August

"They had loads of it here when we first came over, but haven't seen any for a while." said a friend, talking about terracotta floor tiles.  Can get them here but they're fifty euros a metre squared, so that would be 4 grand to do the ground floor.  Also, they look crap!  See below at our sample after I had sealed it.  I guess you have to walk on them for 100 years to get them looking good.  Or buy expensive ones.  Or, as we have, buy ceramic looky-likey for seventeen euros a metre squared and make do.  Also, to keep them looking good and not covered with ground-in muck and cat sick, you wash and oil them every week.  Sod that.

France don't do what everyone else does.  We have decided that concrete is bad as it produces it's own weight in CO2 emmissions.  Lime absorbs CO2.  It's also permeable (ish) so good for damp places like our house.  Which might have a spring under it, meaning I need to investigate and maybe dig a drain in the house.  Everyone who has pioneered limecrete floors recently uses LECA, graded and mis-shapen to provide structural stability.  France has balls of even size, which would be like making a floor out of marbles: prone to movement.  I found the next best thing - pumice.  Should (fingers crossed) have some insulation properties, and it's pozzolanic, meaning it makes the lime stronger.  Worked for Rome...

Also been wiring the house.  Very, very slow work as we can't sink the conduit into the walls: they're only 5cm thick and very brittle so the conduit would almost cut them in half.  I wonder why no-one has thought of this.  So, surface-mounted it is, in wee placcy boxes.  Brittle, expensive, and every shop has not quite what we need, or it's another make of wee box which is 2mm smaller/bigger than the rest on the walls.  Bloody nightmare.  I don't know why it's so cheap and nasty over here - British stuff is so much more solid and half the price!  The other half of the problem is routing it correctly.  For the plugs in the bedroom, it leaves the fusebox, goes up into the roof void, along a frame I had to make to mount the cables properly, through the wall into the living room, up into the bathroom, into a junction box, along and up the a plug in the bathroom, down and through the doorframe, up and around the door, along to the plug on the far side of the room, back to the plug nearest the bathroom door, up and round it again, across to the bedroom door, round the door frame (I replaced the door frame trim with the conduit to try and hide it a bit), along the top of the skirting board and up to the last plug.  Twenty million miles of wee placcy strip for 6 sockets, all mitred by hand, all staggered as per regs, all sank into the plug sockets a wee bit to make it neat.  Good job I'm smacked off my head on Ritalin or I'd be in a madhouse by now.

Yawn.

zzzzzzz.....

Also started plastering.  First coat harled on, next lime-hemp coat splodged on, then battens set up and down the walls as guides, then second lime-hemp coat on, then finishing coat of fine stuff (lime putty, fine sand) on.  Fine stuff is maturing in our old bath for 3 months so it's nice to work with and not shite.

Floor's coming up for the tiling.  We were going to tile on top of the old ones, but that would mean having to use tile adhesive, which is cement, sand and glue to make up for the cement being crap.  Better off using lime and not breathing in glue all day when laying it.

K is working her magic on the radiators.  Rub down, clean with linseed oil soap, prime with linseed oil primer (linseed oil and rust, basically), paint with linseed oil paint (linseed oil and probably graphite powder).  Good fun (K says I talk a lot of bollocks some days), no headaches, natural so no problems with disposal killing fish and that, lasts a long time.

Looking very nice indeed.

Not much going on then... better do some work in the garden as well...