Friday, December 17, 2004
ADSL ordered
On the good news front, Caroline has ordered ADSL from France Telecom. Our modem/WiFi router (Live box) arrives in the next few days, enabling the line will take about a week.
I'm quite excited about the extra speed and being able to surf without tying up the phone line.
| 8:21:12 PM
ADSL ordered
Concrete boots
At the front of the two gites I was going to put a 60cm wide oak post to separate the two windows. After the macons left I changed my mind and decided a cast concrete post covered in the same render as the breeze blocks would look nicer and be easier :-) The pictures are self-explanatory, clamp on shuttering, insert wire reinforcement, fill with concrete nailing extra boards on the way up.
The morning started fairly windy when my friend Ian and I knocked up the shuttering with scrap wood and French masonry clamps. Ian took charge of the concrete mixer and I started shovelling it in, nailing additional boards as it filled up. By this time the wind has really picked up and was blowing a 'gale'. Just as I was adding a second barrow load of concrete one of the boards started to work loose oozing concrete. I hadn't banged the nails fully home so I could remove them more easily later and the weight was pulling them out. Just then BANG. One of the ridge tiles blew off the roof of another gite. It landed between Ian and I.
Change of priority. Saving the roof was more important than concrete on my boots. We could see a second ridge tile lifting in the wind and was worried the wind would get under the slates and rip the roof off. We filled an old fertiliser sack with sand and I planned to climb up onto the ridge and straddle the 'sand bag' across the loose tiles to prevent further damage. Fortunately my ladders were too short and so we decided to call a roofer. It was very windy and would have been fairly dangerous. It also meant we could get back to the concreting. With luck on our side the wind didn't cause anymore damage to the roof, it just blew a fence panel out and snapped one of the fence posts round the back of the house !
The rest of the operation went without further incident apart from a bit of dust blowing in our eyes, horizontal rain and leaves in the concrete. You can see by the mess I managed to rescue the shuttering and use extra nail and clamps to keep everything together.
| 8:19:47 PM Concrete boots
