Thursday, September 29, 2011
Sickness and Loss
Spent this weekend in Morzine. Took a flight out on Friday evening and we hired a car to get us to the chalet. Saturday morning I was feeling really unwell. We had eaten this very dodgy suspicious cheese sandwich in the plane and by Saturday it wanted out any way it could. So in between dashing to the toilet^and feeling sorry for my self I put more tiles up in the shower and bathroom. I grouted the shower room. I stuck the tiles down in the hallway and stairs that had some unstuck and replaced the grouting in the kitchen with grey mastic in the hope that it will stop crumbling out and look a little better. I cleared off the wooden kitchen surface and after a light sanding, applied a generous coating of oil that I hope will help keep it pretty.
I have stuck down the divider between the tiles and the click clack flooring as it really annoys me when it lifts. I have stuck the trim down a^t the top of the stairs.
I went round the laminate flooring in the dining room and stuffed packing foam into the gaps at the edges and then masticed over the gap. The mastic looks a little off colour, more purple than brown but I am hoping it dries a better colour.
I got a bit done but I was hampered by being sick and also by a strange disappearance of many of my tools. I searched high and low for several of my favourite tools and cant seem to find them anywhere. My clipper and my wire strippers normally stored in my tool belt appear to have gone walkies along with a red plastic box I used to put wire and cable in. The wire and cable are all over the garage but the box is gone along with some of my tools.
Looking forward to our next visit probably in October during half term.
Monday, August 29, 2011
A month of hard work
We came back! After a long break (we never made it for Christmas) we came back for a four week "holiday" determined to get some of the outstanding jobs sorted out.
One of the most important jobs was the construction of both balconies, finishing the render to the rest of the outside walls and boxing out around all the windows and doors.
We arrived on Sunday night to find the place had been "tidied". Matt has been living in the chalet for the past 5 months whilst he works on Robs farm project and he has moved everything around. Everything has been moved into one of the unbuilt bedrooms downstairs. Feels a bit weird to have had everything rearranged without knowing about it.
Started on Monday with the shower room, figured out what bits I had after searching around and what bits I might need to finish the sink and toilet. I need to box everything in so several bits of chipboard are employed the holes. I find all the toilet bits so I can start by plumbing that in. I have to make up a reducer from 16 to 14 to 12 to 10 so I can connect the cistern up and turn the out let through 180 degrees to get it to flow properly but eventually its all working and water flows in, flushes and flows out. The sink is next which is easier as its all flexi pipes to the taps and a bit of drainage. So the shower the toilet and the sink all now work. I think I should leave it a couple of days to see what leaks so in the mean time I look at the huge amount of tiling that needs doing. Starting at the top of the house I disassemble the dalek do I can move it out of the way and take a look at the base. Found the signatures we signed when it was laid back in 2009!
Laid a few tiles and rebuilt the dalek:
Wednesday, the shower room needs a light and that is supposed to be from a cabinet on the wall like the other bathroom. This means breaking a channel and embedding cables for the cabinet. So get out the hammer drill and break a channel in the wall, dust and bits of concrete everywhere. Arrange the wires and make sure its all going to fit through up through the sink supports and up through the plasterboard wall out along the channel I have hacked out and up into the back if the cabinet to the lights. I also figured out the heater supports and that the light switch needs moving. In the evening I started to tile the top steps.
Thursday, was tiling day and I tiled more steps, and finished the hallway. I tiled the splash back of the kitchen
and began tiling the shower floor. This involved cutting round the curved shower base, cutting the floor tiles as close as possible with the tile cutter then trimming them down with an angle grinder. At this point it was about 6 in the evening and I was finishing up when the neighbours complained about the noise. I suppose they had a point but it could have been a whole lot worse! Anyway that kind of stopped my grinding and cutting tiles for the evening. Try to do something a bit quieter that evening and fix the bath plug which has popper out of alignment and needs completely taking apart to fix.
Decided that Monday was going to be rubbish tip day so we cleared out one of the downstairs bedrooms, moving all the wood and stuff that Matt had stacked in there into the front drive. We made five piles of stuff, wood, cardboard, metal, plastic and sweepings. Tidied the garage, moved loads of stuff outside for the tip. Took all the insulation of the garage walls (most of it had fallen off anyway)
Built shelves and generally cleaned up the garage and the bedroom. Laid the insulation down on the bedroom floor.
