Tag Archives: electrics

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 electric and water supplies

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Stone wall before cleaningBoth 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.

Stone wall after cleaningWith 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.

Progress update

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I was on holiday last week so not much has changed recently. The roofers finished the roof whilst I was away, and everything looks great. I'm really pleased with the result. The downside are the piles and piles of old slate. The original quote included a price for the disposal of the rubbish, but in order to save a few bob I decided to do it myself.

That has turned out to be a bit of a false economy. So far this afternoon we have shifted 4 large trailer loads of slate to the dechetterie (rubbish tip) and we are only a quarter of the way through. I useful technique is to stomp about on the slate to break it up into smaller pieces making it easier to shovel. Fortunately the dechetterie is only 2 minutes down the road so it's just costing me time, and a little backache.

I've finished the doorway through the cob wall trimming the edges of the doorway to the correct width and squaring everything off. More rubbish to dispose off, but this time it's getting spread on the garden. It's just mud and heather mixed up.

The good news is that a man from EDF (the french electric company) came to look at my electric meter with a view to having it moved. Currently the equipment looks like it's from the 1930's, and is placed high up on the wall right next to the fireplace. This is the wall I want to keep as exposed stone, so the EDF guy came to survey the place and give me a quote for moving the meter into the proposed laundry room. I can't put the meter under the stairs because it has to be about 1.5m off the ground. I thought I would have to run cables in trenches or under the floor, but he said they could just extend the supply outside the building running a cable under the guttering at the back and drill through the outside wall. Fairly simple and inexpensive job. Whilst they are there all the Bake-A-Lite kit will be replaced and a remote meter box placed outside. He took a few photos, a couple of measurements and 'the quotes in the post'.

It looks like the rest of the week is going to be dedicated to clearing up the mess from the last month or so before I hire the mini-digger to rip up the floors ready to lay new concrete floors.