Tuesday 19 March 2024

Kind of Blue

Compared to the fun we had with the red paint, painting our bedroom was an easy choice. I wanted a kind of petrol blue - and that's what we got straight out of the tin.

The room during the day

The two big wins in the bedroom are the floor and the fireplace. The floor was sanded and given numerous coats of a soft wax look varnish.

How it looks after dark

The fireplace... I decided to use it to create a feature, and that's exactly what I did. I lined the firebox with plasterboard to seal it, the surround was painted grey and the interior a very matt black. I would post a photo, but I've neglected to take one. Maybe tomorrow. I will create a "hearth" from chipboard, and tile it with tomettes - but that's a project for another day.

Monday 18 March 2024

Seeing Red

That was a narrow escape...

I chose the colours of our paint very carefully, especially the colour of the second (after the pierre apparentes) feature wall in the salon. Over the course of a couple of days I studied the colour swatches, compared them to the tiles, took spot colour samples from photos and ran them through colour matching programs, found the HEX value, matched that through encycolorpedia.com and came up with the paint reference number and name.

Except when paint met wall it was pretty obvious that the choice wasn't perfect. It was worryingly raspberry coloured, not the dark red edging towards brown that were we're hoping would match to the tiles.


We would have gone with it - we've reached that stage - but having an expert on the team that wasn't going to fly. So we spent 30 minutes of adding various amounts of ochre powder, doing test patches and drying them with a painter's hairdryer


In the end we managed to find the colour I thought we had chosen.


It's a colour I like to think of as "old velvet curtain red". It works really nicely with artificial light, as well.


Those tiles do need a clean, though.

Saturday 16 March 2024

Tiling

After my exertions on Tuesday doing the pierres apparentes, Wednesday was back to cutting tiles. I had finally got my head around how to do corners, so I set myself up in the garden and got grinding. It was a lovely day - t-shirt weather - so I organised myself a chair, and set to.


I was a lot quicker than on Monday but it came at a price. By lunchtime I had almost finished the the tiles, and the tiles had almost finished me. My arm was in absolute agony, caused due to spending two days holding a heavy grinder, and one day doing masonry. My wrist wouldn't rotate, and my forearm was constant pain.(Anyone who has had shin splints will know the feeling. Yes, forearm splints is a thing).

I knew I wouldn't be able to get the tiles laid that afternoon, but we had a deadline to meet. Once again, the value of friends was demonstrated. Susan phoned Huub, and he swung into action.


A couple of hours later it was done. Huub claims not to have done tiling before, but honestly you would never know. A bit of finishing and the job looks spot on.


Don't let the bright red strip worry you. That's an undercoat colour.

Friday 15 March 2024

Men at Work

More pierres apparentes, but this time action shots.

The master shows the apprentice 3½:1

My first patch of enduit

Simons turn to mix

A close up of the wall in progress

The completed wall drying out yesterday afternoon

You can see the wall lightening up as the enduit dries. Hopefully it will all dry to more or less the same colour - that will mean I was consistant in my 3½:1.

Thursday 14 March 2024

Pierres Apparentes

After cleaning out the wall in the salon it's time for pierres apparentes.

The wall before we started


All the cement render is chipped off


The joints between the stones are cleared out


Susan and I started at 08:30 on Tuesday, laying protection for the floor and preparing the tools.

Dennis came over to show me how it's done, and ended up staying the whole morning. This means that the job I was fearing would take two days of hoping I was getting it right, turned into one day of an expert and his apprentice. The process involves flicking the mixture into the joints, making sure it fills all the nooks and crannies, and partially covering the faces if the stone.


Dennis left just after midday, and I finished applying the mixture - referred to as enduit in French - at 15:30. The enduit is a mix of one part lime to 3½ parts sand. We used 115 kg of sand and 35 kg of chaux blanc (hydraulique lime) to cover about 5m².


I then returned to the house at 21:00 (9 pm) to rub back the enduit to expose the stone faces, finishing at 00:30 (half past midnight). The finished enduit and stones will lighten as they dry out.


The Sahara dunes at the foot of the wall is 45 kg of excess enduit which has been rubbed off. Susan and I bagged and removed that yesterday morning. I'm exhausted, Tuesday was the longest day of intensive physical activity I have done for many a year, but the signs so far is that it's been worth it.

Wednesday 13 March 2024

Wot a Mess!

I was at our house on Monday evening, because the wall of the salon had to be made damp so that when we got around to applying the lime mix for the pierre apparent, the stones in the walls wouldn't instantly suck all the moisture out of the mix.

We've been aware that the house is filthy to the point that we can't actually envisage it being livable, but this photo really brings home just how lucky we are to have friends with a house nearby.