The Dalek Sleeps

Late Friday and I set off from Zürich, I would not be in Morzine until 11:00pm and apart from some strange metal cage things lying all over the road just outside Montreux, it was a quite trip. It had been raining all the way and just out side of Thonon the rain turned to snow. By the time I got to Morzine it was falling thickly and I was worried about making it up the road to the chalet. But it was OK thank heavens for traction control and ABS brakes. The car was sliding and spinning all over the place but was OK until I tried to turn in to the drive of the chalet, luckily it had been cleared of snow recently but there was still 20 cm of new snow to get over. I needed to at least get the car off the road as the snowploughs are a little unforgiving when it comes to parked cars. Managed to reverse the car up far enough to clear the road. Emptied the car in a couple of trips and set up to sleep the night in a very cold chalet. The thermometer said it was zero in the room at one point that night but I was pretty warm, wearing a t shirt and fleece and woolly hat, in a sleeping bag under a blanket with a duvet on top! It was heavy but warm.

Anyway Saturday morning and the usual trip down to Viourons to get stuff. The big plan this trip was to insulate the hot room wall and get the hot water heater up on the wall and do as much plumbing as possible.

Plumbing is not easy. There are literally hundreds of bits all different sizes, all different shapes and all do different things. They all join in different ways to other different pieces. Its like a huge jigsaw puzzle were you have far to many pieces and don't know which pieces you don't need!

At least I had a plan. I have, for the past year or so, carried around a note book in which I scribble down ideas and plans for the chalet. One of these was a long time ago a plan for the plumbing. It involves valves and T junctions and should basically mean a plentiful supply of hot and cold water to the chalet while being able to turn off and drain the pipes when required.

With this in mind I stared at the bewildering range of connectors and plumbing bits. OK I need valves, a huge vista of valves opens before me Oh dear this might take some time.

Well about an hour and half later I had a basket full of bits and pieces, these plus some wood was all driven home. One major problem was no where in Morzine could I find a 150mm diameter pipe for the fire. So on this occasion the dalek sleeps.

Back at the chalet, I framed out the hot room wall,

This exposed another potential disaster. In the past we have spent money on groceries and got points. Each month or so because of the huge numbers of points we get we are sent about 50 swiss francs in vouchers. I spend these on stuff for the chalet like screws and nails and small tools, stuff like that, Well I had thought my self real clever as I bought a box of long screw suitable for fixing these batons to the wall. I was very careful to get cross head screws cos I have loads of screw drivers and all sorts of bits for the drill that would screw them in. So imagine my surprise when I open the box to discover the screws are in fact star headed. Great I have one drill bit that might fit.









OK it seems to work, something to put on my Christmas list. So fit the frame to the wall, insulate the frame
Blue insulation cut to fit.


















Board out over the insulation to give me something to fix on to.

The try to lift a really heavy hot water tank. Oops this is going to be interesting. The tank is heavy not so heavy I can not lift it but heavy enough to be awkward. The tank is large, too large to reach all the way round so handling it is awkward. Right drill the walls and install 4 massive bolts. Then build a platform (from blue insulation) get the tank up onto the platform sling a wire around the bottom supports and lift the tank using the wire then wobble it towards the wall and with a bit of luck the tank and the bolts should all line up.




There you are! Tighten up the bolts and hope it stays on the wall when its got 200 liters of water in it!

There is then the jigsaw to do with all the other bits and pieces.













34 pieces all have to go together and (not leak) Then I realized I did not have a vital connection that would allow me to actually get water into the tank! Probably just as well as I dont think my joints are tight enough. I need another wrench.

Any way the taps at the bottom allow the water to drain, the taps at the top will have more pipe added and lead up to the bathroom above, hot water on the left and cold on the right.


Did a bit of finishing of the plaster board in the bedroom when it got cold.

Came home a bit early on Sunday evening.

A Bit of Heavy Lifting

I wanted to buy an wood burning stove for the chalet but I knew it was going to be heavy so I arranged with Rob to come down on Friday (yesterday) and get him to help with the heavy lifting.

