WOW

• Bathroom now finished & painted, there’s even a toilet roll holder to add some luxury to the experience
• 2nd kitchen sideboard & cupboards installed ready for new appliances
• The rear bedrooms new ceiling is up & plastered
• New lights & power sockets run into the new bedroom
• 1st wall totally pointed ( this is VERY time intensive )
• Old electric, phone & data points replaced & secured
• 4 new windows ordered to replace the current rotting ones
• 1 new stable type door ordered. Delivery & fitting the windows & doors should be 4/6 weeks
• Roofs on the grange & the house repaired (again)

I’m sure i’ve forgot something but i’ll be speaking to dad in length tonight when he returns from his mammoth renovation trip (it’s Good Friday today), the write ups, photos & podcast will be hot on the heals of this post.

There’s at present no further work planned for the next 4/6 weeks until Dawn goes to the house to supervise the windows being fitted but we are on the cusp of achieving what we wanted to for this year and IT’S ONLY APRIL

The latest Google SketchUp model has arrived so as usual we thought we’d share it with you by clicking HERE (500k)

The model is not yet complete to the new specifications but we wanted to see a before and after, so they’ll be a newer version posted shortly. This will include extra Velux windows, the internal balcony overlook closed up (maybe – opinions please) and the bathroom removed and placed where the 3rd read bedroom is.

We are also changing the design of the master bedroom, and these changes will all be reflected in the final model as we are now close to submitting for final planning approval.

As always this model is free for you to use and chop and change around. We’d love to see what you come up with, but as with all of the download this will be under a creative commons share alike with no commercial use.

Enjoy.

Your rights of use ( please read )
We are releasing this model under the CREATIVE COMMONS rights management. The copyright we are releasing this under is BY-NC which basically means :

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Finally after weeks of customs delays, parcel force loses and sitting on my hands today the Zoom H4N finally arrived! I’m dying to try it out so brace yourself for some very rough and ready recordings, the actually podcasts will come a little later when i know what i’m doing with it.

With the Grand Designs show coming up in a week we’ll be taking it with us to get some interviews with suppliers that we have lined up. Top on the hit list are Velux who we have a meeting with, also the guys from http://www.rainwaterharvesting.co.uk/ to clear up the myths of rain water harvesting.

So we are very very nearly there…

UPDATE 13 April: I’ve had to correct some of my figures the the “Grange” isn’t the same size as house at all (sorry i rushed my calcs) so this has reduced the figures by at least 1/3rd however everything is still impressive and we’ll be pushing ahead.

It seems no matter if you’re in England or France then Good Friday weather is it the same. RAIN and rain of some possibly appropriate biblical proportions right now.

Hiding in the house i didn’t think much until looking out of the window i noticed the sheer amount of water running off of the porch roof (the photos don’t do it justice) and then there was the flash (that’s the lighting) and it struck me (not the lightning) that we’ previously been thinking about rain water harvesting but didn’t know how successful it would really be, and looking at this small demonstration from nature we could currently fill a bath with what has come off the roof.

Some quick maths says our house was a total area (front and back) of 126Sqm of roof and thus rain capture. The Grange has a less at around 46Sqm together. That’s a combined area of around 172Sqm which seems a total waste to not do anything with.

Doing the math
Here are some figures for the maths :

• Average rainfall in this area of France, 76cm (0.76m)
• Area of roof on the main house 126m square
• Area of roof on the grange 46.5m square

House Roof Only
So 126m2 x .76 = 95.76m3 of water
138m3 of water = 95,7000 litres of water for possible harvesting for the house alone.

Adding the Grange roof @ 46.5sqm
172.5m2 x .76 = 131.1m3 of water
131m3 of water = 131,000 litres of water for possible harvesting total.

These are crazy figures surely everyone should be doing this???

To give you some idea of how much water this is here is a comparison for you.

• Average pool = 20,000 litres of water. We could fill 6.55 pools (the pool we are looking at is 11,000 UK gallons or 41,639 litres so 3 times)
  
• Average shower use (8 minute shower) is 120 litres. We could have 1091 showers

Now of course I’m not expecting to be able to recover every last drop of rain but even if we were only to recover 50% it is still a vast amount of water.

Some very interesting figures
A 2006 UN Human Development study (available HERE) found that the “average” UK person uses 149 litres of water a day (France comes in at 287 litres per person per day!!! A French habit we WILL NOT be picking up) .

According to a BBC Water calculator my personal usage is around 111 litres (click here to get yours), these figures take into account all sorts of toilet flushing, showering, bathing & washing machine use. Using these figures i want to show how self sustainable we could be using this “grey” water and I’m going to reduce the rain capture by 50% to help bring the figures what i personally think to be a more “real world” scenario .

Rain water capture @ 50% = 65,500 litre
1 person @ 149 litres per day could last 439 days before buying in extra water
2 people @ 149 litres per day each could last 219 days (7 months) before buying in extra water.

Now if we use the BBC figures we get  different picture
1 person @ 111 litres per day could last 590 days before buying in extra water
2 people @ 111 litres per day each could last 295 days (10 months) before buying in extra water

For those who aren’t sure of what I’m on about I’ll post more in the tech section shortly but here’s an info graphic for you to give you a quick idea.

