Unfortunately I can’t tell you what wood they are but i can tell you it’s hard, bloody hard (one rolled off and hit me in the head!). Now these aren’t the straightest of timers but i’m sure someone can find a good use for them..

Since delivery is out of the question you’ll have to arrange collection of these long and heavy beams… If you’re interested drop us a mail to wood (at) montpillard.com , now of course we are offering these to anyone in the local area as well and they’ll be given priority but feel free to request them

Location of the wood is Montpillard, Crux Le Ville (google map link : HERE )

On doing so i selected their Barcelona range and dropped items in and then got a nice surprise when i hit the price list button to find all the items were either half price or less!

So what could i do? I hit the buy button and all is on it’s way. Now i know i have to get it to the house but since we need to take a lot of materials over soon we’ll just load this in with us. The plan never was to buy items here and ship but the strong € against the £ now makes it far cheaper to by items here and then take them with me especially at the time of the sales.

Prime example is this sink :

Was £75 now £37.49 . One that i have seen in France €130 and at todays rate thats a saving of £86.25 or €90. That’s the diesel paid for in one item alone ( and the WC the saving was much greater ).

There are of course things that people need to check before buying and shipping these items abroad. Make sure the pipe sizes are the same and that you buy the waste gates with the items so you know everything fits.

Now i normally wouldn’t suggest this but i must admit the way things are right now with the exchange it’s much better to buy all the plasterboard, tiles, grout and wood for the new wall frame it’s going to be about 50% less to create this bathroom.

UPDATE ALL CHANGE: Unfortunately for me however while I’m raring to go and get this started with the Honeymoon coming up I’m not able to get to the house until end of Feb / March. That said with it being sub zero at the moment maybe that isn’t a bad thing.

As usual it’s all change. I’m booked on a very early ferry Jan 10th to go check all is going to fit. Report as usual.

Lee

We’d initially decided to wait until the morning to do any more but one thing lead to another and we just started having a look.

Dad with his trusty lump hammer as a crow bar started to “gently” peel off the start of the wood. We could see behind it what looked like a white plastered wall and with any luck we’d have a nice smooth wall behind. However this wasn’t to be.

On removing the wood cladding we were faced with a wall of uneven and some what damp plaster. Since the plaster was wet when we removed the wood and battening had small chunks of plaster were falling away to reveal what looked like a very nice natural wall. At this point we really could have gone on all night pulling off the wood and picking out the plaster but I knew if we finished all of this on the first night then Dawn would kill the pair of us. So around 11, getting a bit tired and somewhat cold it was time to come back in the morning with Dawn as a re-enforcement.

Dawn the really got stuck in and as you can see from the below pictures and got the 2nd wall done in the kitchen.

At the end of all this we realised we’d got our first surprise with the house. We’d hoped we’d have walls like this hidden away but expected it to be hard to get back to or hard to find. The fact the house was giving itself up so easy to work on was a total joy.

At present we’ve left and will leave the walls bare while the renovation happens however the plan is to point them in a natural lime mix to keep with the colour and seal them leaving these two walls on show. For now we’ve stopped peeling back the walls as we had another wall to pull down and the roof on the out building to tackle. Since we were only here for a few short days we had a lot to do and we couldn’t stop and admire all our handy work, but this wa a really great job to get us motivated for the rest of the house.

Date of Job : April 11/12 2008 (will add to build diary shortly)

The overriding desire for our renovation is to keep as much of the old house as we can where possible and where that isn’t possible we want to restore the section in the same style, after all we fell in love with the way the style of the house when we bought it however we’ve already had to take the decision to remove a part of the house for the safety of the rest of the house.

Failing Roof!
Along with the main building we have two out houses attached at the end of the house where the kitchen and chimney currently are, however over time the moss that has grown on the roofs of these outbuildings has bought down one of them due to the extra weight of the water that is held in the moss. At some time during the empty period of the house this extra weight has moved a beam attached into the wall of the house causing a major crack in the house and this is why we decided to remove the roof to release the weight and stop any further damage.

As you can see from the photo on the right you can see the amount of moss on this roof and due to the weight of this and with the added rotting of the wood there was going to be no way I could save all the tiles as putting weight on the roof to retrieve them all was not an option.

Removing tiles
We allocated a whole day to take the roof down as we didn’t want to just smash away for a few reasons.

1. The safety of myself, my dad and of course damage to the house
2. We want to reuse the tiles
3. Respect for the house, just plain respect!

