Running a Gite in Brittany

Trip to Disneyland, Paris

The family all came over to France for Christmas this year and we had a really good time. One of the advantages of having gites is that there was no shortage of accomodation for everybody.

We drove down on the 27th Dec and it cost about 60€ in fuel and 49€ in tolls. It took just over 4 hours each way from Dinan to Disneyland Resort Paris. We used the Michelin route planner but I think if we did the trip again we would circle Paris using a more outer ring road rather than go closer to the center. We had to make quite a few road changes etc. on what was a very busy and complicated road system. I would guess that there is a greater potential for hold-ups closer to Paris.

Whilst we where at Disneyland we stayed in the My Travel Explorers hotel just on the outskirts of the resort. The hotel was fine, it was clean and tidy, it had a swimming pool and a play area for the kids and a shuttle bus to ferry us from the hotel to the Parcs every 15 mins. It was only a 5 minute trip on the bus.

There are dozens of web sites about Disneyland describing everything from 'It's a small world' with lyrics to the different types of candy floss available. From our point of view we tended to make comparisons with Disneyland, Florida (which we visited about 10 years ago before kids) and Disneyland, Paris (with a 6 and 4 year old). We had a great time at both, but Paris is definitely colder, wetter (it snowed one morning!) and much busier and not quite as manicured as Florida. It may be a function of fading memory and lower parc occupancy, but we thought that 'queue mangement' was better in Florida. Queues seemed to flow better and they had TV's and 'pre-shows' in the queue to take your mind off the delay.

Would we go again ? Yes, BUT, in low season. According to a Disneyland employee we spoke to, it was busier during our stay (27th Dec - 30th Dec) than during the Summer holidays. The previous week (the week before Christmas day), the park was much quieter.

For a few Disneyland tips see here, here and here and this well orchestrated amusing queue avoidance scheme.

|   3:47:56 PM   Trip to Disneyland, Paris   

Disneyland Resort Paris

Just got back from 4 days, 3 nights at Disneyland Resort, Paris.

A bit cold and wet at times, a little snow, but a fun time had by all. Full report to follow.

I just hope I can get the 'It's a small world' tune out of my head !!!! Arggg.

|   10:01:16 PM   Disneyland Resort Paris   

It's snowing

It's 0.5^oC outside and snowing heavily. The kids are running around outside. It's not meant to snow here. It's only snowed twice in the last 17 years, and the previous time was in Feburary this year.

Snow on Christmas Day is normally quite rare in the UK, and in this part of France, and is a common seasonal gamble, like a flutter on The Grand National, for many people.

|   7:32:33 PM   It's snowing   

Lucarnes roofed

Our roofers arrived a week early, which I'm very pleased about. They have been at it for a couple days and finished both the lucarnes now except the ridge tiles. Each slate tile is attached to the battens with a stainless steel 'double' hook. One end hooks over the batten and the other end clips under the bottom edge of the tile. All the gullies and rain channels are done in zinc flashing, same as the guttering and down pipes. Everything gets soldered up on site to fit.

They are currently tiling the new kitchen roof. It should be much simpler as it's just are large flat area.

|   1:24:51 PM   Lucarnes roofed   

Ian and I built an almost identical set of stud walling today in the other gite. Each gite is an almost mirror image of each other, so every job we do in one has to be mirrored in the other. This time we learnt our lesson and moved the scaffolding before building the walls around it.

The scaffolding remined me of the DIY horror story involving expanding foam and a canoe.

|   8:55:15 PM      

Broadbanded

After ordering ADSL the WiFi box arrived today, after 5 days. Plugged it in this evening and bingo, it works a treat. I'm dead chuffed. I no longer have to read fast thinking about the cost, or get irritated by interruptions. Brilliant. Setup was dead easy (Laptop on WiFi and USB for the desktop PC).

|   8:42:45 PM   Broadbanded   

Rooms are starting to appear

Sometimes I wish I was left-handed. Left handed people apparently better at spacial visualisation, i.e. imaging things in 3-D. Having a set of plans is all very well but trying to image the turning, twisting space under an invisible staircase in which to build walls for a toilet and washroom is very difficult.

Ian and I spent most of the morning scratching our heads figuring out heights and angles etc, so we could put a toilet and washroom in the space under the stairs. As a secondary element we also wanted to provide some extra structural support for the beams under the upstairs bathroom. A full bath of water weighs quite a lot. The result was quite a feat of over-engineering. The front stud wall perpendicular to the overhead beams is made from the wood normally used for floor joists with the side walls a more normal metal studwork. The metal studding is much mush easier to work with than wood, but we needed the additional strength in compression for the extra high ceilings.

