Category Archives: gites

Underfloor heating

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When I renovated the gite I put in electric underfloor heating in the Kitchen and Sitting room so I could rent in the low season.

This week I had some guests arriving, but the weather forecast predicted cooler temperatures. It was time to turn on the heating for the first time since it was fitted in the spring.

The underfloor heating is on two separate circuits with one floor temperature thermostat each. The lounge worked fine, but bad news – the kitchen thermostat did not work at all. The LCD display was dead. Swapping the lounge and kitchen thermostats heated the kitchen OK – so thank goodness the heating wires and floor sensor buried under the tiles worked OK.

With people coming in a couple of days I couldn’t find anywhere locally to buy a replacement, so I had to ‘borrow’ the thermostat from our house. Disaster averted.

The broken thermostat is on it’s way back to the manufacturer (who were very helpful on the phone).

Next year I think I’ll check things a little earlier.

Kitchen walls and Taping and Jointing

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Kitchen wallsIt’s been a busy but really productive week. We’ve chosen a kitchen from IKEA and went to pick it up the other day. It’s all in boxes in the lounge at the moment. When we went to choose the kitchen we actually made a few minor changes which altered the dimensions of the space required. Fortunately I hadn’t built the walls for the kitchen at the time so after purchasing the kitchen I knew exactly how it was going to fit together. That meant I could build the required wall to fit exactly.

As you can see the walls are now up, and with a first coat of filler for the taping and jointing. It’s a L-Shaped kitchen with the classic triangle of fridge in the corner, sink and cooker opposite.

Whilst the filler was out we have also finished the taping and jointing of the two kids rooms upstairs and they have had a undercoat on the plasterboard.

The kids rooms have taken priority over our bedroom as they come to stay with me at the weekends and I don’t really want them living in a complete shambles.

The lounge is still a storage room and all the bathrooms are as yet unfinished, although the upstairs bathroom has been painted. It just hasn’t got a toilet, sinks or shower yet!

It’s going to be very tight to move in on time

Plasterboarding, and more plasterboarding

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Plastic plumbingThe blog has been a bit quiet recently because I've just been plasterboarding everyday for the last month and there isn't much to see apart from grey rooms.

Almost all the upstairs has been boarded out. Three bedrooms, corridor, landing and two bathrooms finished. The photo shows the plumbing for one of the bathrooms from about a week or so ago. This bathroom also has a suspended toilet and shows the hot and cold water pipes in place before boarding. Each water supply is a single point-to-point feed supplied from a downstairs manifold next to the boiler. The advantage is that there are no joints behind walls etc. and the only connections required are at the end of each run on the tap/appliance. Connections are made with a simple compression fixing onto the plastic pipe. Two sizes of pipework are in place, 12mm for sinks and toilets; 16mm for showers and baths.

All the electrical cabling is also now in place for the sockets, heaters and lighting. I've also cabled up every room with a TV/Satellite/Radio co-ax connection and two RJ45 sockets with Cat 5e cable. Again all the TV and Internet cabling goes back to a central point to a patch board for connection to the router, TV distribution and telephone. The telephones can be plugged into the RJ45 sockets. Hopefully the system should be flexible enough to cater for most eventuallities. I might even be able to run network booted thin clients connect to a cental media server for video/music etc. in each room.

Hopefully by the end of next week all the plasterboarding upstairs should be finished and I'll have some photos of the rooms.

New doorstep and staircase opening

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Door step Two main jobs this week, increasing the size of the opening for the staircase and building a door step.

As I mentioned before I've got two pieces of granite from a broken mantlepiece. I did consider using them as external door steps but neither piece was really long enough. The sill of the side door from the lounge is about 20cm about finished floor height, so why not use the granite inside. It should tie together the stone walls and complete the picture. Each piece of granite had to be cut to length. I used an angle grinder with a diamond blade to cut around all four sides then a couple of whacks with a coal chisel and lump hammer saw the two pieces part company.

The idea here is to remove the broken ends of each piece then butt up the clean original outside edges in the center of a new step. The cut ends will be pointed in.

