The house is finished and ready to rent! We already have 6 weeks worth of bookings so far, which is very exciting for our first year. Tom has been back to the house a few times to meet with Sawdays and Gite de France to discuss our ratings and advertising.
We have also added a balustrade to the terrace. We felt that the drop was just a little too high. Tom designed it to match the house and we found a great local guy called Chris to build it for us. Despite this not being something we wanted but realised that we needed, we feel that it has turned out really well and Chris did a great job.
The new balustrade
As you can see from the image above the grass is doing nicely. It still has a little bit of growing to do and we need to tidy up the posts that can be seen, but there will definitely be a useable garden space in time for our first guests. There is also still some planting to do and I think at the front of the house we will go with lavender. The purple of the lavender and the cream of the stone will always be a winning combination! We had the trees at the front of the house pollarded. Whenn they grow back they will have a much thicker look and give the house some more privacy from the road.
The front of the house
Chris also did a lot of the snagging works inside the house. We know have wardrobes in all the rooms and the architraves and skirting have been finished. It is amazing what a difference these little touches make to the house.
We will be back in the Summer and I for one can’t wait. It will be almost a year since I was last there and so much has changed. If you are interested in renting the house, please visit our website where there are a lot more photos and information about the house.
Tom explains the design of the house (in French!).
Although we didn’t want to Il ne faut pas vendre la peau de L’Ours avant de l’avoir tué we were quite hopeful of success when we saw that our house had been used as the main image for the marketing of Prix Regional Construction Bois. As luck would have it, we won first prize in the Maison Individuelle category! Tom had to go to Niort to pick up the award and then give a speech in French to the other winners, runners up and judges! He said that everyone was very complementary about the house and the design.
All the winners
As winners of the Poitous Charente regional award we are automatically entered in to the national awards. There is no date for when these will be, but we will probably be up against houses in Provence and Cote d’azur! But hey, I’m not to sat that this will happen quand les poules auront des dents – because you never know.
Présentation des projets du Prix Régional Construction bois 2015
We have written about the organisation Futurobois a few times on this blog. It was recommended to us but the regional Architect that we contact them to talk about our build. The Architect also thought that they could help with suggesting a builder who could build to the specifications that Tom has designed. For those that don’t know Futurobois is an inter-professional association of timber companies in the Poitou-Charentes region, including all firms, from logging, to architects, to sawmills, coopers and carpenters. They also assist professionals in the responsible and sustainable development of their business, through collective or individual actions.
The also happen to hold a Regional Wood Awards which celebrates buildings made of timber that have been built over the last year. Now in its 11th Year, the event, ‘Building with wood;’ is being held on 29th January 2016 in Niort. Tom and our builders Marandat entered the competition, but are yet to hear if they’ve been short listed. However, the programme for the day has been released and we are chuffed to see that Tom’s building has been used on the front cover! Even if the house is not short listed, this is great advertising, everyone who attends the conference will see his design and you can’t get much better than that!
Here we are in France, 3 weeks of putting the (hopefully) finishing touches to the house. So much had happened since I last the house that I was very excited to see it. The week before we were there, my sister and her family stayed for a week. They had to do a bit of indoor camping because unfortunately the kitchen hadn’t been fitted in time for their arrival. I hope they still enjoyed themselves though – at least they were able to have a hot shower! Sadly for them, the kitchen started to go in just as they were about to leave and was ready to use by the time that we arrived. The kitchen may be have been delayed, but it is well worth the wait. It is much nicer than the kitchen we have at home and is great fun to use. We were lucky to find our kitchen fitter because he was able to help out with a lot of the other jobs that we needed to do. There was no way that we would have been able to work on the flooring, skirting, wall cladding and other bits and bobs if he hadn’t helped us out. We are very grateful to Matt for all his hard work.
Setting out for shelving
The shelving is up!
Always check your IKEA bits
Helping with the flat pack
Helping with the flat pack
Checking the screws are tight enough!
During our first week, Tom spent a lot of time fixing lighting in the rooms. It is all well and good having a shower or going to the loo with the door open when it is just the two of you, but when there are a lot of builders around, it is a good idea to have the door shut! My DIY skills amount to painting and fixing towel rails and it was a little too early for that, so I was on Supermarket runs and Lego building with Molly. Neither of these things are particular hardships, although letting me loose in a French supermarket may not necessarily be the best idea.
I was able to help Tom with the storage for the living area. He had worked this all out very precisely on IKEAs design page which then kindly gave him a list of all the bits he needed. All of this was included on his mammoth ‘three trolley’ trip to Bordeaux IKEA, but something went wrong and a few bits were missing and a few bits were left over (a door rather than the vital screw we had forgotten to use). Off we popped to IKEA once again, but got round in record time and didn’t even stop for meatballs.
