without craning their neck.

Spring is late this year. The willow tree is only just in leaf:



and usually it is a good week or two earlier than this. On the other hand, the wild violets in the grass underneath it have been putting on a good show, for at least three weeks now. This picture was taken on March 24th:



Coincidentally, I have been reading Fernand Braudel's wonderful "Memory & the Mediterranean", and he notes (shortly before disagreeing with J L Borges on the merits of Athenian democracy as a foretaste of paradise) that Aristophanes described Athens in its then vanished past as "crowned with violets".

still painting the shutters

Nice spring day today, so I've been treating the shutters to a couple of coats of "lasure bois".

I've been trying to do more than one pair at a time, but in fact the production line isn't that easy to organise:



Wire-brushing and sanding can't be done with them like this (you need to be able to put a bit of weight on the brush and the sander), so I've only been able to prepare two at a time. They have needed a certain amount of repair work - several of them had missing bolts securing the hinges to the shutters, and since I was doing that, I've also used the angle grinder to cut off the ends of the existing bolts, which have always looked a bit unfinished.

So it has been a matter of painting one side of the shutters on the trestles, then standing them up to paint the other side, and then leave them to let them dry. But they look better with a coat of finish, and should be a bit more durable now:



So far I've done five windows (ten shutters) and there are another four windows to be done. But soon I will have finished the least accessible ones. Climbing the ladder and hooking the shutters on and off is a bit nerve-wracking:



These ones will have to wait until tomorrow to go back up the ladder and onto the windows, as they are still rather sticky.

Three of the four pairs of shutters yet to be done are the original ones: the plus side is that they are nicely made, proper joinery, but against that the oak is getting rather crumbly for lack of maintenance. The other pair are more modern - like those in the picture above, with a zed-shaped bracing frame - and should be good for another ten years at least.

And - as a matter of record - my third grandson was born today......

readers' requests

Here is the glass-headed man:



And just stirring the paint made it thicker. I don't know why. Possibly as it's an emulsion, some of the water separates out and floats to the top. It's surprising the paint doesn't say that you should stir it. Next time I'll bear in mind the glue suggestion, Mo. For painting ceilings, it's an obvious short-cut.

The paint bucket in the picture got a second outing today, as I used it to empty the two tons of gravel from the trailer....

Keynes would be pleased

because I've spent the day digging a hole in the ground, then filling it in. Productive work. At least there isn't a hole in the ground any longer!

It was the trench outside the front door - this one



It has been waiting until we'd finished waterproofing the top of the silo (the old cistern, now full of chipped firewood). I should also say that it's been waiting for some dry weather, which finally arrived today.

The other side is a bigger hole (well, not one full of wood and concrete blocks, anyway). The reason it isn't any deeper is that when I cut down I reached the bedrock, and found that the wall of the cistern came to within three or four inches of it. Someone a hundred years ago had worked very hard with a pickaxe to excavate enough rock to provide for the storage of about 30 cubic meters of water. As now the object is to make the silo waterproof, I wanted to lay a drain against the side wall.

So this is where I started:



After a couple of hours I'd dug out a bit more earth, and reached bedrock again, at which point I decided that enough was enough. The picture doesn't give a very good idea of the trench, but it's the best there is, as I only took one picture.....



..... and of course now it's been filled in. Before doing that I remembered to put in the drain tubing, and wrap it in "geotextile" (to keep the earth from clogging the pipe). The geotextile has gravel in it as well as the pipe, to improve drainage.



I put a bit more gravel on top, then another layer of geotextile - you have to buy a full roll, 25 meters I think, and this trench and drain is about 6 meters long. And then I filled it back in with the earth - mostly rock - I'd started by digging out. There were three trailer-loads of gravel in the hole, just over two metric tons according to Chausson's weighbridge, and my back pretty well confirms the figure this evening.



Even all that lot wasn't enough to fill the hole, so I swept up some of the dusty floor from the hangar - where the chickens come for their daily dust-bath - and added a couple of large wheel-barrow loads of this. I will probably go and get some "proper" compost tomorrow, just to bring the levels up to where they were before. Not too much, as the thin soil encourages interesting wild flowers. The hangar floor is all very well as a compost source, but it is full of foreign bodies, mostly chips of wood and bark, but other unidentifiable or unmentionable stuff too (which I removed).

I've also started treating the shutters on the farmhouse. This is a simultaneous "before" and "after" picture. I don't think these shutters have had any attention since they were installed. This is a new pair (25 years old?), made of oak, but not very well made: the original ones don't have a zig-zag framework on the back holding them together, instead they are made with good wide mortised joints at the corners, held together with wooden pegs. The old ones will get a coat of wood treatment too, but they are nearing their sell-by date I'm afraid. Mind you, they seem to have managed more than 80 years, so I'm not complaining.



After the shutters, just some emergency repairs to the actual windows - fixing the rotted frames, new glass, that kind of thing - and the farmhouse will be about ready for the summer.

Painting the ceiling

I'm working on getting the farmhouse tidy for May, when the first visitors arrive. Today, I was finishing off a ceiling. It seems to have been a special ceiling paint. Ordinary ceiling paint is designed not to drip, while this special one has dripped and run all over the place. Possible it was because I didn't stir it. Notrmal paints tell you, usually quite fiercely, that you either have to stir them (and stir them well), or alternatively that you should under no circumstances stir them at all. This B&Q product kept entirely schtum, though it did suggest that some older paints might constain lead, that a pamphlet was available describing the associated hazards of old lead paint, and that I should take great care if using sandpaper on an old surface.

The hazards I normally try to avoid include falling off the stepladder, so I prefer to use a (OK, yes, rickety) scaffolding arrangement:



That said (the "rickety" bit) the platform between the stepladders is very heavy, and difficult to move, so I tell myself it's unlikely to wobble over easily.