I learnt a couple of useful tips today. The first from Ian on using nails and rawplugs in the concrete floor as a fixing and secondly, to move the scaffolding to the outside of the room before constructing the room around it ! We did realise just in time and managed to squeeze the scaffolding out of the room without having to dismantle it first.

 

|   8:48:08 PM   Rooms are starting to appear   

Shuttering removed

Removed the shuttering to reveal my magnificent concrete pillar. A thing of beauty. Well they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I very pleased with it, especially considering it's a first attempt.

|   8:46:23 PM   Shuttering removed   

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | French deal with storm aftermath

Le Monde.fr : La tempête a fait au moins sept morts

Looks like we got off lightly from the storm with just a few fence panels and a couple of ridge tiles.

|   8:17:12 PM      

ADSL ordered

On the good news front, Caroline has ordered ADSL from France Telecom. Our modem/WiFi router (Live box) arrives in the next few days, enabling the line will take about a week.

I'm quite excited about the extra speed and being able to surf without tying up the phone line.

|   8:21:12 PM   ADSL ordered   

Concrete boots

At the front of the two gites I was going to put a 60cm wide oak post to separate the two windows. After the macons left I changed my mind and decided a cast concrete post covered in the same render as the breeze blocks would look nicer and be easier :-) The pictures are self-explanatory, clamp on shuttering, insert wire reinforcement, fill with concrete nailing extra boards on the way up.

The morning started fairly windy when my friend Ian and I knocked up the shuttering with scrap wood and French masonry clamps. Ian took charge of the concrete mixer and I started shovelling it in, nailing additional boards as it filled up. By this time the wind has really picked up and was blowing a 'gale'. Just as I was adding a second barrow load of concrete one of the boards started to work loose oozing concrete. I hadn't banged the nails fully home so I could remove them more easily later and the weight was pulling them out. Just then BANG. One of the ridge tiles blew off the roof of another gite. It landed between Ian and I.

Change of priority. Saving the roof was more important than concrete on my boots. We could see a second ridge tile lifting in the wind and was worried the wind would get under the slates and rip the roof off. We filled an old fertiliser sack with sand and I planned to climb up onto the ridge and straddle the 'sand bag' across the loose tiles to prevent further damage. Fortunately my ladders were too short and so we decided to call a roofer. It was very windy and would have been fairly dangerous. It also meant we could get back to the concreting. With luck on our side the wind didn't cause anymore damage to the roof, it just blew a fence panel out and snapped one of the fence posts round the back of the house !

The rest of the operation went without further incident apart from a bit of dust blowing in our eyes, horizontal rain and leaves in the concrete. You can see by the mess I managed to rescue the shuttering and use extra nail and clamps to keep everything together.

|   8:19:47 PM   Concrete boots   

ADSL has arrived.

As of today we now have an ADSL enabled exchange. According to http://www.degrouptest.com/ we might only be able to get 512K as we are at the extremities of the exchange. But hey, it's still 10times faster and I can use the telephone at the same time.

Caroline is going to phone France Telecom tomorrow about ordering our ADSL line and a modem/router via Wanadoo. I might even go WiFi and give the kids the old PC for games/surfing.

Even though I was in IT just a couple of years ago I'm already feeling old and perflexed by this new technology. Does my phone plug into the ADSL modem ? What happens on 'change-over' day ? What about wireless security ? Whoa, get the pipe and slippers out.

|   8:00:15 PM   ADSL has arrived.   

Floor laid

Caroline and I picked up 8 windows and 1 side door from Lapeyre today in my now trusty van. Thats all the windows and doors for the gites except the two front doors. They didn't have a suitable size and style so we have had to get them made specially from a local firm. Ian and I laid most of the 'chipboard' yesterday to level off the existing floor. We couldn't finish the job because the roofer has been delayed for a week meaning the roof is not watertight. Any ingress of rain would ruin the new floor. He did come today to put extra sheeting over the roof to help protect the floor. It's going to delay things a bit as I'm reluctant to do too much work upstairs in case it gets spoilt. The floor is my datum for ceiling height, wall positions etc. |   7:51:50 PM   Floor laid   

