Renovating a Gite in Brittany

It's taken along time to get here but the plaster boarding has finally started. Only one ceiling mine, but it's a start.

The plasterboard delivery didn't come until Monday this week, 150 sheets, three pallet loads. Monday afternoon was very tiring moving all the boards inside. It wasn't helped by the wind along with rain and hail showers. We had to keep stopping and covering the boards, then rushing between breaks in the weather. The plasterboard comes in pairs stuck together with a strip of paper each end. We started by moving them in pairs, but by the end of the afternoon two sheets was too heavy and we had to split each pair and move them singularly. Exhausting.

Whilst waiting for the plaster boards the other half of the house upstairs has been floorboarded in a similar way to before. The first side took two days to complete but this half took three days. The problem was that the existing oak floorboards were very uneven and warped with some large height differences (up to 50mm) in places. I used some large sheets of chipboard/OSB3 in the center of the room to pack up the floor but nearly every board required additional packing wedges and shims to level everything off towards the edges of the room. At least I've now got a fairly level and flat floor to work from.

The other jobs this last week of so was to put up some studwork around the edges of the room and fit the framework for a suspended toilet in the bathroom. The suspended toilet kit comes with a metal frame with the cistern/flush integrated into the construction and then the bowl is bolted on later after tiling. They are a little more expensive but save quite a bit of space and are easier to clean as you can just mop underneath.

The garden has also seen some changes. Debbie has been over the garden with a rotovator to breakup and level the soil after the diggers churned it all up putting in the septic tanks. We do have a garden plan, but the lack of time and huge number of jobs, I think we are going to just grass the whole area for now and plant a few shrubs and trees to get things started. There's plenty of time later to finish the garden.

So with the ceiling up in one side I can start next week putting up the internal walls and doorways.

With the floorboards laid I could now proceed with the ceiling.

The plasterboard for the ceiling is screwed to metal rails suspended from the rafters I fixed in last week. From the photo you can see a complete rail and bracket fixed to the rafter. Resting on top of the rail is a scrap piece and the bracket to show how it fits together. The brackets are simply screwed to the rafters at 40cm centers and once in place the rail is pushed onto the brackets and hangs there.

As usual getting everything level was important. The hardest part of the job was the measuring and levelling. It's really difficult on your own to measure long distances or hold a level with one hand and measure with the other whilst up a ladder. In the end I used bits of string stretched tightly across the room at the correct height. It did mean a lot of up and down and moving step ladders but I got there in the end. The bottom edge of the rail is set at 2.5 meters (plus 13mm for the plasterboard) above the lowest point of the finished floor height. Using the strings as guides each bracket is screwed to the rafters. Various lengths of brackets are available, so it's not too important that the rafters are level as the brackets take up any slack.

All the brackets and rails in place as shown. Personally I find that using this metal rail system really easy and prefer it to using wood. Also there is no danger of rot or woodworm and all the rails are straight and consistent. Now the rails are up I can order my plasterboard and fit the electric cabling for ceiling lights and put up the plasterboard. With the ceiling in place the internal stud walling can be considered.

At last things are starting to take shape.

brittany renovation

My goal this week was to get the metal ceiling channels installed on the new rafters ready for the plasterboard. However before putting up the metalwork I had to lay the floorboards to ensure I had the correct floor to ceiling height and to give myself a level/flat datum to work from.

The existing floor was old pine floorboards but unfortunately they have suffered over the years with woodworm (now treated) and a fair bit of damage in places. They were also a little springy and had dips in places where the oak beams below have settled and sagged over time.

I did consider running a sander over the whole floor but a small test area didn't come up well and all the boards have been fixed by nailing through the boards with large headed nails making sanding almost impossible.

The replacement boards are 15cm wide tongue and groove maritime pine. As you can see from the photo I've laided them perpendicular to the existing boards. This seems to have helped stiffen the whole floor and mostly taken out the lumps and bumps. There is a little packing in places which I just slipped in as I went along. I wasn't aiming for the perfect flat floor as it is a 500 year old building.

The first row of boards across the space was crucial to get right and took quite a bit of fiddling around with tape measures and pythagoraus to make sure the whole lot was square. The first row was placed with the groove against the wall and nailed in place into the floor leaving the tongues on the working edge towards me. Working from left to right across the room each new row was fitted and tapped home with a piece of scrap board slotted over the tongue to protect it from the hammer. I used 50mm lost head nails hammered at a angle through the tongue into the old boards below. The nail heads were then punched below the surface with a nail punch. The waste from the board cut to length on the right hand side was used to start the new row on the left hand side giving a staggered finish across the floor.

The whole exercise was relatively easy except when there was a bowed board in the pack. It took a few banana shaped boards to realise what was making it difficult to make all the floorboards fit snuggly together. Once a small gap creeps in the error just compounds itself making the job harder and harder. I ended up leaving out the bowed boards as I didn't have any way of clamping the boards together. I've since found out that I could have used those speed cramps and turned the cramping end around so it expands and pushes against a temporary batten. Also the Readers Digest website showed a technique using a baten and a wedge to push bowed boards together. I know for the next time.

Anyway, floor in, and now I can move on to the ceiling.

brittany renovation

Well all my stuff arrived Monday morning first thing on the lorry. Piles of wood, insulation and metal studwork bits.

Some of it has gone to preparing the ceiling on one side of the house. This side has a flat ceiling 2.5m high (the length of a plasterboard), whilst the other side is plasterboarded between all the woodwork up to the ridge. The reason is partly to gain a little loft space and somewhere for various bit of ventilation and pipework to run.

