Dec 2013 – The family mucks in

Hi,

Happy to report the work has taken another few steps along in the direction I wanted it to go. Second week of December I picked up my brother and Mum from Calais and brought them back down to Normandy for a working holiday. I didn’t have to twist their arm either, they wanted to come! Some people are just loopy for wanting to get their hands dirty.

My Mum cracked on stripping back the heavy covering of ivy growing in the front part of the garden where Victor (the previous owner) kept his used plasterboard collection. None of us knew what we’d find under all those leaves.

Turned out to be a steel box. I joked with a German neighbour that is was a bunker left over from the war. She asked me how I knew that. I told her it still had the Germans in it. Thankfully she laughed.

Mum then got busy taking down the sculpture that was part of the main feature in the front garden. This was mostly of wood and concrete, luckily the wood had rotted enough that it came apart easily and Matthew mucked in when there was some heavy stuff to lift out when it got too much for Mum to move. She cleared away 3 cubic metres of plant debris alone! She worked damn hard at it too! Thanks Mum, it looks great!

The front garden looks a LOT better now that all that growth has been cut back and I can see through the front fence now into the cow fields beyond. Certainly makes the place feel less cramped for sure.

Meanwhile while Mum was unearthing German bunkers, Matthew was around the side of the house getting busy with a club hammer and cold chisel on the concrete and steel “sculpture”. He wasn’t so lucky with this one having much rotten wood in it. This one fought him every inch of the way.

Scroll back through the older postings to see the before pictures. Now that this has been reduced it’s opened up that entire side of the garden and I can see out the side window and look at hedges rather than … shyte.

Thanks Matthew!

His efforts added considerably to the scrap metal and concrete rubble piles. The plan is to get my mate Simon with his big trailer and 4×4 to drive round the other side of the house and we’ll load and haul this lot away in a couple of trips to the tip in February. He needs the ground to be frozen hard rather than the bog it currently is after all this rain we’ve had.

We had a cold snap while Mum and Matthew were over. Three mornings we woke to heavy frosts and I got chatting to a neighbour who said the temperature had dropped as low as -12 degrees one morning. Happy to report I was pretty cosy in the house with just one of the electric rads chugging away.

During this cold snap when it was just too bad to work outside Mum got busy painting the kitchen. The canary yellow and Barbie pink colours were just too much for me (and her too) so I had a tin of white emulsion which she used on the concrete and hardboard. This will all be covered one day with new walls, but at least now it looks a bit better than the bare concrete it was before.

Whilst mum and Matthew were working on their respective jobs I was busy installing the woodburner. Drilling the hole through the concrete outside wall went without a hitch and assembling the various sections of flue pipe I had also went fine. Fitting the flue pipe to the outside wall meant I had to bolt it through the concrete rather than simply screw it there, but with all the bits and bobs I’ve collected over the years finding a suitable bracket and bolts just meant a 10 minute rummage in a box to find the parts I needed. Being a hoarder has it’s advantages.

With the outside pipe in place I couldn’t resist testing the draw on the chimney. This was on an almost windless day too.

After that I built a firebreak around the flue as it comes in through the wall to keep heat away from the wooden studding making up the walls in that corner. Once that was done it was a simple case of fitting the rest of the pipe down to the woodburner. I intend building a sort of hearth to sit the stove onto but for now those nice storage heater bricks will do nicely.

Lit some newspaper in the woodburner and the chimney drew the smoke out nicely.

Yes, I know the bed is too close to the woodburner as it stands, but it’s not up and running yet. The task was to just install it.

The week with Mum and Matthew flew by and they got in some serious work on the garden this was mixed in with some trips out to see the local Christmas market, we also had some nice evenings spent in front of the TV watching a DVD or simply chatting. Matthew was determined to sample the delights of French cuisine, in particular frogs legs. We found a shop that sold them and he cooked them up for dinner one evening…. The do indeed taste like chicken.

I closed down the house and prepped it for storage and on December 17th we all headed back to Calais for me to spend Christmas in the UK.

Thanks for reading.