What's up, Doc?

Or, what's been happening while I was away?

We actually arrived back in Brighton quite latish on Wednesday but as I had been well aware of just how much catching up I would have to do, reading all the blogs I follow, sorting out the trash emails from those I really wanted to read, dealing with the post and phone messages and so on, I left another post "on the schedule" as it were.

We learned at one of the French motorway service stations that not only was the Duchess of Cambridge pregnant, but also that she had been rushed into hospital.  The news might well have been covered by French newspapers but this service area sells the European edition of several English papers.  I refuse to pay the exhorbitant prices demanded for them and content myself with glancing at the front page headlines as I wait for the Old Bat to emerge from the ladies.  I could not help but notice that the Daily Mail was offering a "Royal Baby Special" on pages 2 to 14.  Eh?  !2 - no, 13 pages devoted to an embryo whose sex isn't yet known, let alone the name?

I was pleased to discover yesterday that Sgt Danny Nightingale (I mentioned him here) had his sentence reduced to 12 months suspended and was therefore freed immediately after his appeal against his sentence.  He has also been given leave to appeal against his conviction.  The justice machinery really did sort that out very quickly, probably because of the enormous swell of public opinion. "joke"

Reverting to Kate, I can't understand why two Aussie radio (or TV - I don't know which) presenters thought it so hugely funny to telephone the hospital pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles.  And I'm not just being an anti-republican royalist when I say that.  It just seems so utterly puerile and the sort of "joke" that even my 9-year-old grandson would think infra dig.  God help Australia if that really is the level of their humour.  But I can't imagine it is.

Eh bien, I must get ready to take the Old Bat to her Friday oxygen treatment.

~~~~~

There's just time to upload another picture of Christmas decorations in Chateaubriant, this one being a new picture.

Plan B

The Plan B that Chris and I devised involved laying joists of three inches by two inches, fastening them to the existing boards with metal angle-brackets. On top of the joists we would fix loft panels, with underfelt and laminate flooring to finish. It was a shame to do away with what were, I thought, the original floor tiles, but they were breaking up and the floor was becoming dangerous.

Back in England, I e-mailed Chris with the room dimensions and, to help with my own calculations, I drew a scale plan on a large sheet of paper. I visited several do-it-yourself stores to get the measurements of their loft panels, all of which were the same. At least this meant that if I had to use several stores to obtain sufficient for my needs, there would be no problem with differing dimensions.

I took great care over my calculations as I realised that there was just one chance of getting this right. No way could we wing it once the tiles and sand had been removed. I had several telephone conversations with Chris in which we decided which way the joists would be laid (at right angles to the floor boards), which way the loft panels (at right angles to the joists) and which way the laminate flooring pieces (at right angles to the loft panels). By this time I felt as though my head was going round in right angles.

Having agreed the basics, we then needed to calculate how many lengths of timber would be needed, how many angle brackets, how many screws, how many loft panels. The timber could be bought in France, but the angle brackets, screws and loft panels would have to be bought in England as we didn’t fancy our chances of being able to pick up exactly what we wanted at any of the French do-it-yourself stores in the area, let alone in sufficient quantity.

Rather surprisingly, especially as neither of us is a quantity surveyor (or could it have been because of that?), both Chris and I came up with the same figures. I made several trips to B & Q to buy loft panels – no way could I get all I needed into the car in one go – and sourced a supplier of the hardware, which I duly ordered over the internet. As there was no way all this could be transported at once, I had to make a special trip to take about half of the materials. About half the remainder could be taken over when I went to remove the old floor and the rest when I went over with Chris to lay the new floor.

I was astonished when my neighbour, Tom, expressed interest in coming with me to clear the old material. I did warn him that it would be hard, dirty work, but he was still keen to come – and I wasn’t going to decline the offer of a free slave.

~~~~~

Still in Chateaubriant  but now with Christmas decorations.

Skip for hire?

The new plan for the floor in the upstairs bedroom would involve lifting all the tiles and digging out all the sand on which they were laid. If the boards beneath were in as good a condition as those I had already exposed, then they could be used as a foundation on which to lay joists and, on top of those, a new floor. In preparation for this, I would take careful measurements of the dimensions of the room.

I also decided to find out where I could hire a skip to dispose of the old tiles and the sand. A visit to the post office was needed so that I could study the local Yellow Pages. This was not terribly successful as there didn’t appear to be any company in the area which hired out the sort of builders’ skips we have in England. All I could find were giant, industrial-sized monsters, but, just in case, I noted the addresses of all the companies supplying these. Mrs S and I then spent several days touring the industrial estates and back streets of every town and city within a forty mile radius. I might have saved both time and fuel if I had bought some street plans. I’m sure there was one back street in Laval that I drove along three or four times, and the number of times we lost ourselves on vast industrial complexes verged on the ridiculous.

But the search proved fruitless. France doesn’t have builders’ skips. I wondered if this was a business opportunity, but then I remembered that practically every car in our village has a tow-bar and every car owner has a trailer. That was how they disposed of unwanted sofas, mattresses, bikes and the like.