We also went to the Mairie to talk about bins and rubbish collections. I know that even though the translation of Mairie is Mayor, he isn’t the same as our Mayor in Lewisham, I still found it funny that we had to talk to him about our bins when at home residents have to ring a big call centre in a Council building somewhere. I work in the same office as the people whose role includes dealing with problems of missed collections and missing bins and I know that they like me would find it amusing. I can never imagine a situation where Tom and I would walk in to Lewisham’s Town Council Chambers to talk to the Mayor about getting a bin.
Dining room lighting
Lighting went up via scaffolding
Lighting went up via scaffolding
Dining room lighting from scaffolding
Living room lighting from scaffolding
Living room lighting from scaffolding
We have just started the second week and things have moved on massively. It was a flurry of excitement and activity here on Monday (yesterday). Thromas – our plumbers and electricians – came to install shower screens, heated towel rails and some of the lighting. This was the lighting that needed scaffolding to install so Tom wasn’t able to do it. It is amazing what a bit of lighting can do to a room. With these major jobs done there would be a lot less dust being created. This meant we could put furniture together and remove plastic coverings from the windows – the later of these activities certainly made the place feel a little less like a building site. Flapping plastic in never a good look. With the furniture in place we were finally one the way to having a home.
Lighting and furniture
Breakfast in the ‘dining room’
On Thursday, Fred (French Fred), the man doing our earthworks is starting. Hopefully, by the middle of next week we will have a driveway, footpath and some useable garden at the back of the house. This will make a huge difference to the look of the house. Removing plastic from the windows does help stopping the place look like a building site, but the piles of earth and stone all over the place do nothing for the look of the house.
I’m off to do some more cleaning now, we’ve got guests coming in a couple of days, so we need to get things a little more tidy – I think you put up with a lot more when you’ve been living with it for a while. I’ll report back soon on our progress…., but it really is all coming together….!
The wall is complete, and doesn’t it look great! We are so pleased with how it looks, and I think our mason, Stuart is rather proud of himself as well. All it needs now is a bit of lavender, landscaping and lighting and it will be perfect. When the sun is shining on it, that creamy stone is going to look fantastic. It really has been a labour of love for Stuart and you can see that in the details around the doors and windows.
Wall and timber cladding
Window detail
Door and window
I think that the stone wall really adds something to Tom’s design and while I think that if we had clad the whole building in timber it would have also looked great, this wall adds a whole new dimension.
The wall and timber cladding
The wall also extends to the pergola, which will make the area in to a really lovely, warm and sunny spot. I can’t wait to get over there an see it. I am also not sure we’ll be able to resist sitting on the pergola with something cold and delicious – even if we are surrounded by building equipment.
Working on the wall
Working on the wall
The pergola from the north
Hello Faron Young! (I tried very hard to find something other than Pink Floyd, and I manged, just)
At the end of February we had an air tightness test. Achieving a good level of air tightness is important for the energy efficiency of the building. The benefits of improved insulation and more energy efficient heating systems such as the ones was have installed would be lost if warm air leaked out of the building and cold air leaked in. Too much air leakage can lead to unnecessary heat loss and possible discomfort, which anyone in the house would feel as draughts. To carry out this test, the company arrived and fitted a temporary airtight screen to our front door. They then mounted a big fan to the screen which blew air in to and out of our house so that they could create a pressure difference between the inside and outside of 50 Pascals. To pass an air leakage test in England and Wales, a home must achieve an air permeability result of 10 m3/(h.m2). By the end of our build we will hope to achieve 0.6 m3/(h.m2) which is far in excess of UK building regulations and is almost Passivhaus standard which is 0.2 m3/(h.m2.). At the end of this interim test we would not expect to achieve our desired result, but doing a test at this stage would allow us to seal up any major leakages through the construction. It was all quite exciting on the day and as we waited for the results. The results came in and….we achieved 0.8 m3/(h.m2). I think this far exceeded what Tom expected to achieve at this stage, so he was very pleased that when they ran the test again they attained the same results!
The scaffolding is down and the pergola is on its way to being finished – it has been a busy week on site! The building is beginning to look like the original concept sketches that Tom did almost a year ago.
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We only have a week left in France before we head back to the UK. There are still a few things that we need to sort before we go because we will not be back until Easter. It is hard to choose tiles and flooring when you are not around to see them in the shop. Still, this as finally been decided as has our hedging, decking and walling!
We have an air tightness test booked for next week as well. Achieving a good level of air tightness is important for the energy efficiency of the building. The benefits of improved insulation and more energy efficient heating systems are lost if warm air can leak out of the building and cold air can leak in. Too much air leakage can lead to unnecessary heat loss and possible discomfort in the house which you would feel as draughts. The test involves regulating air pressure inside the house. They do this by fitting a temporary airtight screen to our front door. They then mount a big fan to the screen which blows air in to and out of our house so that they can create a pressure difference between the inside and outside of 50 Pascals. There is then some more complicated maths to do. To pass an air leakage test in England and Wales, a home must achieve an air permeability result of 10 m3/(h.m2). We hoped to achieve 3 m3/(h.m2)! We’ll let you know how it goes.
