Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Renovation Project - I hate plaster


Renovation Project - I hate plaster

Yet another day spent shopping, I was never a big shopper when we lived in the UK and now I hate this task, yet it is never ending, as we do not have a van, we cannot get everything we need in one trip, so today we buy the rest of the plaster board and the scant (this may be an English term, but it is the 3 x 2 wood that is used to build the frame of the wall).

We have gone to Quimper today as we also want to go to a particular shop to buy a door, we had bought all of doors from this shop and somehow managed to buy one door short, luckily they still have a few left.

We also hit the jackpot in the builder’s merchant and find the isolation valves that we need, John suggests we buy two and at this point I could quite happily kill him, not only am I stressed at 4 hours of shopping and untold hours on the internet trying to find the valves, he only wants to buy 2!!!!!! And suggests we keep looking for cheaper ones (they are approximately 7 times more expensive than in the UK), we decide to buy the 8 that we need and John lives another day.

As we are leaving we see something in the wood burner department it is a ‘collecteur de chaleur sur poele a bois’ this gets us very excited (I did say my life was quite different now) this piece of equipment attaches to the flue of  the wood burner and the air heat distribution system goes into it.

This may mean nothing to you but what it will do is mean that we do not have to brick in the chimney, we will be able to keep the lovely wood burner and the air distribution system will work correctly, this is the best find we have made since coming here.

We had seen these on line but the ones on line cost approx Euro’s 800, this one was only 200! BARGAIN!
All we need to buy now is some finish, this is the plaster you use to finish walls, John also wanted to use this for the joints in the plaster boards. In France it seems that they don’t skim boards, they mainly dry line and tape and fill the joints.

John has tried every type of plaster available that he can find and is still not fully happy with it, so we spend another 20 minutes looking at bags of plaster with me trying to translate what each one says, a number of them state ‘fin’ which is what we assume we are looking for. But the setting times seem too short, we know we can get a 2000 version which means 2 hours setting time but can we find it? NO, I hate plaster now!!!!! Just pick one!!!!!!

We have everything else we need and drive home, all we need to do now is add a rocking chair to the roof and we would win any fancy dress competition as the Clampet Family!

We are going to visit Craig and Theresa on the way home and ask where they got the 2000 plaster version from.

Talking to Craig, john finds out that he will never find the finish he wants in Brico depot, which is the main builder’s shop we use, so at least now we can stop looking. We have to go to a specialist builders merchant, unfortunately John didn’t ask where this was and instead started talking about jointing plaster.

The problem is that the plaster in France is Lime based so that the old granite can breathe, in the UL the plaster is gypsum based.  The gypsum finish is a lot finer and gives a smooth finish which is what John wants. The Lime based finish is very grainy and harder to work. But this is what is here, so John will have to make do.

We have also done some food shopping today and treated ourselves to a wonderful dinner, Fresh Scallops and the most enormous, fresh king prawns, half a kilo of each has only cost 15 euro’s this equates to approx £12. This has made up for the bad shopping day and is one of the reasons I love France so much.

7 comments:

  1. You really can get a very good finish taping and jointing. I have become something of an expert at it and find it worryingly therapeutic!

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    1. ha ha ha not my idea of therapeutic :) the problem is when it's a 30 foot wall that needs fully skimming. But we are adaptable

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  2. Hooray for the collecteur de chaleur sur poele a bois!! Don't you just love finds like that?

    Gerda

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    1. oh yes, and we can feel the difference already. Not long till you come over hope all is well with the family :)

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  3. It brought back memories Jenny when you said about the rocking chair on the roof of the car, we moved from Normandy to the Mayenne with an estate car and at one time we had an armchair strapped to the roof of the Suburu, I don't think the villagers had seen anything quite like it, thank god we didn't have a sofa at the time :)

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    1. ha ha ha it's amazing how much you can actually fit on to a roof rack!

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  4. Taping and jointing seems to be the way of doing drylining on the whole continent. When I talked to some Germans about skimming (to avoid visible seams and cracks later on, in my experience that'll inevitably happen, I spent many a school day counting plasterboard sheets on the ceiling because the seams were so obvious) they thought I was crazy, why'd I want to plaster something that's already considered plaster? (one of the official German terms is actually "dry plaster" although "gypsum-cardboard" is a lot more common - not very trust-inspiring name I'd say). Germans will also tell you to use metal studs instead of wood because they're straighter, easier to fasten together and are for some reason better at deadening sound. Another school experience, steel studs get interesting if you've got tall ceilings! It's only fun to watch someone bump into the wall and the wall bowing out by almost an inch or so on the other side if it's not your own place :-D

    BTW, I think the main point about lime plaster isn't so much that it'll let the stone breathe (depending on what kind of stone you've got it might not even breathe at all, e.g. granite is rock-solid) but that it won't crumble and fall off the wall as easily or quickly if it gets a bit damp.

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