{"id":3251,"date":"2020-01-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kergudon.com\/https-www-kergudon-com-sunday-19-january-trenchant-effort\/"},"modified":"2020-05-12T15:55:54","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T15:55:54","slug":"sunday-19-january-trenchant-effort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/sunday-19-january-trenchant-effort\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday 19 January – Trenchant Effort"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of last week\u2019s blog<\/a>, I mentioned that the forecast was looking particularly bad for the start of the week just gone, and so it turned out.<\/p>\n

Storm Brendan arrived on Monday which, despite stronger winds than normal and lots of rain, didn\u2019t prove too disruptive.\u00a0 It was the storm which hit us on Tuesday that was considerably more damaging as the winds were stronger and the rain heavier.\u00a0 This storm didn\u2019t have a name.\u00a0 I still can\u2019t fathom what conditions need to be present so either the UK or the Irish Met Offices name a particular storm but it was so bad with us, it must have caused disruption to at least the south west of the UK and probably more widespread.<\/p>\n

Sadly, the frame of the serre we bought last year didn\u2019t cope and has completely collapsed so needs replacing \u2013 the perils of trying to buy something a bit cheaper as a \u2018temporary\u2019 shelter.\u00a0 False economy again.\u00a0 Thankfully however, despite many of the outlying hamlets around Sizun losing power we didn\u2019t suffer a power cut at all, or lose the phone line, although we were expecting one or the other if not both!<\/p>\n

Thankfully we were able to stay indoors and progress the Priory project.<\/p>\n

Our electrician, Pascal, arrived on Monday and has set about the rewiring with gusto.\u00a0 Being an old building with thick slate walls there are a number of challenges he faces with the wiring, especially in the living area, although he hasn\u2019t started there yet, so we are looking at the most attractive ways to hide the new cables throughout the building.<\/p>\n

As we are having a new power supply provided, before we can connect to the grid, we will have an inspection by the electricity company so Pascal is ensuring he follows all the rules to the letter, which, while obviously safe, means there a number of things that we perhaps wouldn\u2019t have had otherwise and the house now has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese!<\/p>\n

While Pascal has been working, I have completed a couple of useful tasks.\u00a0 The first was to finish breaking up and removing the slate step in the kitchen.\u00a0 While we knew that the step wasn\u2019t original, we weren\u2019t sure how large the slates would be at the base, or whether they would be sat on a concrete base or straight on the ground.\u00a0 Thankfully, there is a solid concrete base beneath that we can tile onto and incorporate that area back into the kitchen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can also see in the picture the new Granary door which I had painted in the autumn.\u00a0 Our carpenter returned today to put the door \u2018kit\u2019 back together and he will return tomorrow to install it.\u00a0 It will look so much better than the current one.<\/p>\n

The second inside job I had to complete, as I mentioned in last week\u2019s blog, was to remove the lights and cladding on the mezzanine level which will be replace by something much lighter and more attractive.\u00a0 From this picture you can see a fraction of the new cables that Pascal is threading throughout the building and that many of them will be hidden behind the new facing we will create behind the bed.<\/p>\n

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The weather changed markedly yesterday as high pressure replaced the series of depressions we have experienced since last September and we have a couple of perfect crisp, cold, winter days.\u00a0 Thankfully, we had preempted this and had wrapped and moved our banana plants so they are far better protected than they were last year.<\/p>\n

It has also meant I could work outside over the weekend, although my work has sadly been in the parking space on the north side of Granary and out of the warmth of the sun.<\/p>\n

We had a new electricity box installed last September<\/a> which, once we have been inspected, will provide the power to Priory.\u00a0 But, there are many metres between the new box and Priory and the cable will need to be buried underground so I had a lot of digging to be done.<\/p>\n

Having dug a number of trenches around the gardens, not least the foundations of Grange, I knew that it is not easy to dig here with heavy clay sub-soil and lots of slate and quartz in the ground, and Pascal told me the trench needed to be a minimum of 45 cms.\u00a0 I did know there would be one soil pipe crossing the parking area, I hadn\u2019t expected to come across a number of other, redundant, pipes and I even found the old concrete septic tank (visible just by the closest pipes in the right hand picture) all of which made the job slower.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

However, after 2 days digging while I haven\u2019t quite got from the box to the Priory terrace, I should only have a day\u2019s worth of digging left to complete the job.<\/p>\n

The weather looks like it will hold for most of the coming week so I should be able to finish the trench and progress a number of outside tasks while Pascal continues the wiring.\u00a0 Good weather always makes me feel we are making good progress!<\/p>\n

Kenavo.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the end of last week\u2019s blog, I mentioned that the forecast was looking particularly bad for the start of the week just gone, and so it turned out. Storm Brendan arrived on Monday which, despite stronger winds than normal and lots of rain, didn\u2019t prove too disruptive.\u00a0 It was the storm which hit us…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3256,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ben-and-daves-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kergudon.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}