I did consider having a tow bar fitted and buying a trailer myself, or borrowing one from Jean-Paul or Jacques, but decided that the cost of the tow bar would be more than I wanted to spend. The materials for the new floor were going to be expensive enough. I would just have to think of some other way to dispose of the remains of the floor.

~~~~~

The church at Chateaubriant again.

Think again

Mrs S and I were in France before Chris and I were due to go over to work on the floor in the upstairs bedroom and I took the opportunity to reassess the job. I lifted a few tiles in one area to check that they were indeed laid on sand and to see just how deep the sand was.

It was then I realised that, if the job was going to be done at all, we would need to re-lay the whole floor in order to even out the ridges in the sand. If we didn’t do that, the cracks would soon reappear. I also became concerned about the weight of sand we would need to use, fearful that the ceiling of the downstairs bedroom might collapse under it.

I dug out some of the sand where I had lifted the tiles. It varied in depth from two inches to four inches, and was laid straight on top of rough sawn planks that had gaps between them of anything up to an inch. How on earth could we stop the sand falling through the gaps? Come to that, how had the original builders done so?

It was becoming more and more clear that the original plan would have to be scrapped and that we would need a major rethink. Despite the cost, I phoned Chris for a discussion and Plan B was developed.

This was how it looked after I had cleared a corner.

The floor upstairs

I was becoming concerned about the floor in the upstairs bedroom. Mrs S might have been delirious about the terra cotta tiles, and I had to agree that the wavy floor added character to the room, but too many tiles were cracking and breaking along the ridges of the waves.

It so happened that Sue and Alan, an English coule living in France, had replaced the terra cotta tiles in their house with more modern ones and the old tiles were stacked in her shed. Every now and then she would take a few of them to the local tip. She told me she would be very happy if I took what I wanted as replacements for my broken tiles: at least that would be few less for her to dispose of.

My friend Chris and I went over to collect some. Unfortunately, few of them were real terra cotta and many were paint-stained. However, we sorted through them, picking out the best before loading the boot with as many as we thought the car could carry. We stacked them in one of the sheds before going back for a second load, and then a third.

But not only were those tiles made of something other than terra cotta, they were also smaller than those in our bedroom. Undaunted, Chris and I worked out that we could lift sufficient tiles from one corner of the bedroom to replace the broken ones and then lay the replacements all together in one patch. It might mean some jiggery-pokery, but we thought we could manage it. We arranged a tentative date to do the job.

~~~~~

The other day I posted a picture of the door of St Nicholas church, Chateaubriant.  Here is another view.

Reloading

If you have by some strange chance just dropped into my blog, you are very welcome.  But you will need to go back a couple of days to catch up with what is going on.

We eventually got under way with the double mattress on top of the two singles. I drove gently along the road with Mrs S sticking her head out of the window every few yards to make sure that the mattresses were behaving themselves. All went well until we came to a roundabout. Halfway round, the mattresses started slipping off the roof and I had to stop.

This would have to be the busiest roundabout in the town and traffic was soon stacked up on every approach road. A van-load of police in full riot gear appeared, seeming to arrive out of nowhere. My heart sank. I knew that the motoring laws in France were quite severe and that French police could not only levy large, on-the-spot fines, they were also empowered to confiscate offenders’ driving licenses in certain circumstances. I had visions of the car and mattresses being impounded until I had paid a fine of several hundred euros, and possibly having my license confiscated into the bargain. But all the police did was to clear a path through the traffic and help to steady the mattresses while I drove at a slow walking pace to a spot where I could safely refasten the load.

It did cross my mind to suggest to Mrs S that she should wait there with the double mattress while I took the singles home. I didn’t, because I thought she would object even more to standing beside, or lying on, a double mattress beside a busy roundabout than she had about doing it at the side of a relatively quiet road.

After reloading the mattresses, I sat for some time trying to work out a route that would avoid roundabouts and sharp bends. But I overlooked the fact that although the mattresses might slip sideways at bends, they could slip forwards or backwards on steep hills. And sure enough, as we were going up a hill on one of the quiet country lanes, they slid off the back.

By the time we got those mattresses home I was shattered. There was no way I could take the two singles up the stairs until the following day.

~~~~~

In Chateaubriant old town.  I'm not sure if it was this house or the one next door that Victor Hugo's mother lived.

Loading

We had bought new mattresses for our French house.  They had been brought to me at the store's collection point by a human gorilla who stood and watched as I loaded them onto the roof of my car.   I heaved the first of them onto the roof. This was the double mattress, which I had decided should be first as I thought it would be easier to put the lighter mattresses on top. I struggled slightly getting the first of the singles on top, but managed it in the end. It was rather too far to one side and I pushed it towards the centre.

It was a pity I didn’t allow for the fact that all the mattresses were packed in slippery, polythene covers. I must have pushed a little too hard and the mattress shot off the other side, knocking Mrs S to the ground in the process. I happened to glance towards the collection point, hoping that the human gorilla was not there to witness my clumsiness, but of course he was grinning hugely. Which was more than Mrs S was doing.

I tried again, this time pushing more gently.

The last mattress was, not surprisingly, even more of a struggle to lift onto the top, but between us we managed it without any further incidents.

Having been a Boy Scout in my youth, I had learned how to tie a number of knots, several of which I could still remember.  The bowlines, clove hitches, sheepshanks and round-turns with two half hitches that I used to tie down the mattresses would have earned praise from Lord Baden-Powell himself, so securely had I fastened the load.  I was proud of those knots, but I had to undo them again. I had pulled down so hard on the rope that the double mattress was folded over the sides of the car and we couldn’t open the doors.

By now the gorilla was not just grinning, he was slapping his thighs as he laughed out loud.

~~~~~

This house stands opposite the church in Chateaubriant and claims to be one of the oldest in the town.  It is now a creperie but the steps to the door are a bit of a challenge for the Old Bat, who prefers the menu at a competitor anyway.