Rustic charm

Cold, wet and tired. I've just finished pressure washing the beams and underside of the floorboards. It's been about 2^oC all day and I've been rained on by cold wet dirty water all afternoon. Yuk. Making a gite with character is much harder than just plasterboarding everything. |   7:45:10 PM   Rustic charm   

Water meter moved

The water board have been and gone whilst we where at lunch leaving us with a new green inspection trap containing our old water meter. The meter is now outside the gites which will be much more convenient for everyone. Making the connection our side of the meter was painless. Everything up until it gets inside the house is 25mm flexible plastic tubing with simple 'O' ring type screw on fittings.

|   3:17:44 PM   Water meter moved   

Holes for staircases

My friend Ian and I have been cutting beams upstairs in the new gites to create holes for the new staircases. Each gite needs a hole approx 2m by 2m in the corner to accomodate the staircase. Each staircase has two quarter turns to make the rise shallow because of the high (3.5m) ceiling height. A few acro props, a chainsaw, and some very big nails (hand made 14mm dia. nails !) and job done. Unfortunately the longditudinal beams we removed were not quite long enough to be used as a cross brace back into the wall, so I had to buy two new 2.5m long oak beams (40cm was sunk into the wall). Amazingly they were only 32€ (£20) each.

The water board arrived this afternoon to move the water meter. After our digger driver nearly flooded us out, we decided to move the meter etc. to a position just outside the gites. It took them all afternoon to find the buried supply pipe and then discover the stopcock in the road was broken. Not being able to switch off the water was obviously a minor problem that stopped all work. Back on Monday to fix the main stopcock first.

|   8:49:19 PM   Holes for staircases   

Sandblasting

Spent the day sandblasting some of the internal stone walls in the two new gites yesterday. I hired a sandblaster and compressor from Loxam in Dinan along with 20 bags of abrasive sand. The plan was to clean up the walls surrounding the two staircases along with smaller portions of stonework on an opposite wall. Depending on how much sand was left I was also going to clean up the exposed beams.

I picked up the compressor and sandblaster at 8 'o'clock in the morning (that's the earliest I think I've started work for about a year) from Dinan. I'd picked up the sand in the van the previous day (700 kg) and had to use the car for the compressor because it's the only vehicle with a towbar, even then they changed the towbar on the car to a different style to accomodate the compressor/trailer. Heavy duty ?

As a side issue, I believe you have to register trailers/caravans over 500 kg separately. I.e. with it's own number plate. The compressor was registered on a 92 plate (Paris) whereas our car is on a 22 plate (Cotes'D'Armor). If you move house you need to get a new number plate that reflects the new department number, if applicable.

The whole sandblasting process is very noisy and very hard work. The compressor is thumping away outside, there are various hissing noises from the sableuse (red drum sandblasting machine), several valves and dials to fiddle about with to get the pressure and sand flow rate right, plus several hefty bits of tube to lug about. On top of all that you need to wear a helmet (reminiscent of an old deep-sea diving helmet) with it's own air supply. I suspect the air supply in the helmet creates a positive pressure to prevent dust and muck getting inside. There is alot of dust. Within seconds it's almost impossible to see anything. The dirt and sand is thrown everywhere, much of it back into your face, and as I found out later, into your boots.

Every couple of bags or so (each bag does about 2 to 3 m²) you need to change the disposible plastic visor. It gets all pitted and very dirty with the spray back.

Life is not that easy for any helper you have. It's impossible for anyone else to stand in the same room, neither of you can see each other let alone communicate via voice, especially with the helmet on. It's possible with a series of bizzare hand signals and gestures you could save time, but in the end I just left the room after each bag load, removed my helmet and took a breather whilst the sableuse was refilled.

It was a very tough days work, but worth it. The stonework has come up really well and is ready for pointing. I didn't do the beams, partly because of the cost of another days hire, more sand would be needed and I was dead on my feet. I did test a small patch on one of the beams with a pressure washer and it worked fine. The beams only have a white lime wash/paint covering whereas the stones have much more stubborn dirt.

By the time I'd returned the equipment to Loxam I was completely done in, and tucked up in bed by 8 'o'clock.

|   7:59:29 PM   Sandblasting   

Christmas is coming

The Christmas decorations in Dinan, Lanvalley and Tressaint went up this weekend and I noticed tonight that the lights have been switched on. It's all starting to look very Christmassy. It's a little surprising in a strange way because The State and Religion are kept very very separate. Remember the furore about religious symbols in French schools. However The State (L'État) has a huge hand in funding each of the communes that display religious symbolism.

