Preparing the house for winter
October 24, 2008
We finally managed to get a plumber to replace our copper guttering which means that there should no longer be a constant stream of rainwater running down the face of the house from the dove-cote balcony. We had a few short words, first, though as the guttering was initially about 15cm short of the eaves it should have lapped under. Any rain, therefore, would have merely gone around the guttering and straight down the walls.
The guttering was organised by the painter whom we had given up on. No fault of his but we had made it a condition of his work that he organise a plumber to do the guttering – the last thing we wanted was two different contractors and two different lots of staging/scaffolding.
As always, our decorator went round in a whirlwind. None of his men seem to move particularly fast but turn your back for a second and they’ve done another wall. The house wall area is around 415 square metres and there are 25 windows (it cost a fortune to double-glaze). One coat of sealant on top of our fading and deteriorating paint and then two top coats of high-quartz, exterior quality emulsion in glorious pink!
It was a relief to see our repairs disappear under the new paint. If we had to sell in a hurry, the crack signs would upset a lot of buyers – unjustly so since the root cause was that the house is built on two separate foundation grids and they settled differentially when the house was constructed; six or seven years ago.
The new stove is gobbling up the pellets although now we’ve got everything automated, we use less with the fire on 100% of the time than we did when it was being switched on and off manually. It is a brute of a thing and cost us the best part of 4,000 Euros. It gets through 3 sacks of pellets every two days (4 Euros a sack) but in return it heats up the underfloor heating of the long-room (100 m2 floor area), the radiators, the water for the shower and the water for the indoor swimming pool via a heat exchanger. Unfortunately there is still some work to do on it and neither of the two side panels have been fitted on yet.
The insects and such are beginning to look for a winter home. Yesterday Damaris fished a drowned scorpion out of the indoor swimming pool and I killed a queen hornet in the long room too. Either would have been ‘fun’ to stand on.
The gardeners are coming less frequently now that the weather is turning. Although there is a lot to do, the colder temperatures make it less appealing and they cancel at every opportunity. They are a group of Moroccan brothers who alternate at weekends but have a tendency to take liberties – eg if it is raining where they are, they don’t come despite the fact that our microclimate is very often different to that in the valley where they live and it is commonplace to drive up the hill and out of the clouds (like on a plane) when going to our home.
We’ve bought a few more plants – climbers mainly – and these need to be planted this weekend. I can see Damaris struggling to do them if we get abandoned again.