And here is a man at work:



A first attempt at this picture produced a man with a large glass head with flowers on.

getting tidy

We asked all the neighbours and the tradesmen who had worked on the building to come to a tea party. As a result two things happened: we spent an exhausting week running around finishing small jobs and cleaning up, and to my surprise a couple of the tradesmen came to finish off jobs they had been working on. The most noticieable of these was getting the balcony railing done. Regrettably we've had some grey wet weather since, so the pictures don't make it look too inviting. Some sympathy is due for the menuisier, who found himself assembling it in a downpour (I lent him a waterproof and a hat). So, from inside:



The glass is 10mm thick, and laminated, with nicely rounded edges. The glass looks insubstantial but has a very reassuringly solid feel, as does the stainless steel framework. Here it is from outside, with puddles:



The plumbers also came along, and painted the central heating pipes red (flow) and blue (return), a curious but apparently traditional aspect of the craft. They were a couple of young men, and weren't able to explain what the green stripe meant (if anything), just that it was what they had to do.

I then put up some of our pictures, and a couple of mirrors, to make the barn look a bit less barn-like, and for some reason (as in our previous house) the family photos have arrived on the stairs:



The entire village then came around yesterday afternoon - possibly 60 people - and a good time was had by all, with conducted tours at intervals. The boiler drew quite an enthusiastic crowd, even though the plumber was one of the few people who couldn't come - he was having his own open day. It's hard to be sure exactly how many people came, and for data protection reasons, we had to forbid photography. But many of them came with pot-plants and flowers, which was very touching, and the plants are now occupying the sunnier corners - allowing for the fact that there are thick grey clouds everywhere, and absolutely no sun at all:



And the odd new purchase also arrived during the week, smelling strongly of antique dealer's wax and looking better than I had hoped:



This chest is surprisingly heavy, and I can only hope that the woodworm have been asphyxiated by the wax, as there seem to have been a lot of them at work quite recently. We'll see.

Postscript to those tiles

All it took to get them looking better was a further coat of linseed oil, and then a wipe down with turps to remove the stickier bits - where the tile is already fully saturated, extra oil just sits on the surface.

So not a bad result at all:



I have yet to remove the waterproof tape from the top of the floor drain, but I wanted to be sure the grout was fully dry first.

And as our plumber is coming tomorrow to put in branches on the hot and cold pipes, top right in the picture, we'll be able to install a washing machine quite soon. Plumbers usually mean water all over the place - the cold pipe is, after all, the mains supply for the whole house - so we'll probably get to try out the drain too.

The last floor is tiled

And about time too.

The six coats of linseed oil took a while - and it probably should have been more, to judge by the way the grout has stuck to some of the tiles. I tell myself it gives the tiles a pleasantly rustic look.

The one in the middle is (probably) the same tile as before:



And here's a general view of the room.

And yes

(a) the walls need to be painted
(b) the tiles could do with a bit more cleaning off - possibly something fun like an acid, and
(c) the oak strip for the raised section isn't there yet. I couldn't find a bit of oak 2.5 meters long.



In my spare time, I've also helped out a real professional builder in putting down a waterproof surface on top of the wood-chip-silo, and it certainly seems to be waterproof now. Trouble is, it is a much rougher surface than the 90-year-old concrete that was there before, and it is crying out to be tiled. I am not sure that I can face any more tiles right now.

And for a break, I spent the weekend over at the Poterie du Don, learning how to use a potters wheel. It will come as no surprise that this is a bit more difficult than it looks.



The windows really are a funny shape. I blame the architect. No change there, then.

And as for the sticking plaster on my head, I can only blame myself. I put the post-box just where I would hit my head on it when I straightened up after putting down a concrete sill in the farmhouse cellar.

the end of the tiles?

well, nearly.

In case you don't remember what tiles look like, this is one of the last:



The tiles were irregular shapes, and difficult to fit. The ones bought a year ago were even more difficult, as they were on average half a centimeter bigger than the newer ones. I had to saw the edges off to make them match. But all that I have to do now is seal them (three or four coats of linseed oil), and grout them. Then the last floor will be finished. Almost. There are some oak edge strips to be done too. And sealed with linseed oil.

And, talking of sealing, the new lid went back on the septic tank, without breaking. A bit of grease round the edge helped it slide in place nicely. Naturally I am not sufficiently indelicate to post a picture of either the lid or the septic tank itself, and certainly not the grease, but this is the mould I made the new lid in:



Getting it firmly back on was - err - a relief.

creeping towards the end of the bathrooms

It seems to be a very slow process, but we are very nearly there. I've finally done all the tiling and grouting except the two removable hatches into the space below the bath, and the mirror for the second bathroom.

This is the mirror in the red bathroom (it's easy to remember which one that is, as of course "the East is Red"):



The plastic over the round window is not (entirely) an admission of defeat, in that we haven't yet been able to get the coloured glass to go into it. It's more to keep the new cat out of the bedrooms, though at present getting her to come out from under the cooker would be something of a triumph.

And this is the west (blue) bathroom, just waiting for the plumber to put the fittings in. And of course I hope they will fit, as the floor levels do need to be just about right:



I've also been casting a new lid for the septic tank in (regrettably yes, in) the farmhouse. The old lid had cracked and the smells would gradually percolate up from the cellar to the kitchen (naturally the septic tank doesn't have a vent pipe). I am keeping my fingers crossed that the rather wet concrete won't cure into something fragile. If it does, though, I'll still have the mold and I can try again. It was tricky getting the reinforcing to fit, as it comes in 20cm squares and the width of the lid is just exactly 40cm. I crimped the rods of the steel mesh a bit and that shortened it. Hopefully enough. Though I won't know until it starts to rust where the ends project (if they do).

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).