The last couple of weeks in the Charente have been glorious, this has meant that our carpenters have been able to make a good start to the timber cladding on our house. The whole building, including the roof is going to be clad in Douglas fir. When we were first discussing the cladding with Marandat, we had the choice of using Larch or Douglas Fir. Initially the Larch cladding does look a little less bright, but as soon as the start to go grey the two woods will look the same. We therefore decided on Douglas Fir because it was cheaper, but just as good.
Tom designed the timber façade to be open jointed rather than tongue and grove to give the impression of depth, this meant that the setting out of the cladding took a lot of working out and a bit of complicated maths! Tom and Claude from Marandat eventually agreed on spacing the battens 15mm apart. To ensure the timber battens were equally spaced to the nearest 15mm each section of the building had to be measured and then divided by the spacing, while taking in to account the width of the battens. Hopefully, once the cladding has finished, nobody will notice if the spacing is a few hundredths of a mm out in some places!
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What you see in these photos is not the finished product, the edges will be neatened up to be the same length and then the ends will be covered with flashing. The south and west sides that have been put up have already started to lose their slightly pinkish colour. This does mean that the wood will be changing colour at different rates, but it all happens so quickly that it will not be noticeable for very long. The cladding should be completed by the end of this week and then they will start work on the inside, with the very exciting drylining!
We have also (finally) finished tendering for the screed, tiling, stone wall and decking area. We now need to decide what tiles to use. This has proven more complicated than tendering for the person to do the work. Tom and I have therefore been spending a lot of time in tile showrooms. The choices seem endless and because there are a lot of areas to tile, most of which need different styles, there are a lot of decisions to be made. One thing I have learned is how expensive mosaic tiles are – almost 3 times the amount of square or rectangular tiles. I don’t think I will ever look at a tile in quite the same way again! Whenever I use the loos in the supermarket or restaurant I take notice of the tiles. Sadly, Tom has been doing the same thing, ‘oooo, did you notice the tiles in there?!’
We are also tendering for some of the soft landscaping works, including where to buy the hedging plants for the garden and who to get to do the tree works. I think we have made our decision, with help from Al, it is just a question of choosing the correct plants. Due to my background I am very keen that we should have a native woodland style hedge rather than the leylandii and laurel that you see in gardens all over France. We are therefore likely to be planting a mix of blackthorn, hawthorn, hazel etc. These plants will give us colour and the birds fruits and berries. It also means no leylandii or laurel!
Over the last few weekends, we have been exploring more of France, staying in our general area, but hoping to get a better idea of our surroundings and the Country. We took a long weekend to Bergerac and Perigord, home of good wine, truffles, duck and foie gras. Staying in the most amazing Chambre d’hôte in Beaumont du Perigord, we took a couple of trips out to some wonderful Bastide towns. It made me realise that there is still so much of France to explore and that wherever you go you can always get a decent bag of veg in the local market!
View from the master bedroom, before the windows went in
A lovely view hopefully! It was a big week this week on site with a lot happening. Our 3 Velux windows were installed, the ‘crinkly tin’ finally started going up, flooring went down upstairs and the big sliding doors in the living room also went in. With flooring down upstairs I was finally able to go up and have a look myself. I am not a lover of heights and ladders at the best of times so the thought of wandering around up there, balancing on timber beams was not my idea of fun!
View from master bathroom, before the windows went in!
Anyway, now I have been up there, I was really able to appreciate the views across to the other side of the plot. It wasn’t the best of days to see it from, but I can just imagine lying in bed with the sunshine streaming in – bliss!
The living room windows
As I mentioned in our last post, we thought we should celebrate the closing of the roof. So on, Thursday, we took some champagne along with us to site and raised a glass to all our builders. Drinking champagne on a building site, in the cold on a Thursday afternoon is not something I ever thought I’d do. I think the builders appreciated it anyway and even complimented us on our choice of champagne! Now if a Frenchman compliments you on your champagne choice, then you must be doing something right.
Fitting the Velux
Fitting the Velux
Living room doors
Living room doors
The view from the entrance framing the garden
The new doors from the garden
There are still a couple of windows to fit upstairs, but even with the downstairs windows fitted the difference in the temperature in the house is very noticeable. We also no longer have the wind howling through which makes being on site a lot more pleasant. Hopefully, the windows will be complete on Monday and then work can continue on the roof. Unfortunately, a lot of rain is forecast for next week and rather unsurprisingly the builders can’t work on fitting a metal roof when it is wet!
Windows in
Another important stage was that we were connected to mains drainage! The Mairie has been promising this for a while, and in the end they came a day earlier than we were expecting! We now have water, drainage and electricity – we could almost move in.
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