VADOULOU

After some very iffy weather this week, Thursday was glorious. The cement wagons came in regularly all morning, one after the other, manoeuvring up the very narrow lane. The cement passes into a second vehicle with a very long reach over the whole site & off you go.
It covered all of the basic floor, the dalle, from 5 wagons.
The team were grafting to keep up with it but the end result is wonderful. It’s now left to dry & a week on Monday we hope to start on the walls!!
Of course on Thurs evening we had a huge storm, our first for months & a real downpour, but all is well today. There’s more rain forecast for the next week, which we really need & which won’t do any harm to the concrete.
We’re now getting some tricky news concerning supply problems for the huge windows, for the woodburning stove etc. It’s going to be tight!
But significant progress.
Unfortunately the videos are too big for our web site. I’ll have a word with Theo to see if we can change that.

We’re nearly ready to put in all the concrete for the entire floor. All the ground insulation is in, most of the reinforcement is in & all the conduits for water, electricity, air for the stove etc are all installed & poking out from the base.
All being well the freezing weather should be over by midweek. Then there’ll be a fleet of cement wagons disturbing the village, which will be different from what’s being disturbing us this week.
The French army has had an enormous military exercise from Sète on the Med to Cahors just north of us, and we’ve had tanks, armoured cars & some very impressive hardware parked up here in the village. There are no photos because they had seriously armed guards patrolling, all very polite but…!
Our épicerie at the end of the road has been full of squaddies buying everything. Coincidentally the épicerie has also had a full page article in La Dépêche, our SW France newspaper, today.
The squaddies have been sleeping in the salle de fête (village hall), & again they’re all very polite.
It’s never dull here!

There’s lots of progress being made, with much of it hidden. Luckily the weather’s great again, freezing at night, but at the moment there’s no concrete involved.
The insulation is pretty big, and we need to talk to our architects as to why 2 types are being used. There are the enormous polystyrene blocks, but there are also the chipboard squares with a different insulation type fixed underneath them. Not easy for the on-site team working in the vide sanitaire.

We’ve also finalised the wood burning stove with an air supply from outside directly to it. The stove is a back-up in the case of any electricity cuts.
Also decided on the kitchen extractor fan which will be a filter/recycling type.
Both of these are special because the house will be passive, meaning that it’s virtually a sealed box. Therefore the air in the house circulates within it’s own system, & as it leaves the house it passes through a heat extraction unit so that we can re-use the heat! Otherwise we’d have to have doors/windows open to use both the kitchen & woodburning stove!!

We’ve also mostly planned the electric, TV & entertainment systems through 1 control room, & the ethernet and wifi systems & positions. We’ve specified the number of sockets switches, lights etc but will wait for the internal walls to go up before final decisions.
We’re also nearing a resolution to the position of our only TV, which for the first time in our lives will be in our lounge. In France in new builds you are legally obliged to have TV sockets in other rooms as well!
And so maybe not much to see but lots going on.
We just hope that these nights of heavy frosts stop soon, but they’re forecast for the next 10+ nights. A couple of photos.

There’s been lots of interest in our last post and the shuttering.
Basically the floor of the house will be “floating” over the vide sanitaire. The foundations of the walls are in, but the house will be stone faced, which requires a ledge on the outside. That’s the shuttering.
In the meantime this week has seen a lot of the pipes/tubes for the water in & out, electricity, comms, heat pump & air for the stove etc being put in before doing the floor. Many of the struts for the floor are in & all the insulation onto which the concrete for the floors will be poured is on site & ready to be installed. Can’t wait to see the cement wagons coming on site in convoy.
After that the beton cellulaire (cellular concrete) blocks for the walls can go up.
We’ve also finalised the positions of the wifi, speakers, controls for the TV/radio, music, computing etc. Just need to finalise the sockets for ethernet & electricity, which should be much easier when the walls are up.
Some photos below with some showing the blue skies & temperatures – it’s lunch outside weather in February. Sadly though there’s some more freezing weather with snow forecast in the next 15 days. Just hoping that we escape that!

At last the weather seems to have changed.
It’s glorious clear blue skies and still chilly, but not getting down to freezing night after night. And so the team are putting in the shuttering for the next stage of the beton cellulaire (insulating concrete blocks) & then more cement. We should start seeing the house grow over the next couple of weeks.
There’s been little progress with snow, ice & freezing nighttime temperatures, but the architects are still confident of an October move for us.
Some of todays pictures.