Tuesday, April 28, 2009

terrasse, delayed by scattered showers



It rained off and on all day long, sunshine, then hard rain, a cycle every half hour or so.  You can watch them pour in from downstream, from Fumel, the storm clouds.  So when Robert showed up,  he decided to set up a welding shop indoors.  But first Robert had to drive to Fumel to report in to his parole officer.  I took the opportunity to bone up in Wikipedia about concrete, rebar and welding.  I watched hilarious UTube welding episodes where a guy with a big gut and probably a big heart sincerely described welding, using terms like puddle and spatter and scratching that meant little to a virgin like me.  Then he pulled down his welding helmet, the screen exploded with the supernova of an arc welder, and the teacher mumbled incomprehensibly from behind his helmet, drowned out by the zapping of the arc welder. 

First we used another of Robert's incredibly specialized machines to bend hooks at either end of the short rebar sections.


 

 These will serve to hold the rebar even with the middle of the thickness of the concrete.  Wikipedia told me that rebar is wonderful when planted deeply inside concrete:  it expands and contracts with temperature just like concrete does and better yet, the lime in concrete reacts with the steel to form a corrosion resistant film.  At least that's what I remember. 

Then it was time to weld the shorter hooked pieces at 8" intervals to the longer pieces to form a grille.  Robert sought the advice of  Christien, a mechanical engineer who works at the junkyard, Mas Moury.  He recommended two layers of welded mesh, perfectly spaced within the thickness of a 4" slab of concrete.  Neither Robert nor I could think of a decent way to keep the two layers perfectly spaced while pouring cement on them and probably walking on them as well.  I imagined yanking them up constantly and relying really on dumb luck.  This rebar is 10mm (3/8") and much stiffer than mesh.  


I had actually checked that this whole grill would make it out of the door, even if at a diagonal.

 

 Here's about how it looks at the moment under the tarp.  It's raining like crazy and the tarp is getting little wholes in it from being pulled on and off so many times.   Lots of water is dripping into the bathroom below.   Now all I need to do is finish the forming in front.  And pray for clear weather. 
 

Sunday, April 26, 2009

terrasse, continued


The breaking of the glass
Next step is pulling out the old wire-reinforced glass.  Surprise, surprise:  it was double-glazed all along.  It came out without much effort.  Then I used the big grinder with a metal cutting blade to cut the frame down into managable pieces which I hauled off to Mas Moury in nearby Pescadoires.  All the guys over there have odd little ironic smiles.  The old man, AndrĂ©, owns the place and quite a lot of Pescadoires to boot.  The guy in the office is a civil engineer who used to do big steelworking contracts in foreign countries.  He gave me a whole euro for the metal and I bought another sheet of plywood and some more rebar:  Mrs Snoutsworthy decided the terrasse needed to be widened by the width of one window frame.  


The cutting of the groove


Next step is chopping a channel into the the far (railway embankment) wall to support the other end of the slab.  I ventured out with the gas powered grinder machine at 10 am on a Sunday and fired through the layout groove.  



A bit dusty...


I started on the channelling with a small jackhammer but soon found myself on the way to Robert's house to get the next bigger one.

Next step:  cleaning out the groove,  dropping the window, forming the end.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Starting the terrasse

Now with the time running low, I am finally in a position to begin the dreaded terrasse project.  
Overview
1, Chemin St Roch, 46140 Castelfranc used to look out on the river from both ground and second floors until they built a railroad on this side of the river to bring coal from Decazeville in the eastern Lot Department to the steel mills in Fumel, west of Castelfranc.  To prevent steep inclines which locomotives cannot climb, they evened out the grade by building up an embankment at the back of our house which blocked the entire first floor.  They left, however, a space 
of about 2 meters between the exterior wall of the house and the wall of the embankment.  

The long-time former owners of the house, the Miran family, headed by a fine furniture maker, covered over the space between the exterior wall of the house and the embankment wall, installed slanted wire-reinforced glass, like in a factory,  to bring in light and keep out rain, and built a bathroom in the newly-created living space.  My project is to remove this glass for half the width of the house and replace it with a concrete slab for a terrasse.