The trip down on Friday morning was terrible. It was raining hard and the windscreen wipers on the car started playing up just as I got out of Zurich. Sure enough a bit further down the motorway the wipers jammed and I could not see anything. I pulled over on to the hard shoulder and freed them, had a look to see if it was fixable but it would require a spanner to remove the blade. Well there is a services a bit further down the road surely I can fix it there, after all it is a service station, that's what they do. Yes? Well the blades jammed up again before I made the services, I freed it up and carried on. Got to the services to find or rather not find a single piece of mechanical help available. You could buy clothes and garden furniture but a simple spanner No. Right desperate times apply some pressure and oops the wiper just came off in my hands. Oh well that will cost me! Still thank goodness its the passenger side not the drivers or I really would be in trouble!
It rained all the way up to Morzine. Arrived about 14.00 and after a cup of tea Rob and I went back down the mountain to Thonon to get the wood burning stove and a hot water heater. Drama in the DIY store, my credit card was refused and we had to make other arrangements much embarrassment but sorted. Any way the stove and boiler only just fit in the car we had to strip the packing off the water heater to get it to fit.

Still it drove back OK. We left it until Saturday morning to unload As handling heavy stuff in the dark and snow sounded a bit dodgy even for us!

It snowed over night even more and when we came to unload the car we decided the Stove was just too heavy to lift so what about a sledge?

Dropped the crate onto a pieces of blue insulation and dragged and pushed our sledge about 20 meters until it was at the foot of the entrance stairs to the chalet.





We heaved the crate containing the stove up the stairs on runners made from a ladder. Up ended it through the door and in to the chalet. The crate decided it had had enough and disintegrated allowing us to discover that the stove actually came to pieces and we removed about 100kg of iron from inside of it! Moving it into its final position was a lot easier now it was a bit lighter.

It looks like a Dalek!

Cant light it up yet as the chimney needs 150 mm tubing and I only have 125mm so I t will have to wait until next time.




The other heavy piece of kit was the hot water heater and associated plumbing stuff

I was worried the heater would not fit on the wall but it seems OK. There is a load of plumbing that needs attaching to the bottom of it.










All this fun for next time. Well thanks to Rob cos I couldn't have done it on my own.

Heat and doors

Friday rolled round and at about 3:30 I left work and went straight to the DIY shop on the outskirts of Zürich. I had already scoped out the place and knew what I wanted, I knew where it was and I knew how much it was going to be. It still took an hour to get three doors and three door frames off the shelves and into my car. They only just fit, but once again the car was great and has taken all the stuff I cram into it. So I drive home to eat a quick dinner then off towards Morzine at about 6 in the evening. Before I left I found a letter from the bank, just a statement but it showed that the loan was up and running and that money was available. Very reassuring just before I go and spend it! Taking the slightly longer way round in order to avoid the mess we got into last time. Arrive at the chalet just before 10. Wow, Robs chalet has been done over! He has given control of the bookings etc to a management agency called Slow Chalets They have been in and changed all the furniture! That might not sound too bad but some on the decoration is a bit disturbing. The large wall in the front room has been covered in about twenty or so skulls complete with antlers. Apparently Rob had to ask them to remove the moose head and the boars head from the walls! Very strange.
Any way I unloaded the car and got straight to it, plaster boarding, I had to stop at midnight as I had to get up the next morning to go shopping.
Saturday morning, drive down to Thonon, to one of the big DIY shops there and loaded up with heaters and electrics and loads of other stuff, about 900 Euro's worth!
Back to the chalet and unload then on with the job. Install the big heater at the bottom of the stairs.















After a few false starts with the electricity and blowing the trip switch a few times I finally wired the fancy switch the right way round and the heater came to life!

OK then on to the door. Lots of plaster boarding. It takes ages to get that all done and It was Saturday evening by the time the door finally went up.

Looks quite smart from the photo, doesn't quite close properly but it can be adjusted. Right just time to put the heater in the hot room and then bed time.











Sunday morning and into the bedroom the door here was going to be a pain as I had constructed the walls without knowing exactly how or what kind of doors I would be using so as expected the doors I had bought were not going to be simple. I was going to have to make some adjustments.

All in all it went up fairly easily once I had worked out which bits to chop off. The plaster boarding took forever but then the door went in pretty quick after so many trial fittings to make sure it was the right size.

I had to adjust the sides quite a bit to get it to fit but all in all it looks OK.













I should be back at the end of the month with the intention of putting in the hot water boiler and the wood burning stove!

Signed, Sealed and well, pending...

