Today’s will be a short blog as most of my productive time has been focussed on a single task which, thankfully, is the one that I said I would be progressing in last week’s blog – plaster boarding the interior of the pool house.
The week began with work done principally by someone else, but is something that we have wanted to do for a couple of years. The hot water tank in Hayloft’s loft space has sprung a small leak sometime in the autumn which became obvious when we were preparing the gîte for New Year guests and saw some of the ceiling planks had become discoloured.
We had meant to change the tank when we refurbished the gîte in spring 2025 as they have a notoriously short life but didn’t get around to it. The leak hastened our need to replace the tank (to save me having to enter the loft space a few times a week to empty the bucket we had placed under the tank) and our local electrician came on Monday to do that. He also installed a drip tray under the new tank plumbed into a drain so, if this tank ever also develops a leak as the old one, it won’t cause problems in the gîte.
On Tuesday, as this week’s tempête du jour, Chandra, passed through with yet more heavy rain, I could focus on the interior job of plaster boarding the pool house.
It has taken me most of the rest of the week to get about 80% of the work done – don’t look too closely as it’s probably not the most professional job but nothing that some taping and filling won’t resolve.
I said that my productive time was spent in the pool house unfortunately, we had a fairly unproductive morning on Wednesday when we went into Brest to see if we could order some cabinets that we will install in the pool house. Unfortunately it turned out to be a completely wasted trip.
For various reasons, including one of the DIY stores we use having its annual rebuild / rearrangement (obviously the French don’t do DIY in January), we achieved nothing, other than to remind us that we should probably get the paint for the interior from the UK! I get the impression that shops are almost discouraging customers to visit their actual shops and want everything to be done online but there are certain things, such as looking at cabinet colours, which can only be done in the flesh. Hopefully it won’t lead to too much of a delay in completing the entire space.
One other small but useful task we managed to complete was trimming a tall fir tree in Granary’s garden. The tree, definitely not native, we think may have been planted to hide an unattractive concrete electricity pole. Over the years it had acquired an odd shape as bits had been blown or cut off but it had grown tall enough to block the satellite signal for both French and UK television in the gîte.
While, I suspect, all TV will eventually only be available online, at present we provide UK TV using the FreeSat system. Unfortunately, with the tree that service was interrupted so we needed to lop some off the top.
Having borrowed a friend’s very small, but very powerful, chainsaw I felt confident enough to get our large ladder out and cut as high in the tree I could reach. It has made the tree look an even odder shape but at least it still hides the pole and we now have television service again.
Tomorrow I hope to finish with the last sheets of plasterboard before a friend has offered to come on Tuesday and assist with the taping and filling which will be a large and messy job.
More to update next week.
Salut.