In order to get the levels right it did require some excavation under the door. A bit of hard core, sand, plastic membrane, then mortar to lay the granite blocks on. Positioning the blocks was really really difficult. We couldn't get our hands round the blocks and anyway they were just too heavy. After quite a bit of shuffling the blocks were in and positioned and level, but too low! The mortar shifted around, squeezed out and mucked everything up.

It was a tough decision, but it would have annoyed me every night, so out came the whole lot. The mortar dug out, more hard core and packing and second attempt. This time it went much smoother. We used a technique of aligning the blocks on a plank then rolling them onto the bed of mortar. It worked much better than trying to lift and shuffle.

Staircase openingThe new opening for the stairs was necessary in order to fit a standard 'off-the-peg' hardwood two quarter turn staircase. I've choosen the staircase I like and it required a 180cm square opening. The current opening was too narrow. I could have had a staircase made to measure but that doubles the price of the stairs, so a bit of elbow grease was required.

The cross beam (the one with the ladder on it) needed removing and moving back about 30cm to ensure the hole was large enough. Because the cross beam was buried about 40cm into the wall the only option I really had was to cut off the tenons to remove the old beam. With the other beams supported by acro-props the cross beams could be wiggled free. The existing beams cut where short and new tenons made at the beam ends to fit into the cross beam mortices which where then pegged with new oak pegs. These seasoned oak beams are like cutting concrete and I've completely trashed a couple of panel saws hacking away.

Re-using the existing cross beam meant I didn't have the extra length to remake the tenon and I certainly didn't fancy cutting a new mortice so I cheated and got some 14mm steel bar and just drilled right though the beam and into the end grain of the cross beam. A couple of 'pegs' and it's rock solid.

You can just see above the blue clamp some shuttering where the hole has been filled from the old cross beam position. The horizontal acro-prop is just there to ensure the cross beam was pushed up tight.

Breton Fireplace renovation

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Original fireplaceIn between renovating the fireplace I've also been sorting out some other little jobs, like digging trenches in the house to get the water supply to the correct place and digging more tenches to lay the soil pipes so I could install a temporary 'coffee station' with running water and a waste supply. I was getting a bit fed up with only having an outside tap and no sink. Because you are not allowed to use 90 degree bends on horizontal runs of waste pipe it is necessary to pass through a wall at a 45 degree angle. When the walls are over half-a-meter thick it needs a big hole. I guess the rule is to help prevent blockages in soil pipes buried under floors etc.

Anyway back to the fireplace. The photo above showing the original fireplace was taken just after I bought the house before sandblasting the beams. Not very attractive. After stripping back all the plaster and removing the breeze block and various in-fill I was left with a shell of the original fireplace. Old fireplace ripped outIt's not very clear but in the photo there are two stone 'shoulders' about 1m50 off the floor. On these shoulders used to rest two oak supports for the mantelpiece. They protude into the room about 20cm and also extend back into the wall about 50cm. The weight of the wall on the rear of the supports and the lever effect would have supported the original mantelpiece.

I knew they used to be wooden, probably oak, supports because when I dug into the wall there where the remains of the old rotten timber.

From some spare oak I had left over from the windows and created two new supports and fashioned a traditional rounded end to the section that protrudes into the room. These were cemented into place and the stonework above reconstructed to lock the supports into place.

For the hearth of the fireplace I decided to dig down a little to lay a plastic membrane and cast a concrete base for the new stone hearth. It was a bit of a suprise and a real disappointment but under the floor I found two very large pieces of granite. Once pulled out it was obviously the original mantlepiece broken into two halves. A real shame. I can only guess the timber supports must have rotted away and the granite mantlepiece fell and broke.

New oak mantelpiece in placeAlmost the last piece of the puzzle was to fit a new mantlepiece. I decided to use an oak beam 20cm by 20cm rather than granite. Partly cost and partly because it fitted in better with the beams above and the wooden supports.

The beam is shown resting on the new supports and just awaiting some infill above from the top of the mantelpiece to the ceiling.

Whilst all this has been going on Debbie has been slaving away raking out all the mud and clay between the stonework and cleaning up all the stones with a nylon brush. It's a bit of a time-consuming soul destroying job, but once it gets pointed up it should look fab.

