Thursday, August 2, 2012

I've broken through ...

... the wall between the house and the lean-to. It's not properly through, yet and to be honest I don't think that it will ever be, because one of the down-sides drilling from both sides of the wall is that the two holes never mate up and mine is about 5mm out.

Yes, I was working on the website but for one reason or another I couldn't concentrate. Add to that the fact that we had so much solar energy this morning that I ran the huge drill for half an hour or so, wasting the surplus electrical energy while I was doing it (only 82 amps made it into the dump load) and it broke through. I need to tidy the hole up now, which will take a while, run a tube through the hole, and pass 6 wires through the tube - 230 volt mains, 12 volt DC power and 12-volt DC light, and then the world will be my lobster in the lean-to.

One of the benefits of having power in the lean-to is that I can tile the floor, make a kind-of work area and then install the big washing machine. I'd love to see how that works and how much current that it uses, bearing in mind that I'll be running it off the hot-fill from the dump-load with the machine on a low temperature setting and on the economy wash low-water programme. 

Talking of the lean-to, I spend a few hours on the wall and it seems that I'm advancing rapidly. While I was scavenging around for stones in the house, I came across a pile of smashed-up lightweight brick, plaster and the like from when I knocked a wall down and so I'm shovelling that up and using it as infill. Apart from the fact that it is of course quite light, it's slowly emptying the house and that can only be a good thing, killing two birds with one stone.

For our Wednesday walk, we went to Roche'd'Agoux, a small village where there is a really impressive outcrop of the quartzite seam that runs diagonally through the north-west of the Combrailles.

It was also a feudal seigneurie, with its own local baron and a proper fortified medieval castle now sadly almost all gone. The family "disappeared" and the castle was razed to the ground sometime in the early 15th century but the reason for this is ... errr ... unclear. So unclear that no-one has a real clue.

To give you an idea of the state of population in the Auvergne, the parish today has a population of about 84. Back at the census of 1851 there were 445 people living here. Such is the state of rural France - just imagine what it would be like without the foreigners here.

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