Some time later ...(part 2)

So we had electricity despite being told by the EDF that they had cut us off. OK I can live with that and now I had power I could actually do some work!

Wednesday morning I began by putting up the railings on the mezzanine. This involved bolting a chunk of wood in the middle and fixing together the same type of railings I had used for the stairway.

The top hand rail had to slotted to fit against the window frame but misses the window.
In the afternoon I installed the thermostat for the salons underfloor heating. This has been waiting to be done for a long while and I have avoided it as I knew it was going to be difficult. There are three gaine coming into a small embedded box. The power coming in, the load from the heat mats and also the thermostat. The thermostat is also pretty big and takes up a lot of the room so after trimming the gaine back as much as possible eventually I got it fitted.
I added trim to the fireplace:

This should hold and tidy up the laminate flooring edges quite well. The next job was to paint the walls with the textured paint. One pack did the kitchen wall and the dining room wall.

Thursday I decided to go visiting. Two couples I have met through this blog but never actually met in person are both building chalets in the next town down the valley. They had both said they would be in France while I was there and I thought this would be a good time to meet up.
Annemarie and Dave are building a chalet in La Moussiere, St Jean d'Aulps. They have had to spend a huge amount of money (more than they expected) on the foundations for their chalet and as such they have a lot less to spend on the actual building. We met them and they showed us round there building. They came back to my place for lunch which my eldest (surprisingly) launched into preparing lunch for six people without me having to say a word. I was impressed. Anyway we talked about money and electrics and each others plans. Annemarie and Dave want to be in their chalet by the end of the year in some fashion at least so my advice was to concentrate on getting the place warm (insulation and heat)  and getting a functioning bathroom and kitchen sorted.
It was great to meet up with someone I had only spoken to by blog and email and I look forward to seeing them again when we next go back.
Thursday evening I spent boxing out the chimney in the salon. Another job that has been bothering me for a while. I have always been unsure exactly how to do this. The builders left a mess of metal supports and firecell insulation around where the chimney went through the roof and I could not figure out the best way to cover it up. In the end as is usually best I just added timber until I had it square and then panelled it over with plaster board. The plaster board is far enough away from the chimney and it is separated from any heat by the firecell. When  this was painted in textured paint (Saturday) it looked quite good

Friday I decided to go visit the next couple I had talked to through my blog. His name is Calum and we went down to Les Seytroux to see his chalet. His chalet was beautiful. Its 8 bedrooms (i think) and it has been built to a really high standard. His wife and him along with both sets of parents are now decorating the inside of the chalet and it is his intention to live there permanently. Calum explained he had saved money by making a lot of use of ebay and by loading loads of stuff onto an arctic truck in the UK and transporting it all to France. His chalet looks amazing and I was very impressed.

Friday afternoon was spent trying to figure out how to wire up the consumer unit to spread the load over three phases. Hopefully making sure the the load is spread out will prevent the kind of tripping out we have had when the single phase we now have is overloaded.
For example the hob, which is a big demand device needs to go on a separate phase than the immersion heater which is another big demand. The radiators need to be spread out as well as the plugs and all the rest of the electrics. At the moment I had four rails of breakers and all of them are powered from a single phase. In the final wire up, each of the three phases would power a single rail and one will power two although the forth rail will be fairly empty. Anyway all this consideration had me thinking about the supply and wondering if I could already have three phase power. It all depended on what was live in the cabinet from EDF. Currently I only had one line connected up and I had assumed the other two wires were not live but our testing on Tuesday night told me that they were actually all live but only one connected. What would I need to connect all this up and get three phase power? Well I would need extra cables to go from one end of the garage to the other. I turned everything off and disconnected the consumer unit and earth. Pulled the neutral, phase and earth out from under the garage dragging a rope back through the duct. Then I used the rope to pull a neutral, three phase cables and the earth back to the consumer unit. A bit of connecting and when I switched the EDF box back on at the pole I had three phase power! So I went from no electricity on Monday to three phase power on Friday! With the consumer unit arranged and the loads spread out it should prevent the tripping out problems from now on!

Whilst rearranging the consumer unit I now have kitchen plugs that work, dining room plugs that work.The salon underfloor heating came on and started to warm up the floor. I even got round to wiring up the lights in the salon.

Saturday I started to clear out the bedroom and bathroom off all the boxes and boxes and boxes that had been stored down there over the last few years. One of the main aims of these two weeks was to build the dividing wall between the final bedroom and the last bathroom. A trip down to Voirons supplied the required wood for the partition wall and allowed me to get started.

Saturday evening was spent applying the textured paint to the new boxed out chimney and the concrete wall behind the fireplace. About half a tub of paint left, I painted the lower steps wall to use it up.


Not a bad end to the first week. The salon and dining room were getting very close to finished. Just the skirting board to go really. I had started the bedroom wall and most of all I had three phase electricity.