Thursday was Ascension day and a public holiday here in Switzerland. Nearly everybody decided to take Friday off as well for a long weekend. Surprisingly my sons teachers also decided to take a long weekend also. So I took him along with me to help out in Morzine.
My intention was to get the kitchen floor in, so that next weekend I can start the construction of the kitchen proper. In order to do this I needed tiles for the floor, these I was going to get from Bahaus, a big DIY shop here in Zurich. But (as usual) something went wrong and when I got there at about 18:00 on Wednesday evening they were closed, despite the signs assuring me they opened Monday to Friday 8:00 until 19:00. Apparently they forgot to mention that they close early on Wednesdays or maybe just Wednesdays before public holidays or maybe just Wednesdays before Richard wants to buy tiles, who knows? Anyway they were closed and so I was not going to get the tiles I had been looking at for weeks for my kitchen. Never mind Thursday was not public holiday in France (?) so the shops should still be open, maybe I can get some similar tiles there.
We arrived in Morzine at about 10 ish in the evening, set up home and went to bed. Thursday was big shopping day but first we had to unload the car. I had brought most of the rest of the kitchen and a big chop saw recently purchased in Zurich. The saw is more precisely called an "Sliding Compound Mitre saw" and looks a bit like this:
Basically a new toy! Shiny! The mitre saw Rob has lent me can not cut the wider tongue and groove planks I wanted for the Mezzanine floor so I decide to buy one myself. I will also need it do do the panelling on the out side of the chalet as this will be wide planks also.
That plus most of what was left of the kitchen apart from the fridge, oven and worktops was all unloaded and stacked in the chalet.
We drove down the valley to Thonon and loaded up with electrical and plumbing goodies for the kitchen and bathroom. No luck with the tiles and we had to get back to Morzine. So that afternoon Ohmri and I spent putting insulation in the kitchen floor, cutting around the many cables and running other cables through the false walls I put in last time, cables for lights and cables for power sockets. With all the insulation down I started the carry the sheets of 22mm chipboard up from the garage into the kitchen and lay them. So by the end of the evening we had a kitchen floor all ready for the tiles we did not have yet.
Friday morning and we drove down to Voiron's in the hope that they would have something like the tiles I wanted but no. So back down to Thonon and run around DIY shops until we arrived a Gedimat. Loads of tiles. I found something in my price range that looked a bit like the tiles I had wanted.
Got them and some adhesive. Right, back to the chalet to lay them. Figuring out where to start is not simple. All the books say start in the middle of the room and work out to the edges. Place the middle tile where the cuts will be even on both sides of the room. Well that's all well and good but I have a kitchen to go in on top of these tiles and nobody is going to see 2 of the edges so what's the point in spending ages getting all the cuts evenly all the way round. More to the point they will see the other two sides which will look strange with cuts along them. So discarding the books advice I tried to figure out where the tiles should go to give me full tiles down the two exposed sides and minimal cuts everywhere else. Laying the tiles was fine with Ohmri helping spread out the adhesive and putting the spacers in. We laid one pack of adhesive and quit for the day as we had no way of cutting the tiles and I did not want to mix up the second pack just to waste in. A barbecue in the evening sunshine finished a nice day.
I spent the evening building a frame and support for the bath. The bath which has been leaning up against a wall for months (well probably more like a year actually) has 5 of these spindly plastic adjustable legs under it that allows you to spend hours and hours adjusting them over and over again until you get so pissed off with them you just snap them off and place the bath on a couple of big blocks of timber (offcuts from the mezzanine beams) which works so much better and takes about 30 seconds to level up! A framework along the sides made of the framing timber which magically just happens to fit the gap between the bath and the rim and we are ready to go with the taps. But I will leave the plumbing until tomorrow.
Saturday and a quick visit to Voirons to get a tile cutting machine meant we could lay the last if the tiles ready for grouting Sunday morning. The few cuts we had to do should provide a few thin strips that will act as a skirting on the exposed edge against the wall.
We then started on the panelling in the bedroom but after a noisy hour or so of drilling and fixing the batons on the wall I fixed about a meter of planks on the wall only to realize 2 things. The batons were not deep enough for the light and plug sockets and that I had run out of gaine so I could not wire up the lights or plug sockets anyway! OK so abandon that project! I will have to take down the first meter or so of planks and double up the batons. This will allow the plugs and lights to fit better plus give me an easy way of getting the batons over the gaine that all over the wall.
So that left the bath. Turn off the water, cut through the hot and cold spurs weld on and extension and a screw threaded end. Screw on a long flexy pipe. Fix up a back board for the taps to fix too. This took me three attempts to get right. But finally I had the right combination of small hole to hold the pipe and big holes to allow the joint to do up tightly and enough room behind everything to allow the flexy pipe to actually flex rather than fold and the tap was in. The waste pipe was another nightmare. Plumbing seems to be all about how to get the most complicated tangle of pipes into the smallest least accessible space possible. I spent most of the afternoon fiddling about crammed between the toilet and the bath trying to tighten the plastic fittings on the waste pipe. Eventually it all seemed water tight, which is just as well as the main electricity distribution box is directly below the bath. Something that made me feel distinctly uneasy as I wallowed later that evening in several gallons of water.
Sunday was the last day and we had the grouting of the kitchen to do before we left. Ohmri and I worked quickly to grout all the gaps and clean up all the tiles and by 11:00 we had finished the floor all ready for next weekend and the placing of a few kitchen units!
Quick tidy up, pack the car and off home. Clean (for a change) and tired.
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