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?