Took another day trip to Morzine to see the Notaire. Drive down was a nightmare diversions all over the place. Drove to Chatel and was going to go over the Col du Corbier but that was closed, OK, instead of going over the mountain we can drive down this valley and back up the next one, only adds about 15 minutes. As we drive down the valley there is another diversion. So we end up driving all the way back down to the lake at Thonon to come back up the valley for Morzine. Horrible.

Anyway we signed the documents at the Notaire and gave him his enormous fee. Over a thousand Euros for a few signatures! God what else does he do? What else does he need to do?

Anyway we then drove up the road to Morzine to see the bank. Turns out my bank manager is on holiday (again) and will not be back until the middle of next month. Good job we came here in person rather than emailed these invoices in. They would have sat in her in box for 2 weeks!

We shall see what happens, I gave the bank a few thousand in invoices from the past few months which should cover the Notiares cheque. Now I can get back to working out how to spend it all!

Again the Bank needs watching

I should have known better, I spent so long uming and ahing about calling the Notaire, when I finally did it, they dont have the papers from the bank!
So I call the bank and Oh yes I will get head office to send the papers!

The bank said they would send all the papers when I signed them. So what happened?

Aahrrrggg this makes me mad - mostly at my self for dicking about and not calling the Notaire when I should have done. Why do I put this stuff off only to find that something or someone else else was waiting about to be pushed into doing something !!

Later
Well it turns out the bank did send the papers and the notaire had just misplaced them!
After a confusing call to the notaire I now have my appointment. I just have to get there with my wife. The kids are back in school so that's another problem. O well I have my appointment the rest will have to be sorted around it!

Electricity

Received a bill from the EDF last night, seems they have read the meter and I was charged 174 Euros for my electricity. No big deal until I remembered I am paying 90 Euro's per month and the EDF now Owe me nearly 700 Euro's I wonder If I can get that back? or just stop paying them for a bit!

Quick trip to the bank

Saturday was a long day, after trying to arrange an appointment with the bank to sign the loan agreement I received an email on Friday evening with a very official looking invite to a meeting at 11:00 o'clock on Saturday.
This meant getting the whole family up and out of the house by 7 for a 4 hour drive down to Morzine for a half hour meeting where my wife and I signed the required document multiple times and then a four hour drive home again!
The kids got to watch too much TV in the car and I just got really tired!

The bank requires a "cooling off" period so the document will not actually get sent to head office until the 27th, then the notaire is notified and I need to arrange a meeting with him to sign the guarantee. This probably means another long day sometime the beginning of October.

My head is full of shopping lists, I cant wait to see how fast I can spend 50,000 Euros!

Paperwork, paperwork

Finally got the document from the bank that was wrong, some health questionnaire. Received it last night along with a strange letter from the electrical supplier EDF. As far as I can understand it the temporary electricity supply I have has expired and I can only renew it for three months. That would make things difficult to say the least. Need to get some one else's opinion.

Beading on the Barge Boards

Well I dont have a long holiday as yet and I dont have the money as yet, but I took four days roughing it in my chalet to see what could be done without spending any money.

Roughing it is right, there is no heating so dress up warm, there is no toilet so trips to the public lavatory in town need to planned! There is no kitchen so barbecue time! There is no running water but the river is pretty close. It was very primitive.
At least I had a bed and was warm enough during the night. It wasnt that cold it only got down to 13 degrees which is a bit chilly but not as cold as the night Rob and I spent in his chalet while we built his bathroom now that was cold minus 10 and all we had was one small blow heater! Anyway another story or perhaps one for Rob.

So build chalet but spend no money. Arrived on Wednesday night, just after it had got dark of course, I was planning on arriving while it was still light but got delayed at home and did not leave as planned. So its dark and I set up my bed and crash out for the night. I actually slept quite well and in the morning although a bit chilly went to town as usual. Shopping for some food and then back to decide what to do.

Basically the place was a mess, there was beer cans and wine bottles and rubbish everywhere, the garage was a tip ( I think Rob had been repairing something down there) so the first few hours I spent tidying up. Whilst clearing up i was thinking about the jobs I could do. Basically I had made a list of stuff that I could do with the stuff I knew I had already in the chalet. One of these jobs is to break a big hole in the wall. So I set to it and a couple of real dusty dirty hours later I had my hole.










This will allow the waste from the toilet and shower to flow out as the builders kindly forgot one of the connections. So this is where eventually the waste will go down through the floor and through the wall to the out let. In pipes of course!