Monday: To the tip, loaded up the entire car and the largest trailer we could cadge from Matt, and went to the tip with all the rubbish. Dumped it.In the afternoon I began to prepare for building the balconies. The existing timber has been sat in the sun and rain for about 7 years and the varnish is looking pretty sad. I resolved to sand the timbers down and recoat them with varnish before building the new balconies on top of them. This turns out to be a major task. After sanding them down they need covering in preservative, luckily I have plenty left from when Matt tried to preserve the chalet. Then the timber needs varnish. Both balconies back and front need the treatment. Some time during this the timber for the balconies arrives from Vioron. I have chosen to make the balconies to my own design and the easiest way to do that was to simplify the order for Voiron. I figure I can make the entire balcony from planks and posts. The uprights are rough sawn timber so I set top work sanding down a few of the lengths. Takes an hour or so and makes a tonne of dust.
Borrowing Robs new chop saw (he broke mine, dropped a log on it and cracked the stand, so its only fair) I chop out some uprights and bolt them on to the balcony timbers with some rather large screws, (12mm diameter and 160mm long)
After the uprights I rip a plank into three thin battens and screw these to the uprights. The floor starts next and for this I am using decking. Planks of decking chopped up and screwed down onto the freshly varnished timbers. The top hand rail is to be made from two planks laminated together. So two 5m planks are glued and screwed together over night.
The next morning I have to use my favourite tool, the router. I bought it ages ago and havent had a good use for it before this but I have really wanted to have a go with it. I need to cut a slot in the top hand rail to slot the top of the planks into. I set the router up and cut the slot. It really cuts well and was really easy!
Now this laminated handrail can be fixed to the uprights and I can start with the planking.
Loads of planks later:
A bit of sanding
a bit of varnish
Now its time to start the other side!
Super Sue put nearly all the planks on and got very painful shoulders after doing up all the screws. I bought 1000 and had to buy more so I am calling it the thousand screw balcony. Super Sue then painted both balconies three times, once with preservative and twice with varnish
On a visit to Voiron's I found the mesh for the outside walls which made me much happier and I could finish the walls.
Wednesday, fixed the mesh over the remainder of the walls on the outside until I had run out of bolts to hammer in. Decided to box out the bedroom doors as the the walls were in full sun and rendering in the sun is hard work as it goes off really quick. So chopped up some wider planks I had got from Viorons and boxed out the doors.
Thursday, started rendering the outside.
When this was finished I could get on with boxing out the rest of the windows and doors.
During this hectic time of balconies, rendering and boxing out, we tiled the shower room and tiled the bathroom. We built a wall in the bedroom to fill the gap, plaster boarded the gap. Built a tongue and groove panelled wall to cover up the cables, rendered all the other walls of the bedroom with the textured paint. The walls were also painted and the window and door had timber strips fixed around them.
I finally got the lights to work in the stairway and tidied up a hole load of electrics. At some stage during the four weeks I fixed the roof as well. About half the ridge tiles had cracked for some reason. Did not have the opportunity to replace them but patched them up with mastic and will look to replace them as soon as possible. Patched up a couple of other cracked tiles at the same time.
Well all that was four weeks of really hard work with only about one day off.
Did not get everything done I hoped to but got quite a lot finished. Hope to be back in October when the next holiday starts, maybe I can get the last bedroom finished and the last bathroom started.
One of the most important jobs was the construction of both balconies, finishing the render to the rest of the outside walls and boxing out around all the windows and doors.
We arrived on Sunday night to find the place had been "tidied". Matt has been living in the chalet for the past 5 months whilst he works on Robs farm project and he has moved everything around. Everything has been moved into one of the unbuilt bedrooms downstairs. Feels a bit weird to have had everything rearranged without knowing about it.
Started on Monday with the shower room, figured out what bits I had after searching around and what bits I might need to finish the sink and toilet. I need to box everything in so several bits of chipboard are employed the holes. I find all the toilet bits so I can start by plumbing that in. I have to make up a reducer from 16 to 14 to 12 to 10 so I can connect the cistern up and turn the out let through 180 degrees to get it to flow properly but eventually its all working and water flows in, flushes and flows out. The sink is next which is easier as its all flexi pipes to the taps and a bit of drainage. So the shower the toilet and the sink all now work. I think I should leave it a couple of days to see what leaks so in the mean time I look at the huge amount of tiling that needs doing. Starting at the top of the house I disassemble the dalek do I can move it out of the way and take a look at the base. Found the signatures we signed when it was laid back in 2009!
