The Bathroom DIY Project

This is our notional bathroom in the corner of the bedroom. Being a lot shyer than the last occupant of the house we rather fancied walls around the bathroom. Hot water and a shower will also come in handy we feel, if only to wash off the bitey things that live in the grass.

We have debated whether to have a bath but decided we would rather make our DIY bathroom just big enough for a shower as we prefer to have the space elsewhere plus it is likely to save on water bills.

Something that every DIY shop seems to sell is reasonably affordable (250 euros upwards) shower cabinets where everything is included (cabine intagrale) and you only need to plumb in the hot & cold water and waste. We plan to install the shower then build the metal stud wall around the bathroom hoping  that makes things much easier.

DIY  books for bathrooms below if you need a bit of inspiration or technical guidance.

Another thing that is different is the hot water heaters (chauffe-eau). These are plumbed straight into the mains supply and run at mains pressure the other thing that is different about them is that they tend to be at the wattage of a kettle rather than 3 kilowatts like a UK immersion heater so take longer to warm the water up but draw less power while doing it. We don't know whether this is an advantage or disadvantage.....more on plumbing in France

The Attic conversion

Can you picture the double bedroom?

Well one day. We've already cleared out the junk which included several feather mattresses. Lawrence managed to squeeze them through the attic window unfortunately one burst. It's amazing how many feathers are in a feather mattress it was like White Christmas on our road!

It's coming along now with a new skylight and new windows. Next job insulation.

The DIY Floor

Martin really likes this picture of him working which is why we made it small. To make up for it here's one that gives some idea of just how much the floor was starting to tilt. Martin and Lawrence, in a week of hard graft, managed to break up the concrete floor and re-lay the lovely new wood one. We also gained a foot in ceiling height....more on laying a wood floor

This is a collection of DIY flooring books below for those that need them.

I have seen some disasters when it comes to laying floors like no room left at end of floorboards for expansion etc

so if your not sure how to lay check these DIY books out.

A Kitchen

Actually this is the kitchen, living room and dining room which we will be squeezing into 25m². In this we're being quite traditionally French as our new DIY kitchen and dining table will be the centre of the home.

Reminds me of my aunties in the olden days when we used to get back from school and congregate in the back room next to the Yorkshire range to eat jam sandwiches at the kitchen table. update

The front room was never used just sat there pristine with the china cabinet and mantelshelf dusted every week.

Pristine is not a word you can use to describe anywhere we've lived so don't forget to wipe your feet on the way out

Kitchen DIY books below if you need inspiration, or guidance with a big kitchen DIY project.

The Floor Continued. It was obvious from the start that this floor had a problem.

From our excavations we surmise that the original floor was pretty much like the new one we just put down but at some time many years ago a person who probably looked very much like a builder arrived on the scene. Whoever it was they put a steel girder under the old wooden beams , holding the floor boards up. And covered the old floorboards with stones then filled in with concrete to a depth of 12 inches.

What happened next? The wood rots and the floor starts to sit down on the steel girder which is much lower. But just in the middle. Hence the rollercoaster ride. Now the last occupant of the house tried to stop this by standing in the cellar and ramming fresh pieces of timber in the gaps. I am no urban stuntman, and the thought of standing under a floor weighing in at many tons ramming wood in to support it did not appeal at all. So Martin and I hired a car ,well a van to be precise which was waiting for us at Belegarde airport when we landed. We began by  clearing the room and removed the fire place base which extended out from the chimney breast onto the floor.

   Using a sledge hammer and pick dug a hole down through the concrete.

We quickly found the best technique was to break the surface then sap away under the harder skimmed surface and then hit the edge again. In just over a day we had the floor broken through into the cellar. It was time to inspect the beams. About half a dozen, definitely rotten looked expensive. But luck was on our side when we looked in the barn on the of chance.  We found seven oak beams which we cut to length, a good start from a self sufficiency perspective.

Although on the subject of good luck we did nearly burn the house down. Take my advice don't set up a halogen lamp hanging from an oak beam, forget about it and then disappear for lunch. We came back just in time to find it smoking. Talk about panic, you see we had turned the water off to knock the floor through because the meter and pipes are located in the cellar, and the hose pipe was buried in the rubble. And an old door which we lent up against the meter to deflect falling rubble had its base buried. I have not got a picture of me and Martin on our our knees digging for the hose pipe wondering how we are going to explain to Karen that everything was going well until we burnt the house down.

Anyway we got the good beams cleaned up with a shave-spoke. Every beam in the floor had some woodworm teeth marks in them as they had not been treated in probably ten years. The bad ones we cut through and replaced. At the DIY store Mr Bricolage in the Zone Industrial in Limoges there is a drive through section at the other side of the car park where you can drive in and load bags of "concrit" as they call it straight into the van and pay at a barrier kiosk on the way out. We remembered a top tip from Bob the Limousin builder, we bought "Rapide" a mix to put in the compo to help it set quicker. We used this to fix the new beams into the wall recesses. The very next day it was set hard and enabled us to start getting the floorboards down, but first I sprayed the beams with xylophene a wood treatment for woodworm and other nasties that try to consume your home in this region. In particular we sprayed the tops which would be covered by the floorboards and we sprayed till it puddled  on top for a dam good soaking.

Now none of the remaining beams or in fact the ones we put in were cut too precisely and to keep the floorboards even and level we had to use large amounts of hardwood packing. One DIY job down just a hundred DIY jobs to go.

TOP TIP!!!
If you're not in a rush wait until the materials you need are on promotion in the DIY stores.

If you are doing a lot of work on your house it's well worth while getting the loyalty cards offered by the DIY stores. Those rewards will mount up