OK I was covered in dust and rubble so lets try the river for washing. Stroll over the road and get down to the river. It was cold! straight of the mountain refreshing but still cold. I didnt want to use soap or pollute the river any more than I had to so a brisk scrub up and I was feeling good. Time for dinner.

Cooking dinner was a campfire in what I hope will one day be a garden of sorts, may be decking. My earlier clear up had provided lots opf wood so that burnt and burgers fried and were eaten. Then as it got dark I went to bed.

After a warm enough night I discovered it was raining, a situation due to last all day. At least it proved the varnishing work of the last few weekends was working because as you can see the rain was beading on the barge boards

This is a good thing it means that the varnish is protecting the wood! all that hard work was paying off!







Looking around a bit further I could see The white bits that the rollers had missed. In the corners and crevices the wood was still white.


Well its not a great picture but you might be able to see at all the angles the roller cant get in to the corners and the wood is still white.

Well there is nothing to be done now so ignore it for now maybe I can fix it later.


Well today was electric day I had been thinking about the bathroom and the bedroom and what they required and after a quick consultation of the book I knew I needed an extra plug socket in the bedroom. The other challenge was to sort out the lights for both the bathroom and the bedroom. In my enthusiasm for putting up walls I had forgotten to think about the electrics so I needed to sort them now. The bedroom was not too bad as only only side of plaster board was in so out comes all the insulation and then I realize I dont have a drill. Well I have an SDS drill for breaking concrete but nothing really for wood which I am going to need if I want to finish the electrics. Of course they are in Robs chalet but I dont have a key. After many text messages and phone calls I get Robs lovely property manager, who agrees to call round in a few hours and let me in. Meanwhile I drill through the timber with the SDS drill its messy and hard work but it works (kind of) I install the light in the bedroom and the switch, doubling the nu,ber of working light bulbs in the chalet! I also put in an extra plug socket remebering just in time to turn everything off before cutting the live cable to slice into the plug.

Wonderful I spent the afternoon switching the light on and off, on and off on and off like primitive mans first encounter with electricity!






Robs property manager called round and let me in. I grabbed an armfull of powertools and legged it back to my place. I am sure she thought I was stealing them all but never mind Rob knows where they are.

With the rain the barbecue was out so a cold dinner and bed hoping for better weather tomorrow

The morning dawned (Saturday) bright and clear. Right the bathroom lights, these will be provided by a bathroom cabinet fitting hung on the wall with integral florescent strip light, or thats the plan anyway. The light needs a swith so I need to cut a groove in my new plaster board wall and put a switch in. I dont have a switch so I will just cut a hole and fit the cable. Cutting the groove was quite easy so easy in fact I would consider it for some other electrics if I do the same thing again. For cable I was using the three individual strands of 1.5mm wire and it works really well at least with shorter pieces of gaine, dont bother with the horrible wire in the middle just pull that straight out. In fact I had no choice as little wire had dissapeared from one end but threading the three wires was not a problem. Put the wire filled gaine in the groove and fill the groove with plaster. Done.

Came out quite nice I think.

Right next was to relay the bathroom floor insulation to allow for the new cable and two others. The cable for the bathroom towel heater and a cable to get power to the lights for the other bedroom and the shower room.



Still with electrics on my mind I had turned up three more yellow boxes for embedding in walls these I fitted into the salon upstairs after cutting neat (ish) holes in the timber.

One more job today and that was another dusty one. Break a socket in the wall of the salon for plugs and probably the phone or TV cable. This was fine apart from the steel bars inside the concrete which took some cutting but nothing too difficult.










Well that was about it for Saturday and after another fine barbecue I went for a wash in the river. By this stage after three days of dusty work I was a bit grimy . I am not really bothered most of the time about personnel appearance but my hair was horrible it was dry and dusty and like twigs. I just had to wash my hair. Feeding the river just where you can go down to it is a big culvert nicknamed the hungry drain and this was flowing so standing under it I got what can only be described as a really cold shower! It did not do much for the state of my hair but I felt cleaner.

