Renovating a Gite in Brittany

I finally got around to starting the plumbing.

Actually this contraption, that looks like the control deck of a submarine, is the 'nerve center' of my plastic plumbing system. I hope I'm using the French equivalent of top quality barrier pipe Steve ?

From now on new runs are going to be dead easy as I just attach the length of pipe to the manifold and run the other end to the appliance, turn on the valve and voila, water. Yep, that thing is now full of water at 5 bar.

The reason there are more cold feeds than hot are because of toilets, dishwasher and washing machine. Also the strange brass things at the end of each manifold is an anti-knock device to prevent water hammer. Not sure it's really needed, but why not.

The 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.

Yesterday in preparation for the gravel delivery this morning I bashed a couple of openings in the walls. A hole for the soil pipes and a hole for the water connection. The man from the water company came for a site survey at the start of this week to discuss adding a new water supply for the house. After a bit of metal detecting he worked out where the water main was and suggested the best place for the water to enter the house. The blue pipe in the photo is the conduit with the plastic water pipe to be connected later. He said it should be 50cm below ground level when it exits the house, so a little more digging outside.

BTW, making holes in these stone walls is a brutal job. In the past I've tried to make a hole just big enough by carefully removing stone or using a hammer and chisel to cut my way through large stones. It isn't worth the hassle. Now I just sledgehammer away from both sides smashing the stone and taking out much much more than you think you need and then repairing the large hole later. In the long run its much quicker and easier.

The lorry with 15 tonnes of gravel/sand mix for the hardcore arrived at 8am and the two of us spent basically the whole day with a wheelbarrow each moving hardcore. By 3pm we had a fairly small pile left and realised that we where short by about 5 tonnes ! I did calculate yesterday that we needed another 3 tonnes but hoped that it might stretch. What I didn't calculate for was that in places I had dug out a little too deep, and surprisingly the hardcore mix actually compressed quite a bit, about 2cm over a 20cm depth. I was going to hire a vibrating compactor next week, but having jumped about on the stuff, I reckon it's going to compress quite a bit.

So tomorrow, at 8am, is another lorry load coming with 7 tonnes (a couple extra just in case).

brittany renovation