The rafters are fixed just over 2.5m above the finished floor height and then metal track is suspended on small hangars perpendicular to the rafters. The plasterboard is then screwed to the metal track, hopefully flat and level with the floor. By getting the height correct the stud walls should be easy as they just pop straight in without cutting

Been busy this week juggling several jobs.

Two new windows have been fitted downstairs. The replacement windows are just direct swaps for the old windows, but as usual with old houses nothing is ever quite that simple. Getting the old windows out took much longer than anticipated. The old wooden windows had been cemented in place along with some metal brackets cemented into the stonework inside. Removing the old windows meant lots of chipping away around the frame to get all the old mortar out. The downside was that once removed, the inside face of the brickwork was not vertical or very flat. Not ideal for the new windows.

The first two pictures show some batons of wood fixed around the inside of the window to provide a guide for adding mortar (strong mix) to the inside face of the window opening. The brickwork was about 1.5cm off vertical between top and bottom. Once the mortar was set it was actually easy to fit the new windows, just a bead of silicon and some simple metal angle brackets to screw the window home. Between the sill and the bottom of the window I also added an expanding waterproof foam strip, compriband, for extra protection against water ingress.

Whilst the mortar for the windows was setting I was also able to tackle the old fireplace in the kitchen. As in the lounge this was once a traditional, very large, Breton fireplace (a bit like an inglenook) but also bricked up with a smaller breeze block fireplace painted green and brown! The kitchen didn't need a fireplace so it was to be demolished and blocked up. The chimney stack will be re-used by the house next door. Once all the breeze block was removed and the concrete hearth lifted I found, yet again, the original granite mantlepiece. Fortunately this time it was in one piece and in good condition. I intend to use this to re-create the hearth in the renovation fireplace in the lounge.

And if all that wasn't enough I've also been shopping for materials. I've bought 80 square meters of maritime pine floorboards to plank out upstairs. Fortunately the local supermarket had a promo on for various DIY tools and I bought a 2 tonne chain hoist (palan a chaine) for just 24 euros. It made light work getting all the floorboards upstairs and also came in useful to lift the granite mantelpiece out of the floor.

I've also ordered from the builders merchants loads of wood, metalwork for stud walling and insulation. That all arrives tomorrow morning, so I'm going to be fairly busy for a while. I did originally also have 400 square meters of plasterboard coming but I've delayed that for now, otherwise it just gets in the way.

Oh, alongside all this activity Debbie has also been doing some garden designing. The weather has really started to feel like spring for the last few days which has spurred us on about the garden.

No rest around here recently.

brittany renovation

Both the electric board, EDF, and the water board, SAUR, arrived this week to do their jobs. I asked EDF to move the current electric meter from the wall next to the fireplace into the laundry room next to the kitchen. The lounge wall with the meter on it is going to be left as exposed stone. The guys moved the meter ok but with much huffing and puffing about drilling through the wall and fixing the new meter. Everything just seemed to be a hassle for them. Maybe they were having a bad day ? They also fitted a box outside, I assume with various extra control bits for cheap rate electric and remote meter reading. Once they had gone I just roughly connected up the supply to my new fuse box with some spare cable to give me light and power for coffee etc.

With the old meter gone it meant I could pressure wash the stone work to clean it up ready for pointing. The large white bit in the prior photo is where the old meter was ’stuck’ to the wall with white ‘cement’. I think it’s come up really well, and should look great once it’s pointed up. It certainly helped a great deal that Debbie spent a day or so scraping out the mud and old pointing from between all the stones. When I pressure washed the faces of the stones there was an awful lot of muddy water spraying around and without cleaning out the joints beforehand I don’t think it would have got as clean.

SAUR also came to supply the second house with a new water supply and meter. They came and dug holes either side of the road then must have had some sort of tunneling machine to feed the new supply under the road, cos the road surface remained intact. I missed this part of the operation because the guys came, did their job without fuss. I’ve just got to connect my side up to their meter.

brittany renovation

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.

The 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.

In 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. It'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.

Almost 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.

brittany renovation

With a few days off for Christmas and New Year I've been mainly doing just a few little jobs here and there. You know, all those ten minute tasks that end up taking all day that you put off and off until they start to bug you too much and they just have to be finished.

Before I do much more upstairs with the insulation I need to decide what floor finish I want upstairs. Floorboards, tiles, laminate ? I can't really start building the walls etc until I've got a plan for the floor.

With those decisions still pending I've made a start on renovating the old fireplace downstairs. If I get it done fairly soon it will stop the icy wind coming down the chimney and I can fit a wood burner to keep me a little warmer during February and March. The original fireplace had been partially bricked up and 're-modelled' with breeze blocks. In order to try to return it back to it's original Breton style I've had to rip out the breeze block and recreate the oak supports for the mantlepiece. It looked like they had rotted away and the holes also bricked up.

Once I get a little further with the uncovering I should be able to post some photos of the old fireplace and some of the renovation work which hopefully should be much clearer.

I've made a good start on the insulation. I really hope this stuff works because every morning this week it's been at least -3^oC and not got much warmer during the day. A bucket or water in the house had even frozen over. Brrr.

The insulation was fairly easy to put up providing you have a reliable staple gun. The cheap stapler I originally bought ended up in the bin. It's a real pain balanced up on a platform in the rafters with one had free and then the staple gun jams or mis-fires. New staple gun in hand and things were a lot easier. The insulation is fixed to the rafters, which leaves an air gap between the tiles and the insulation. Around each of the A-frames and purlins I've put metal tracks to take the supports for the plasterboard.

I quite liked this insulation compared to rockwool, even though it's more expensive, there none of the horrible dust and fibres and it's much thinner so more of the old carpentry gets exposed.

One side upstairs complete, now on to the other.