Sunday rolled round and I packed up and began the drive home. During the summer the mountain communities do all the major road repairs ands this results in diversions all over the place. I was on my third diversion which led eventually to the Col du Cobier. It wound though a few little villages one of whicvh was holding some market or festival or something. Anyway the whole of France had decided to go to this festival and had parked, as the french do, everywhere. All down the side of the narrow road leading up to and through the village there were cars parked. Soon enough we ground to a halt as cars coming the other way could not pass. Some cars turned around, some cars reversed back God only knows how far. But cars were backing up. This was the only route over the pass and once you are on it there is no way off. 2 hours of squeezing past cars and waiting for other cars to squeeze past me and I made it through the village to the clear road. Waiting just the other side of the village were 2 of the biggest camper vans, huge things that normally would have no problem getting through but today no chance. I pity them and the problems they had. It must have been horrible for them. After taht the trip home was not eventful.
I was looking forward to getting back and having a long hot bath.

Painting painting painting

OK so its been a while since I last posted anything but things have been happening. I have been trying to get lots of money from the bank which although agreed is taking forever. I had planned on taking a holiday and spending the money but with no money yet it has not been possible. So I have resorted to travelling down for the weekend and finishing off the painting.
This turned out to be slightly more epic than it should have been, after all I paid Mat to paint the chalet! Well that was a bit of a waste. Last weekend Rob and I painted all but a few square meters of the chalet and this weekend we did it again! So how did it take Mat a week to not paint the chalet even once!

We used a revolutionary new technique in house painting called "brush on a six foot stick" this allowed us to slap varnish on most everywhere. Even so we were at some points piling up blocks of insulation and furniture to reach some of the highest bits.
When I say slap on I do mean slap on. It is really hard to achieve an even finish when you are reaching up with a paintbrush at full extension trying to cover as much as possible without a) falling off what ever you are perched on and b) trying to avoid huge globs of varnish landing on you.

So by the end of last weekend we had clear varnished the place all over bar a small section on the front.

I came back this weekend to apply the second coat.
I was varnishing the house with a clear varnish that "retains the beauty of the wood" well thats fine and I was OK with the result but it was very bleached from its year in the sun and snow.
For the second coat I was in 2 minds as to what to use, whether to stick with the clear varnish that you cant see or go with a slight stain that you can. The clear varnish would have the problem of not knowing exactly what I had painted where as the coloured varnish meant I would have to paint the entire chalet or end up with a patchwork effect.

I went with the slight stain and am quite happy with the result.
This time we improved on the brush on a stick slightly by replacing the brush with a roller. The roller on a stick method is far more effective but cant get quite into all the nooks and crannies around the chalet and there are a lot of nooks and a lot or crannies!

The chalet certainly looks better for the couple of weekends it took to do it. All I need now is the lots of money from the bank and s long holiday to get some serious work done inside!

Blood on the tiles

Blood on the tiles, rather a dramatic heading but it takes ages to come up with catchy titles for these things. Its true too, there was blood on the tiles but probably not quite what you might be thinking.

My friend Mat has been painting this week. He was under instructions to paint the chalet. One coat of preservative and at least one coat of varnish all over. All over means all over, every bit of wood on the exterior needs covering, the walls the balconies under the eves of the roof, everything. The chalet is not an easy thing to paint and Mat knew what he was getting into and he said he could do it in a week. This sounded reasonable so away he went. I meant to be there last weekend to help him out at the start but something came up at home and I could only get there this weekend.

Text messages through the week told me how he was getting on and it seemed OK although it was raining a lot.

We turned up at about 9 at night on Friday, just after it was getting dark. It was raining and as we arrived in the gloom I thought the chalet looked a different colour...

That night Mat explained that he had not been able to paint the whole chalet but had done most of it. Most of it included nearly all the preservative and about 70% of the varnish. He then went on to explain how the varnish was weird and might not be varnish after all...

The varnish, it seems, is totally colourless and it dries quite quickly, its really hard to see what you have done and what you need to do.

So the next morning we are out and about on an inspection of his work. It was raining, which Mat told me was not unusual for this week, in fact it had been raining all week and this was one reason why he had not quite finished yet. Well he is right, it is real difficult to see what he has done but slowly you get accustomed to what you are looking for and yes it has been varnished, well most of it, just the hard bits are left. The problem is that the varnish is clear and water based. You need two coats to see it. Most of the other chalets around the place are brown or even orange from using varnish with a touch of stain in it and I imagine its a darn sight easier to see what you have done if the wood actually changes colour when its painted. Well this stuff is clear and the wood is the same colour as it was. Its great, it really looks nice. Just to make sure I gave the front door and the panels around it another coat


Maybe you can see, the wood is a bit shiny, but still the same wood colour.