BTW – The electric meter is being moved into the laundry room off the kitchen.

First day at work and video tour.

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Oh my god, what have I done !!!! In the cold light of day it looks very daunting. Just for fun I've knocked up this quick video tour of the house before renovation starts.

Anyway in a situation like this demolition is always a good stress reliever. So goodbye to the wooden green partition wall, goodbye to some rotten woodworm planking upstairs and goodbye to the corner of the concrete floor. I just wanted to see how thick the concrete was before deciding on a mini-digger or doing the job by hand.

Decorating Cerise gite

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Caroline has been finishing off re-decorating Cerise gite for the 2007 season. Most of it has been finished upstairs with painting, laminate flooring and wallpapering. Downstairs was wallpapered a couple of years ago and most of it has stood up very well. The only part that need doing was around the kitchen wall 'return'. I suspect that because of the stools against the wall to use the breakfast bar people's feet have knocked the paper. Not a major job.

The biggest job is finishing off the ceiling. It is something she has wanted to do for ages, because the underside of the floorboards between the beams had been in-filled with polystyrene tiles when we bought the place. Not ideal.

With the help of a compressed air nail gun she is replacing the tiles with tongue and grooved pine planks (called lambris here) placed at 90 degrees to the beams. Every piece of plank is a different length by the very nature of old oak beams, so it is quite a slow job, but looking good. Over time they should age to a nice natural colour and certainly be safer and look alot better then polystyrene tiles.

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LD Lines new ferry crossings

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LD Lines have announced their summer schedules with daily ferries from Newhaven and Portsmouth to Le Havre with short break prices starting from 45 pounds. Le Havre is about 2 hours 30 minutes from our gites.

Departures and arrivals are indicated in local time.

  • Departure every day from Portsmouth at 23:00 and arrival at Le Havre at 07:30 the next morning.
  • Departure every day from Le Havre at 17:00 and arrival at Portsmouth at 21:30.
  • Departure every day from Newhaven at 12:30 and arrival at Le Havre at 18:30
  • Departure every day from Le Havre at 20:00 and arrival at Newhaven at 23:59.

Plagued by SPAM

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One of the problems with having a website for our gite business is SPAM

The vast majority of our business comes via email from the website but along with a few genuine enquirys we get about 500 SPAM emails a day. The makes it really difficult to separate the good, (HAM), from the bad, (SPAM). It's doubly difficult if an important email has a unhelpful or even blank subject line.

Filtering the emails with whitelists and blacklists goes someway to identify SPAM but plently still slip through and there is always the danger that HAM gets marked as SPAM. Our web hosting provider provides SPAM filtering but we still have to download all the email 'just in case'.

In order to get email addresses the spammers usually scan websites with a webbot to harvest the information. There are techniques to 'hide' the email address on a website from a webbot but still allow a human user to view and click the link. Keeping email addresses out of the hands of spammers should help to reduce the volume of junk mail. I've known about some of the techniques for a long time but made a conscious decision not to use them. I was concerned at the time that older browsers might not display email contact information and lose a potential gite customer.

The rise in SPAM and the fact that most people now have a modern browser has changed that.

One technique is to use a contact form. Some people don't like contact forms and it requires that the user enters their email address. A small typo means you get an enquiry but can't call them back. The other technique is to use Javascript to hide the email address from the webbot but still allow a visitor to click to compose and send an email.

To this end I have been changing the website to add a contact form and adding Javascript code obscufate the email addresses. Adding a contact form but retaining an email address should cover all the bases. I Hope.

I bit of searching revealed this, particularly here. However further research indicated that even this technique might not be enough as the spambots are getting smarter all the time. In the end I settled for a technique in this post with some minor modifications to cater for non Javascript enabled browsers. Extra complication but hopefully worth it.

All this work isn't going to stop the SPAM overnight but it is a start to limit the harvesting of the email addresses. Used in conjuction with some configuration at the web host to reject 'ivalid' email addresses I'm hoping that it might reduce things in the long term.