Laid a few tiles and rebuilt the dalek:
Wednesday, the shower room needs a light and that is supposed to be from a cabinet on the wall like the other bathroom. This means breaking a channel and embedding cables for the cabinet. So get out the hammer drill and break a channel in the wall, dust and bits of concrete everywhere. Arrange the wires and make sure its all going to fit through up through the sink supports and up through the plasterboard wall out along the channel I have hacked out and up into the back if the cabinet to the lights. I also figured out the heater supports and that the light switch needs moving. In the evening I started to tile the top steps.
Thursday, was tiling day and I tiled more steps, and finished the hallway. I tiled the splash back of the kitchen
and began tiling the shower floor. This involved cutting round the curved shower base, cutting the floor tiles as close as possible with the tile cutter then trimming them down with an angle grinder. At this point it was about 6 in the evening and I was finishing up when the neighbours complained about the noise. I suppose they had a point but it could have been a whole lot worse! Anyway that kind of stopped my grinding and cutting tiles for the evening. Try to do something a bit quieter that evening and fix the bath plug which has popper out of alignment and needs completely taking apart to fix.
Decided that Monday was going to be rubbish tip day so we cleared out one of the downstairs bedrooms, moving all the wood and stuff that Matt had stacked in there into the front drive. We made five piles of stuff, wood, cardboard, metal, plastic and sweepings. Tidied the garage, moved loads of stuff outside for the tip. Took all the insulation of the garage walls (most of it had fallen off anyway)
Built shelves and generally cleaned up the garage and the bedroom. Laid the insulation down on the bedroom floor.
Monday: To the tip, loaded up the entire car and the largest trailer we could cadge from Matt, and went to the tip with all the rubbish. Dumped it.In the afternoon I began to prepare for building the balconies. The existing timber has been sat in the sun and rain for about 7 years and the varnish is looking pretty sad. I resolved to sand the timbers down and recoat them with varnish before building the new balconies on top of them. This turns out to be a major task. After sanding them down they need covering in preservative, luckily I have plenty left from when Matt tried to preserve the chalet. Then the timber needs varnish. Both balconies back and front need the treatment. Some time during this the timber for the balconies arrives from Vioron. I have chosen to make the balconies to my own design and the easiest way to do that was to simplify the order for Voiron. I figure I can make the entire balcony from planks and posts. The uprights are rough sawn timber so I set top work sanding down a few of the lengths. Takes an hour or so and makes a tonne of dust.
Borrowing Robs new chop saw (he broke mine, dropped a log on it and cracked the stand, so its only fair) I chop out some uprights and bolt them on to the balcony timbers with some rather large screws, (12mm diameter and 160mm long)
After the uprights I rip a plank into three thin battens and screw these to the uprights. The floor starts next and for this I am using decking. Planks of decking chopped up and screwed down onto the freshly varnished timbers. The top hand rail is to be made from two planks laminated together. So two 5m planks are glued and screwed together over night.
The next morning I have to use my favourite tool, the router. I bought it ages ago and havent had a good use for it before this but I have really wanted to have a go with it. I need to cut a slot in the top hand rail to slot the top of the planks into. I set the router up and cut the slot. It really cuts well and was really easy!
Now this laminated handrail can be fixed to the uprights and I can start with the planking.
Loads of planks later:
A bit of sanding
a bit of varnish
Now its time to start the other side!
Super Sue put nearly all the planks on and got very painful shoulders after doing up all the screws. I bought 1000 and had to buy more so I am calling it the thousand screw balcony. Super Sue then painted both balconies three times, once with preservative and twice with varnish
On a visit to Voiron's I found the mesh for the outside walls which made me much happier and I could finish the walls.
Wednesday, fixed the mesh over the remainder of the walls on the outside until I had run out of bolts to hammer in. Decided to box out the bedroom doors as the the walls were in full sun and rendering in the sun is hard work as it goes off really quick. So chopped up some wider planks I had got from Viorons and boxed out the doors.
Thursday, started rendering the outside.
When this was finished I could get on with boxing out the rest of the windows and doors.
During this hectic time of balconies, rendering and boxing out, we tiled the shower room and tiled the bathroom. We built a wall in the bedroom to fill the gap, plaster boarded the gap. Built a tongue and groove panelled wall to cover up the cables, rendered all the other walls of the bedroom with the textured paint. The walls were also painted and the window and door had timber strips fixed around them.