Although you do feel a bit like the little boy in the Emperor's new clothes. Has it really been varnished? Am I just imagining this? No there really was varnish on the wood. It shiny, you can just see where Mat stopped. I haven't just wasted all that time and money! I haven't. I will believe, I will, I will.


Anyway, the bits I really wanted to do were the bits of timber that the sun and rain had already started to effect. That is the balcony above the garage, the barge boards (thats the timber planks on the edge of the roof) at the garage end and the other balcony. So we spent Saturday varnishing balconies and anywhere else I could reach. Meanwhile Mat regaled me with stories of how hard it was getting up to under the roof and how many times he had to move the ladder and how many times he had nearly fallen off and how it had been raining all week. Any way By Saturday the balconies where done and all the windows and most of the easy places had had two coats of varnish.

On Sunday I decided we had to attempt something more interesting and when the morning dawned not quite bright and sunny but not raining. So the barge board beckoned. Probably easiest to get at from the roof and although not recommended in the wet, in the dry it should be fine. So I opened the varnish and in doing so sliced my thumb open (you can see where this is leading...) Up the ladder and on to the roof. Easing my way over the roof right to the edge I have to lean out to paint the barge boards.

Its not easy and every now and again you get this feeling that your leaning out too far.

Well as I worked my way up the roof I left a trail of blood from my thumb. Looking down I think "Blood on the tiles" great blog title! - How sad is that? thinking about a blog while sitting on your roof in the sunshine!




What you cant see in this photo is Mat:

Just who is paying who ?










Well, I now have a partially varnished chalet, which on the whole is better than an totally unvarnished chalet so I am happy. The colour is great, I love the natural colour of the wood and I am really glad it will stay that way. For how long and how it will age remains to be seen but for now its great.

Saturday morning was spent at the bank seeing my new Bank manager, she was very helpful and is probably going to lend me the huge amount of money I need to get this place rentable!

Walls and door handles

Spent the weekend in Morzine. I arrived on Friday evening to find Rob and Mat around a camp fire after a barbecue I just missed. Rob had been up a mountain with one of his children and a friend and had come down that afternoon. Mat is there to create robs decking masterpiece. It all looks very good, a little springy but it all looks great it really finishes of the surrounds to robs chalet, especially the front door. I dont have any pictures of it, as I only had my phone with me and the camera is rubbish on the phone (as I will show later). Well Saturday rolled around and I went as usual into town to do my chores, visit the bank and go to Voirons to get supplies.
I need the bank to lend me lots of money as I don't have any and my personnel friendly bank manager has disappeared and is not responding to his email. I discover that he has moved on and his replacement is not available for a meeting until Friday. Not very helpful. So I resolve to phone and email her when I return. That's my job when I finish writing this.
Next was Voirons, this time it was gaine and some plastic boxes to hold plugs and switches. I had worked out what I wanted where inside the walls. Plug sockets heaters lights and lights switches, but as usual the plan needed changing almost immediately.
There needs to be a heater in the drying/store room as this will hopefully heat the center of the house as well. The heater needs its own electric supply so that's one line of 2.5mm cable (each of the three wires in the cable is 2.5 square mm in cross section, the whole cable is actually about 10mm diameter) This needed running to the far wall. I think that the hot room heater will probably go on the same circuit as the drying room heater, not sure yet as it may be nice to keep the hot room independent of any thing else. There need to be plug sockets if only for the washing machine and dryer (which should go in the alcove under the stairs) Plug sockets can be chained together up to a point and as good practice I run all the plugs on 2.5 mm cable as well. I have all double sockets and have added another in the garage on the other side of the wall. All these sockets will be powered from the same trip in the consumer unit. This is another run of cable, The lights or at least the switch for the lights required yet another run of cable. For this I was going to use 1.5mm cable but I did not have any so I used three 1.5 mm separate strands of wire run through the gaine for the switch.

The lighting posed a few problems, (which are not fully resolved yet) My intention is that there will be a light on each of the four levels of the central staircase. and that on each level a single switch can turn on or off ALL the lights on all four levels. Now this is possible (apparently) with a load of wire and complicated three way double rocker switches, but I have looked and looked and not found a easy way to do it. So I have opted for the French way! What I plan is to install what amounts to a relay in the consumer unit and push button switches on each level. The switches are chained together in parallel on one side of the relay and the lights are chained together in parallel on the other. Any one of the push buttons can turn on or off all the lights.