PS : This is the reference pool we are using for our calculations since this is the one we are look at, it’s from SunSoka

On the cards for these 4 days is a full program of painting, plaster-boarding, demolition, shower fitting, plan redesigning & meetings with builders. No rest here but there will be lots of updates as rooms, buildings or plans progress.

More updates soon.

Lee

PS: The weather here is stunning right now, here’s a sneak peak.

Here’s the full gallery of images for the kitchen removal and fitting of the new units. You’ll have to forgive some of the quality as that’s the iPhone for you but that said I’ve never had such a powerful renovation tool in my pocket

You can read the full post HERE

With the water off, the wall trimmed by 8 inches and the sink gone it was time to start to putting up some carcasses and see how it all starts sitting together. One thing to note is that due to plumbing issues on the opposite wall the kitchen is now in this location as opposed to it’s original place of against the main wall. I say this because this was a last minute find and this explains why the kitchen DOESN’T BLOODY FIT!

Originally we purchased the kitchen units to fill up 2500mm made up of 1 x 1000mm carcass for the sink, 1x600mm carcass for the gas hob and 3x300mm small cupboards to allow for storage and by having to flip the kitchen it was 500mm over which meant I had to lose 2x300mm cabinets. Not the start i wanted.

Luckily the solid wood (untreated) work top was 2000mm long as was always going to be cut down, so with a small layout change we had something looking like this now.

1x1000mm, 1x600mm, 1x300mm and a 250mm gap between the last cupboard and the uncovered stone wall. This wasn’t the end of the world as I now have room for my 200mm wine cooler so it was time to assemble the parts and cut the worktop.

The work top appears to be the best priece of wood in France. Seriously it was solid, so solid it took 2hours to cut the holes into the work top for the sink & hob. It really was a case of measure once, measure again, and again and then once more then cut. Things were slowed down by the fact the hob didn’t have any sort of cutting template so a lot of patience, swearing and team work between my father and I and we had the wholes in and cut to size. Finally a bit of a breakthrough.

After sleeping on it for the night and feeling positive it was now time to tackle getting cabinets built, leveled and joined together. While I built the cabinets, Dad sorted out the waste and the pluming to the sink while making sure the final cabinets were lined up and then we finally dropped the top in and got our first look at what we could expect the kitchen to start to look like and we liked what we saw.

As we put the doors on to complete the kitchen there are a few small jobs outstanding that needed to be done. Firstly the work top needed to be sealed to protect it against water, oil and usual cooking wear and tear. This was done later but due to the cold there was a 12 hour wait between coats as the sealant wouldn’t go off. This typifies everything that is happening with the house at the moment, one step forward two steps back.

Talking of two steps back – the gas hob is missing a fitting (am I’m still trying to find it on sale) and the wall needs to have a tiled splash-back fitted and then the sink sealed.  However with the doors on, the water on and the waste working there was a huge sense of pleasure and relief that the main part was now finished and what we almost had was a fixed position and working kitchen, but I can’t underplay how nice it is to have hot and cold running water on tap again…

And without further ado ladies and gentlemen here is our temporary kitchen, almost ready to go but the fruits of some solid work in zero degrees. Personally I’m extremely happy considering the kitchen location had to be flipped at the last moment and of course a chunk of the wall fell down.

There is a full set on flickr HERE with all the images from the kitchen build in it’s various stages that you might enjoy seeing and of course not forgetting PART 1 of this eventful bit of DIY.

Small Update: I found a picture that shows the amount of wall we had to trip off to compensate for the bits that fell down. The bit that actually fell off was on the right hand side of the picture but to the left of the sander as you see it you can see a bit of wall we’d not yet trimmed off. Personally while the wall top may not be super smooth, when you have to trim 6 to 8 inches off a plaster brick wall this isn’t too shabby at all. Dad & Me 1 – House 0

What I’m looking for is a solar panel the size of an A4 piece of paper (21cm x 30cm ) with a data logger on the back. The kit should also power itself from the energy generated & charge a NICAD battery (for when it’s not generating power), record the time and the power that it is producing at any given moment then log this for a maximum of 7 days ( possibly 30 ) so that I can then plug a USB cable into it and get a raw CSV file out of it.

With this data it’ll then be really easy to move the panel to different area’s of the house to determine the best location for a panel plus given we know how much the average power output is for a panel this size, some simple maths will let us scale this up.

Here I’ve even got a diagram for you as inspiration but I’m under no illusion that I don’t have the smarts to build this so I’m assuming I’m missing something here and it’s harder than I think.

If you have something similar PLEASE contact me as this will lead onto a decent spend in solar panels for someone.

PS : Sorry if i sound like i’m a little ratty in this post but the truth is I am!
Looking to move to solar seems to be far harder than it needs to be and while I want to contribute to being part of the solution it seems it’s easier to be part of the problem. Below are the links to the other solar posts i have done and you’ll see the results ebb and flow from positive to negative.

Solar – Is it worth it?
Solar – Round IV
Solar Survey Part II

I KNOW I am as shocked as you are and later we will go into all the trouble we have had but to get a first round of drawings through is very exciting for us so we thought we’d share them with you.

I’ll go into more details later as well as show you the scribbles over the current drawings with plans of what we are looking to do.

Today we must say is a huge releaf as we paid out and thought we would never see these.

I will publish all the views and files we have shortly. Along with a full writeup and explantion of what these refer to and out plans for that section. In the mean time if you click the image it will take you to the Flickr page so you can see the other images and these full size.