I finally got the lights to work in the stairway and tidied up a hole load of electrics. At some stage during the four weeks I fixed the roof as well. About half the ridge tiles had cracked for some reason. Did not have the opportunity to replace them but patched them up with mastic and will look to replace them as soon as possible. Patched up a couple of other cracked tiles at the same time.
Well all that was four weeks of really hard work with only about one day off.
Did not get everything done I hoped to but got quite a lot finished. Hope to be back in October when the next holiday starts, maybe I can get the last bedroom finished and the last bathroom started.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Back from the dead
Well its been a long time since I posted here, nearly 12 months! In that time we have moved from Switzerland back to the UK. We moved most of our stuff from Switzerland to either France or the UK. Moving it to France incurred the wrath of the French customs who made us pay to import it and initially at least tried to make us pay for importing the car as well, which we eventually resolved. We "imported" a load of stuff and paid the customs money to do it.
We have been back to the chalet quite a few times during this period and it has changed a bit. I have clad the outside in insulation and begun to plaster over it. This involved sticking insulation to the walls and then as this did not seem strong enough, nailing screws through a mesh, through the insulation and into the concrete
Then plastering over the mesh,
Between Rob and I we got about half the chalet covered in a couple of days and I intend to finish the rest as soon as the weather gets back above freezing. In the mean time the nieghbours get to view an orange chalet.
On another visit we had a huge tidy up upstairs and moved all the furniture from Zurich around to make the place a bit more habitable. My wife and kids wired up the TV, VCR and DVD player so we can watch movies while relaxing on the huge couch!
Railings have gone up overlooking the dining room to provide the impression of safety and the mezzanine will be railed across fairly soon to.
The oven has gone into the kitchen and its been wired up. The big hole that was, is no more and now contains an oven. The microwave works as well.
In the boys bedroom, I have finally finished the wooden paneling and while we were at it we did the floor as well!
This is probably the best room in the house now.
I pulled out the on suite shower and fixed the leak caused by last winters freeze, just in time for this winters freeze to destroy it again! We shall see. This time I was very careful about opening up all the taps and included the shower. I have also swapped the sinks from the shower room and the bathroom as the shower sink was too big for the space and the bathroom sink was a little small. It works a lot better now. Shower room sink is not yet plumbed in.
We ordered a couple of pallets of logs to ensure we had enough for our planned visit at Christmas
This is about half of them! there quite a lot of wood there! But I reckon we will burn a load of it during our stay. Rob has also dumped a couple of loads of timber cut out of his farm. All that is out side the garage doors. So I reckon we should have enough fire wood to keep us going for the next trip at least.
I have replaced the big radiator at the bottom of the stairs with one that actually works now and with all the doors closed to the empty unfinished bedrooms, the stairway does seem to get warmer. That said I think I will super insulate the garage wall and install another big radiator at the bottom of the stairs.
I have done some work on the electrics as well. I remounted the distribution box on a "fake" wall which should allow me to run all the cables behind it and tidy all that up.
This leaves the question of what I am going to do on this Christmas visit. Well, I am going snowboarding with the kids and maybe if there is time I will put that extra radiator in and maybe I will tile the steps between the lounge and the dinning room and if I do that, then perhaps I could finish tiling the entrance hall and could even get down to the next landing!
So lets hope I dont leave this blog quite so long next time and I will let you know how it went at Christmas.
We have been back to the chalet quite a few times during this period and it has changed a bit. I have clad the outside in insulation and begun to plaster over it. This involved sticking insulation to the walls and then as this did not seem strong enough, nailing screws through a mesh, through the insulation and into the concrete
Then plastering over the mesh,
On another visit we had a huge tidy up upstairs and moved all the furniture from Zurich around to make the place a bit more habitable. My wife and kids wired up the TV, VCR and DVD player so we can watch movies while relaxing on the huge couch!
Railings have gone up overlooking the dining room to provide the impression of safety and the mezzanine will be railed across fairly soon to.
The oven has gone into the kitchen and its been wired up. The big hole that was, is no more and now contains an oven. The microwave works as well.
In the boys bedroom, I have finally finished the wooden paneling and while we were at it we did the floor as well!