So I start drilling holes through all the uprights in the new wall for the gaine and wires to go through and after a bit of repair with a metal file I discover that my big drill (the one I ruined earlier) is not quite ruined and is in fact quite good still as long as I dont hit any more metal stuff!. So the holes are drilled and the cable and gaine threaded around









This wall needs to be insulated. Rob donated some large furry sheets of rock wool insulation that he previously used on his garage doors. It is about 200mm wide, uncompressed and should be a good insulator. I have to split it in half to make it this enough to fit inside the walls and still be able to panel the side.

Up goes the plaster board and voila there is a wall.

Hard bits include moving a sheet of plaster board (not light) on my own, that is 1.2 meters wide and just a fraction less than the floor to ceiling height high. Plaster board is quite brittle and bends only so much before snapping. corners get crushed if the weight of a whole board. rests on it. Cutting the holes of the plug sockets is tricky to get right and I am not convinced I have done it properly, we will see. In order to see where the cut out should be you rub chalk or marker pen over the edges of the box fixed in the wall then offer up the plaster board to press against the boxes. hopefully and actually it worked remarkably well, the marks transfer to the plaster board giving you a nice outline of where to cut out.

In the last photo you can see the switch with three wires coming out of it. This was the first time I have installed separate wires rather than cable and I was determined to try the official French method as suggested in my electrics book. I was surprised to find it actually worked really well! The separate wires all pulled through very easily. I can only assume that the system is not designed for cables but it designed for wires.

With still no doors to install I moved on upstairs to the bathroom/bedroom walls. This were a little easier and needed a slightly different insulation as I want to stop sound more than heat.

This stuff is rigid and cuts really well so you just carve it into the gaps. then plaster board up!

Again, voila walls!











There is a comedy series on TV called Absolutely Fabulous and in one episode the kitchen burns down and Jennifer Saunders spends the next three months trying to decide what design her new kitchen will be. After three months she has made a decision, she now knows what door handle she wants. Well I feel like that about my front door handle. I have been trying for months to get the right door handle to fit properly. How hard is it? First of all the square piece that actually does the work was too short to connect the handles. Then the replacement was too thick to fit in the door. Then the replacements replacement was too short. Chopping up the two short sections to make a longer one did not work. Then I finally found a section that fit in the lock and was just big enough to connect to the handles, then the slots cut (for some strange reason) in the section caused the handles to spin on the section. I am fed up of door handles but I think I might have fixed it. I have wedged slivers of metal into these stupid slots and now the handles can grip the section properly. Problem now is that with all the messing around I seem to have lost one side of the door handles!

Any way I left on Monday afternoon reasonably happy with what I had done this weekend and full of plans for the next trip, which will probably be around 1st of June to help Mat with the painting.

That reminds me, I really should get in touch with the bank now....

The wall and the fox

Spent this weekend in Morzine building a wall across the garage. The idea is that this wall divided the house from the garage and hopefully will keep the heat in. In order to construct this wall I needed an order from Voiron's the DIY shop. So Friday morning we are ordering wood and plaster board and insulation and varnish and wood preservative. All this to be delivered on Friday afternoon. Cool. So I spent the rest of the morning making space in the garage and figuring out where exactly the wall was going to go.

At about 3:30 the lorry pulled up

This is the lorry. (finally get to see how to spell Voiron) Rob who was there for a holiday had organised a delivery of timber so that a friend of his could construct some decking around his chalet and my materials hitched a ride with his. Good job he had a delivery as I have discovered that Voiron does not deliver at all on Saturdays at all.

I had ordered insulation, plasterboard, framing timber, and sound insulation. All this was unloaded and stacked out side. So construction could commence!
From empty space to wall in 12 hours:













Studding.



















Plasterboard.










And a bit more around the corner for the "hot room" The hot room is an interesting concept, which I suppose Rob dreamed up originally but I will copy (and perhaps improve) as it seems very sensible. Basically the services most especially the water supply is installed in an area that can be kept warm. Seems simple but its not generally though t about until its too late. With temperatures getting down to minus 20 C the pipes will freeze solid and burst when they thaw. Big problems. So I have designed this service room to be insulated and heated through the winter. The outside wall against which the water supply comes in (great design Hervè) will have to be insulated but that is fine as it will give me a neat method to get cables along the wall, running under the insulation behind all the pipes, without getting messed up in all the plumbing. Also its nicer to fix to a wooden surface over the insulation rather than to concrete.

