This renovation task is to finish off making one large liveable bedroom out the the two tiny, dark and damp rooms that were there before. Below is a picture of when Dad and myself could hide our pleasure making these two rooms into one and this is the 2nd push to rebuild this room to make it an enjoyable space.

Dad wasted no time today in getting stuck in to ripping down the old ceiling as we need to rewired the room, replace the insulation and put up some plaster board plus we had an idea things were living up there, and unfortunately we were right.

While removing the wood cladding (that we hate so much) it soon became apparent that the old roof above this ceiling wasn’t sealed at all and every animal seemed to have taken a chunk of the old insulation for bedding and some wildlife had taken the liberty of just moving right on in and were living up there, breading up there and of course crapping up there. Yes unfortunately that black stuff you see in the photo is rat faeces (ewww). I am so glad we’ve never spent months living in this room

Finding what we have, we are so glad that we are now at a point to renovate this room and especially with the new windows coming can really start to make this a fantastic, liveable, cosy & clean room.

I’ll be updating this page through the week as there is progress on this room so check back regularly but here is todays instalment of Dads hard work with some before and after pictures.

Don’t worry the wallpaper is going as well as the wood.

We’ll be opening up this to have a nice big window overlooking the garden.

Making solid progress.

Oh my! Is that what we think it is?

All down time to remove the insulation now.

let this be a lesson to you and serve as a warning. The desires of this man are simple, give me food and give me heat. Put those things together and give me hot food and as Dawn (now my wife) found out you’ll have me forever.

Living where we do in France we tend to get power cuts so we always plan to have 2 ways to do most things. This means for heat we’ll have a wood burning boiler to top up the electric one, to cook food we’ll have a gas hob as well as an electric oven. You get the point, however this romance comes with a price and up until now i’d not given it a lot of thought.

Throughout the year you would have read that we’ve been stripping wood and burning it in the stove that came with the house. This served a purpose as the wood clad walls needed to go and as we had no heat burning this was a perfect way do use this. Alas we found the stove to be too small to generate any good amount of heat and we found ourselves burning as much of the wood as we had for very little heat output, then along came Godin! The Godin is a somewhat antique wood burning stove our friend lent us after taking pity on us knowing how much wood we were burning through for so little heat. The Godin is a mean beast, it burns whatever we throw in it for a huge amount of heat and thankfully churned through the wood that we’d collected.

Now you see i’m a romantic, the idea of big logs on the stove, keeping the house, my wife and me warm was enticing… A quick phone call and a week later 4 “stairs” of wood were delivered. Now living in London i don’t burn wood (i should) and i certainly have never ordered wood so 4 “stairs” was a guestimate but how hard could it be right? Get it delivered, stack it and burn it for a happy ending…. Kind of

Have you any idea how much 4 stairs of wood is? Neither did I, have you any idea how small it looks in a pile? I did and that’s not very big I thought, i’ll stack that in an hour later… 4 hours! 4 bloody hours later of  lumping, moving, stacking, dropping, swearing and aching and it’s in a pile, only for the dog to steal a log and have some of the end collapse!

Let this be a warning to you my friends, wood burning may be a necessity but unless you have teenage kids who’ll do anything for money or some hired help please only order 1 stair, my back is killing me…

Now i need a hot bath but D’oh we only shower, at least i’ll be able to run the heat FULL POWER for the rest of the time we are here knowing that in theory i’m carbon neutral

This really isn’t a moan as I love the stove and the loading of it, but this is a plea to my wife to HELP ME NEXT TIME… By the way Dawn “where did you go?“.

Yours achingly

Lee

PS : I know it’s cliche but as a man I just HAD to get a big axe, just ask any man it’s an essential tool in any armoury

I got the wood. Might as well have a chopper.

I know! It doesn’t look that much.

Still more to go.

2nd time the front load was stacked.

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 )

Here are some before, during & after photos with the bigger sets below.

With the roof now cleared you can really start to get a sense of size of the space we will have available to us. The timbers that we removed we are offering for free to anyone who wants to collect them (see HERE) and the cattle feed rack on the left we’ve given to Jean Luc our farming neighbour so he’s got use out of that. We are also trying to rescue the trough (at the bottom of the picture) that has a water irrigation system still fitted but given the time it’s stood unused and the rust its infested with it looks like it’ll only good for junk, which is a shame. Also not sure what we’re going to do with the old tiles as yet but i’m hoping i can at least crush them down and use them as hardcore rather than taking them to the dump.

Below are the remaining photos from the work carried out by Dad and I, unfortunately the two photos which would have proved popular if we’d captured it we don’t have…

These were :

1. I slammed my head off the main roof beam
2. One of the beams rolled and slammed the side of my head…

How i wasn’t knocked spark out is beyond me, but more to the surprise of Dad i didn’t lose my rag.
There must be ZEN in them bits of wood

And that’s it. That’s where we are at the moment, we’ve got the wall to remove of course but i need to figure out what to do with all those bricks we’ll remove. There isn’t such a thing as a skip hire company around here and taking it all to the municipal dump is going to take many many trips with a car and a trailer so I need to get my thinking cap on!

Do you have any ideas?

While in the longer term this new room will be removed altogether for now we want to create a temporary bedroom of a decent size and there was only one way to do this and that was “big hammer” approach.

The wall itself was very soft and lightweight bricks really only held together by the wallpaper. The frame of the wall was wood and then what can only be best described as “thick tiles” made up the wall, this isn’t going to take long at all…

So we started:

Two grown men with a lump hammer and a club hammer and away we went.

At this point the wall was coming down well. My only concern was that I realised that I was dressed the same as my Dad! Here’s some free advice “Never ever dance or dress like your Dad”, especially when you’re only 34. Anyway back to the hammering but before that a quick picture of “men at work” :

And then it was done.

By taking down the wall it opened up the room from being 2 roof of 10ftx6ft to a 10ftx12ft room, which for us is a far more manageable size.

Interestingly enough the tiled floor you can see above only goes into one room and the other was just carpet on top of cardboard, this suits us fine as we’ll be removing the tiles in the first room for use elsewhere.

The last job that we have to do in this room is remove the wooden cladding on the ceiling and then this room is ready for “proper” renovation.

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)