Driving around I've seen masses of mistletoe (Le Gui) growing in poplar, oak and apple trees. I always thought it just grew in apple trees, but obviously that's another old wives tale brought into disrepute. From my experience it seems the French don't have the custom of kissing under the mistletoe and it's just left to grow in the trees, but it says otherwise here. In the UK it would be quite a gold mine as a small sprig sells for several pounds at this time of year. Maybe I should bag it up and take a trip back to England.

|   7:20:20 PM   Christmas is coming   

Rafters in progress

The charpentiers, carpenters, arrived today to put the roof rafters on the new kitchen and each of the lucarnes. By the end of the day they had finished one window and the kitchen, so I expect them to finish tomorrow. We also had a chap come to measure up for two staircases. When he measured he just measured up from a blue line that runs horizontally around the inside of the building. Caroline idly reminded him to take into account of the floor thickness (screed, tiles etc.) and he (like everyone else except us) knew that the blue line (drawn on day 1 by the macons) was exactly 1m above the finished floor height. It's the datum everybody works to.

I've been shopping. I've ordered 110 m2 of OSB3 (chipboard) for the flooring upstairs. It's going over the old oak planks to level everything up and cover some of the damage etc. Booked in the sandblasting machine for next Tuesday. We are going to leave alot of the old oak beams exposed and some of the stonework, so it needs a good clean. Bought mountains of metal studwork ready for the ceilings and stud walls upstairs when the floor is laid. I've used it before and think it's much much better than timber (cheaper, straight, no twists, consistent, no woodworm, ... ). Caroline has been out getting best price quotes for plasterboard, etc. When you are ordering large quantities of stuff (e.g. 300 sheets of plasterboard), a saving of just 1€ makes a difference. The shopping aspect seems to take more time and effort than the actual work, especially when it's in a foreign language and it's first time you've every bought the item, so there is alot to learn about.

|   7:55:39 PM   Rafters in progress   

Macons finished

A slight delay posting because our computer failed. The maçons left on Tuesday morning after pouring the concrete floor for the new kitchen. That's the new breeze block part on the left hand side. The rest is up to us, apart from the carpenter and roofer for the two new lucarnes. The breeze block parts will have a cream coloured enduit (lime based render) applied once the windows are fitted. It's a very typical finish on the exterior of French houses. The gites look a bit grey at the moment but once the windows and doors are fitted, Caroline finishes the pointing, the enduit is applied and a few wall plants grow it will look very different.

Caroline and I went to Rennes on Tuesday morning whilst the maçons finished up to order the new windows and doors. In France all the windows open inwards, unlike in the UK where they open outwards. In France it is much easier to clean or paint any windows because you have easy access to the outside without climbing up a ladder. You do lose your window sill as a storage item, but I think it's a small price to pay. Consequently the windows and doors are fitted differently. They are just mastic'ed and screwed to the inside of the wall rather than between the walls. It gives you a bit of room to manoeuvre.

|   8:25:24 PM   Macons finished   

We had a frustrating Tuesday/Wednesday because the PC packed up. Windows 2000 started OK but took about 5 minutes displaying the 'Windows is starting..." dialog, then 10 minutes displaying 'Preparing network connections...", etc. After about 30 minutes we tried to log on but it displayed the message "The system cannot log you on now because the domain <pc name> is not available". Which is very weird cos it's a standalone PC and has never been in a domain. It also did it in Safe Mode! Microsoft article Q244671 had a fix for the problem, (corrupted 128bit encryption files) but it didn't work. A search on Google showed that quite a few other people had exactly the same problem without a fix.

In the end I had to install Windows again in a separate directory so I could copy all my data from the NTFS volume. I then restored an image backup of the whole system disk I took about a month ago using Norton Ghost zapping the disk, and then copied back my data. A real pain.

Firstly Windows shouldn't fail this easily. I've installed nothing in the last month or fiddled about. It just died.

Secondly, why is my data scattered all over the hard drive. It makes performing backups very difficult and time consuming.

When I was in IT we used to recommend that people not only took regular backups, but also regularly tested the restoration procedures. I take (regular?) backups, but have to admit this is the first time I've tested the restoration procedure. Fortunately it worked.

Note to myself - more backups.

|   8:22:08 PM