Before my trip up/down to Morzine I had purchased some doors and frames from the DIY shop here in Switzerland and driven down with these in the car with the intention of installing them in my new wall and if this was not to be then installing them in the bathroom bedroom walls upstairs. Well this was not to be. The frames the doors came with were not entirely suitable for the job so at this point I decided to omit the doors for now and have a bit of a rethink. We did not manage to finish the walls but we got a fair bit done. The walls need to be insulated and have the electrics installed and I discovered I am woe fully short on that plastic gaine stuff for threading cables through so that will have to wait. As it is we did not have time to insulate but it looks pretty good from the other side.

We were working on Friday night about 10 in the evening busy banging away using eclectic saws and drills generally getting it on and I turned around to see a rather large fox walk straight through the open garage door, stop and look at us as if to ask what the hell we thought we were doing! Beautiful, I guess female and about 3 meters from us. It stayed for about 5 minutes looking about. We stayed still pretty much amazed and enjoying the privilege and novelty of being quite so close to a wild animal. Then she left.

Well Rob had told me he though there were foxes about but we never imagined we would be introduced. On Sunday just before Rob left we were treated to another visit. We were all inside and Mrs fox trotted across the field and between the two chalets

Cool.

Mat arrived on Saturday afternoon in order to do some work for Rob and I will be using him to paint my Chalet. Although officially I am not employing him. He is a guest and is doing the painting to fill in his time!
He will start some time around June 2nd and it should take him about a week to do the chalet. My plan is to look in on him at both ends of that week and help out with some if the hard to reach bits which one person may struggle to reach.

So as soon as I can I will be back. Around the middle of May. Put the insulation and electrics in to the garage walls, put the doors on, put the plaster board, sound insulation and electrics on the bathroom and look at the floors in the bedroom.

So much to do.

Got another bill from Hervè not very happy about that. Seems to be the balance for his services. Right. Now I have no money and I need to pay everything and everybody, just how is that supposed to work?

Easter 2008

Wow, no posts since Christmas, I have been lazy!
Well its been cold and I have been thinking about the chalet, I promise!

So Easter break and the family made the trek out to Morzine for a long weekend. I specifically wanted to open an account with Viourons and make an order for wood and plaster board for Saturday then build the garage wall on Sunday. That would amount to a load of work and a big step forward.
Alas, things, as usual, did not go entirely to plan...

We arrived on Thursday evening, a little snow still clinging to the ground in the shaded parts of the valley, Nothing like last Easter with its brilliant sunshine, so much so we had picnics out side. The forecast said snow, snow, snow. No problems getting in this time as an outcome of the key issues of last year Rob and I have an "arrangement" with the keys. All a bit hush hush and I cant say too much in public but I got the keys and managed to open the doors. As we went to bed on Thursday night the first few flakes of snow began to fall and waking on Friday saw a real dump. 30 cm or so of new snow and it was still snowing. All day it snowed.

For the first time I had to put chains on the car wheels. Never used them before. Pain in the arse to get on and off but they make a huge difference. Would never have made it without them. Good job I thought about the weather and bought a set before we left. Apparently my car has enormous tyres and requires the biggest chain sets made. Any way I was well pleased with my forethought at buying them and even more pleased at there performance.
Friday I drove down to the DIY shop and opened my account, all in French and I understood most of it too! They could not of course do a delivery "a demain" (Saturday) because of the snow and the fact that they were closed of Easter. BUM.
So with my new account I piled up a few things on the counter and went back trying to figure out what I could do in the mean time.
Still snowing and the boys playing in the snow, I fiddled about with some electrics, fixing up the sockets in the bedroom and in the kitchen upstairs.
Saturday dawned with brilliant sunshine

So off out on the boards with my son, sod the chalet, lets go surf!
Minor problems including a car that would not lock did not dampen our spirits too much.
Saturday afternoon it began to snow again and kept snowing until we left on Monday!
I put in some more cable for the bedroom heaters and had a major clean up through out the chalet but feel a little embarrassed at the amount of work I didnt do.

I really need to get on with it. Rob is out in a few weeks time and I need to speak to him about some other project we have going but I want to arrange a delivery for that weekend, this will have to be done over the phone!

Something to look forward to!