So armed with a ladder, gloves and a whole load of naivety ( I didn’t have my boots on) we started. I realised pretty early on that we were only going to save half of the tiles as many were cracked already and you would remove one tile and two would fall through and smash. Armed with this knowledge it was time to “gear up”. Boots and gloves on away we went getting most of the roof cleared within an hour. We were amazed just how the house continues to just give itself up and the roof was coming away and soon we were down to bare beams with a clump of unstable tiles and we just had to come to terms with they weren’t going to be saved. Before this it’s time for a cup of tea and in I went.

Then came the crash!
The tea hadn’t even boiled and there was an almighty crash. Looking around I could see Dawn but I was missing my dad. Running out I found my dad standing there looking guilt with a big stick in his hand! He’d gone and pulled on the main rotten roof beam and everything came down.

Now I know I’d resigned myself to loosing those tiles but this was NOT the way I wanted to do it, but this time luck was on our side and everything came down clean.

Overall

Overall I’m happy with the result as removing the roof means we have stopped it coming down in a (more) uncontrolled manner and damaging he house further.

The great news is the crack on the outside is just superficial and will be repaired as we restore the house, the tiles we saved on this roof means that we can restore another roof with them without things looking out of place, I’m sure we could have saved more tiles and going forward it’s time to be a little more patient and with another roof next to this to remove we’ll soon get to see if we learnt the lessons.

The 2nd roof if due to come down next time we are out there, this we’ll be doing on video

Of the two main building the Grange (pictured right) was causing us somewhat of a concern for the coming winter.

You see the issue here the while the wind mainly comes from the west it does also come from the east mainly during storms. With the way the grange has been left it has 3 large gaps in the structure where the windows used to be. What happens here s the wind rushes in and the only way out if up and that means lifting the roof.

The roof was replaced some years back after a bit of a monster storm but not one for wanting that to happen again it was time to seal the holes.

As we reported HERE we did have someone quote for the shutters but the cost was prohibitive so we tackled it ourselves.

Materials
8m of Tongue & Groove wood ( cost €81 )
8m of rope ( cost €2 )
Large tin of weather sealant pant ( €66 )
Wood Glue & Nails ( €13 )

Tools
Hammer
Power Saw

Unfortunately there isn’t a step by step guide for these as honestly we just forgot however it’s easy to assume that we cut the wood into strips of 90cm (window width) and using the left over wood from each plank (each plank was 2.40m so we only got 2 full size shutter widths from each) we used these for the battening to sure up the shutters.

Sure enough the first windows at 70cm x 90cm we easy enough, by the time they were painted, glued and nailed the were lashed to the metal says that were inside where the old windows went. This was a quick and easy win.

Then came the large 150cmx90cm shutter. We (I) originally built it as one large shutter, given I had LOTS of left over i created the battening after gluing the 90cm wide strips only to then lift it up and the whole thing fall apart.

Lesson 1 learned : DO NOT put battening up vertically the shutters as the whole thing will just move and fall apart. There is a reason that there is a traditional Z shape to battening.

Lesson 2 learned : 150cmx90cm is just to big and wide for one shutter. We then halved it and made one shutter 70cmx90 and then the other 80cmx90cm and learning the previous lessons these were finished up and painted and secure.

Job well done approximately €600 saved against someone doing it and a sence of real achievement making the first new part of the property.

As you can see from the photo on the right the “Grange” is missing some shutters and this is causing loss of tiles on the roof during storms and in the past has lead to complete loss of the roof (this is something we are keen to avoid again as you can imagine) so the task was simple, find a shutter builder to quote on replacing the shutters on the grange and on the house to for good measure.

Number of shutters needed : 9
Number of shutters actually quoted for : 6

Number of doors needed : 2
Number of doors quoted for : 1

Number of windows needed : 0
Number of windows quoted : 3 (he actually missed a whole window)

Now that’s not all. Before I give you the price I need to explain that this quote took 3 MONTHS to arrive. It actually arrived the night BEFORE we were due to arrive for a weeks renovation, it did however come with a nice note to say that he could complete the work in September for €6,000… Needless to say I went bonkers, this wasn’t just ineptitude and laziness (getting the quote wrong) it was down right insulting. If he didn’t want to do the work then he should have just said so and we would have started down our DIY route earlier.

So we went from a quote for 9 shutters, no windows, 2 doors to 6 shutters, 1 door and 3 windows.. Time to get down to Weldom and buy some wood I think and that is exactly what we decided to do.

See the post HERE on how we ended up building the shutters for the grange and the house. They may not be professional but they will see us through this winter and cost a whole lot less. Sometimes you really are better off doing things yourself. I fear this is going to be our renovation moto.