I pulled out the on suite shower and fixed the leak caused by last winters freeze, just in time for this winters freeze to destroy it again! We shall see. This time I was very careful about opening up all the taps and included the shower. I have also swapped the sinks from the shower room and the bathroom as the shower sink was too big for the space and the bathroom sink was a little small. It works a lot better now. Shower room sink is not yet plumbed in.
We ordered a couple of pallets of logs to ensure we had enough for our planned visit at Christmas
This is about half of them! there quite a lot of wood there! But I reckon we will burn a load of it during our stay. Rob has also dumped a couple of loads of timber cut out of his farm. All that is out side the garage doors. So I reckon we should have enough fire wood to keep us going for the next trip at least.
I have replaced the big radiator at the bottom of the stairs with one that actually works now and with all the doors closed to the empty unfinished bedrooms, the stairway does seem to get warmer. That said I think I will super insulate the garage wall and install another big radiator at the bottom of the stairs.
I have done some work on the electrics as well. I remounted the distribution box on a "fake" wall which should allow me to run all the cables behind it and tidy all that up.
This leaves the question of what I am going to do on this Christmas visit. Well, I am going snowboarding with the kids and maybe if there is time I will put that extra radiator in and maybe I will tile the steps between the lounge and the dinning room and if I do that, then perhaps I could finish tiling the entrance hall and could even get down to the next landing!
So lets hope I dont leave this blog quite so long next time and I will let you know how it went at Christmas.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Money money money
Somebody asked recently how much it had all cost and I realized that I had not actually really worked it out properly. Sounds weird, but I know it will be too much! I know how much the loans are costing and how I have spent on them but I have not broken it all down.
We bought the land, about 1338 square meters, for two 4 bedroom chalets for 530,000 French francs (before the change to Euros) My half was 26,000 pounds. A small unforeseen cost involved here was the Notary's fee. This is the "solicitor" who does all the legal stuff. He cost 45000 FF or about 4500 pounds. We financed this on loans and overdrafts from the UK. Then I had to pay for actually building the chalet. This was financed through a French mortgage. In fact this was relatively simple once we had solved some issues about the land ownership.
As we had bought the land jointly with a friend and his wife, in order to get a mortgage we had to formally split the land in half, this cost us about 11000 euros to the notaire! (Some percentage of the price of the land) Then the mortgage could be arranged (through the notaire), 210000 euro mortgage cost us 3079 euros to arrange. Then there was a problem with the neighbor and his access that cost another couple of grand to the notaire to sort out. OK so I have now spent £26000 for the land + £19000 in Notiares fees (!!!)
The mortgage amount was based on the architects rough estimate of 292500 euros based on the habitable area of the house (136.33 m2) I was allowed to borrow 70% of this.
The concrete work has cost me 102500 euros. The woodwork cost me 134000.The Architect has charged my about 14000 for his services.
All that comes to 250500 Euros and that is only the external shell no finish inside at all, no electrics, no plumbing nothing extra but walls, floors and roof.
This is obviously more than my mortgage so I had to arrange a top up loan of 50000 Euros (notaire cost something like 3000 E)
I am now reaching the end of my 50000 and as I used it to pay the balance of the construction and the architects fees an a bit of tax I have come up short. I guess I will need about another 10000 Euros to finish the place.
So all in all it will have cost about 320000 euros, about 30000 more than estimated (I think most of that went to the Notaire!)
Monday, November 16, 2009
Flooring the Salon
I wanted to get the floor in the salon laid but I knew it was a two person job. My wife volunteered and insisted although I told her it would be cold. Never the less she insisted and so we all found ourselves driving down to Morzine on Friday evening.
We bundled the kids into bed as soon as we got there (at about midnight) we followed pretty soon after and we awoke on Saturday after a not too cold night.
First things first we had to clear the remaining stuff off the salon floor. Then the kids set about trying to find the squeaks. Jumping about in the floor trying to hear when the insulation squeaks. Then my 10 year old would drill down through the floor and into the concrete, hammer a bolt in and tighten it up.
The I could come along and finish tightening the bolt and grind it off so it would not interfere with the flooring.
When the floor was pronounced squeak less by the children we set about sweeping up and giving the floor a final Hoover before laying out the foam backing for the underfloor heating.
Ontop of that went the 12 sections of heating mat, each with two cables that all have to come back to the distribution box and be wired up to the thermostat.
Loads and loads and loads of flooring! We started laying the floor at about 11 in the morning and we finally completed the floor at about 1 in the morning, 14 hours later.
We were both exhausted.
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