Back from the dead

Well its been a long time since I posted here, nearly 12 months! In that time we have moved from Switzerland back to the UK. We moved most of our stuff from Switzerland to either France or the UK. Moving it to France incurred the wrath of the French customs who made us pay to import it and initially at least tried to make us pay for importing the car as well, which we eventually resolved. We "imported" a load of stuff and paid the customs money to do it.

We have been back to the chalet quite a few times during this period and it has changed a bit. I have clad the outside in insulation and begun to plaster over it. This involved sticking insulation to the walls and then as this did not seem strong enough, nailing screws through a mesh, through the insulation and into the concrete

 Then plastering over the mesh,

 

Between Rob and I we got about half the chalet covered in a couple of days and I intend to finish the rest as soon as the weather gets back above freezing. In the mean time the nieghbours get to view an orange chalet.

On another visit we had a huge tidy up upstairs and moved all the furniture from Zurich around to make the place a bit more habitable. My wife and kids wired up the TV, VCR and DVD player so we can watch movies while relaxing on the huge couch!

Railings have gone up overlooking the dining room to provide the impression of safety and the mezzanine will be railed across fairly soon to.

The oven has gone into the kitchen and its been wired up. The big hole that was, is no more and now contains an oven. The microwave works as well.

In the boys bedroom, I have finally finished the wooden paneling and while we were at it we did the floor as well!

This is probably the best room in the house now.

I pulled out the on suite shower and fixed the leak caused by last winters freeze, just in time for this winters freeze to destroy it again! We shall see. This time I was very careful about opening up all the taps and included the shower. I have also swapped the sinks from the shower room and the bathroom as the shower sink was too big for the space and the bathroom sink was a little small. It works a lot better now. Shower room sink is not yet plumbed in.

We ordered  a couple of pallets of logs to ensure we had enough for our planned visit at Christmas

This is about half of them! there quite a lot of wood there! But I reckon we will burn a load of it during our stay. Rob has also dumped a couple of loads of timber cut out of his farm. All that is out side the garage doors. So I reckon we should have enough fire wood to keep us going for the next trip at least.

I have replaced the big radiator at the bottom of the stairs with one that actually works now and with all the doors closed to the empty unfinished bedrooms, the stairway does seem to get warmer. That said I think I will super insulate the garage wall and install another big radiator at the bottom of the stairs.

I have done some work on the electrics as well. I remounted the distribution box on a "fake" wall which should allow me to run all the cables behind it and tidy all that up.

This leaves the question of what I am going to do on this Christmas visit. Well, I am going snowboarding with the kids and maybe if there is time I will put that extra radiator in and maybe I will tile the steps between the lounge and the dinning room and if I do that, then perhaps I could finish tiling the entrance hall and could even get down to the next landing!

So lets hope I dont leave this blog quite so long next time and I will let you know how it went at Christmas.