Step one, cut a channel in the house wall
Cut a channel in the stone wall of the house to receive and support one side of the concrete slab.  The channel is about 6" thick by about 6" deep. 

Robert was worried that the channel would compromise the floor joists in the main bedroom cut into and supported by the other side of the wall.   We used his infinitely groovy 2-piece, radar-based tool 


to see through the wall and tell us where the bottom of beams were in relation to the channel.  It also read out the thickness of the wall:  56 to 59 cm = about 2 feet thick!  The top of the channel on the bathroom side of this wall was exactly at the level of the bottom of the joists on the bedroom side.  We therefore put in an oak beam supported by two steel columns to support the floor joists and thus prevent the tile floor upstairs from cracking.   

(The oak beam used to be a floor joist in the spare bedroom where you now walk on click-clack flooring on a concrete slab.)

The channel
To cut a channel in a stone wall, you make two straight sawcuts marking the top and bottom of the channel and then jackhammer out the material between.  I anchored a wood band the proper distance below a chalk line marking the bottom cut



and used Robert's brand new gasoline powered grinder 


with a diamond blade, running its rollers along the wood band.  It was a lot like using a very large chainsaw that shoots a blast of lime mortar, calcaire stone, and brick dust into your face.  Every foot or so the dust in the air became so thick I couldn't see my line and had to retreat to the street to watch out for Chat Charmant wait for the dust to settle.  

The jackhammering took most of the day. 

The composition of these stone walls is called "tout va" (anything that comes).  There are solid calcaire stones at the corners as well as a few salted in in the middle.  Otherwise, the stones are small with lots of soft limestone mortar filling in the gaps.  As you progress toward the middle of the wall, you run into brick, gravel, crud, lunchbags from the 1700s (not really).   The real stones went deep, some of them, so I was glad we had supported the other side of the wall by shoring up the joists.

Next, I set a cleat on the outside wall position the form plywood accurately and then cut this plywood to serve as the bottom of the form.  Cutting in anything large, like plywood, in this house requires checking diagonals and a little forelock pulling because no two walls are parallel or perpendicular to one another.  I would give a lot to know why.  It just didn't seem to matter to anyone.  Well, stone walls aren't built with plywood so when you build an interior wall, I guess you just sneak up to each side with relatively small stones and the wonders of mortar, bricks, and lunchbags for filler.        

When we demolish the glass windows tomorrow,  I will slather hydrofuge on the plywood in hopes that it won't be impregnated with concrete and rendered unusable for anything else.  



Finally the oak floor joists support and level the plywood form.  I like these French jacks very much-- practical and so ingenious their inventor deserves an article in wikipedia.   


Stay tuned for Step Two:  demolish the glass;  form and pour the concrete.     




Monday, April 13, 2009

The Great Confluence



Gates controlling the flow of the bief...


Heading south into Castelfranc, you follow one of two river valleys:  La Masse, running directly south from the village of La Masse, Les Junies, Lherm, Les Arques, and eventually,  I think, Cazals;  or else Le Vert, running in more or less from the east,  from Labastide du Vert, Rostissac, St Medard and eventually, I think, Catus.  We seem to always be driving through one or the other of these valleys.  We're paying more attention to available river crossings these days, now that they have temporarily closed the D45 for construction at the village of La Masse.

Coming home to Castelfranc inside either of these valleys,  you can watch the hill system between them degrade until they both are wandering around, lost in a fertile valley.  This is the place they call Les Campagnes, (the Countryside), about the only good farmland in the town limits.  

By the time you reach Castelfranc,  it is Le Vert alone which empties into the river Lot.  In fact, it is really only at that convergence that you understand where Le Vert (the Green River) gets its name since it has an intense green color compared with the tobacco-brown of the Lot, loaded with soil from its eroded riverbanks.  

So where do La Masse and Le Vert converge?  This question haunted me for weeks.  More than once, I came one of runing off the road as I tried to scan the thick woods along the D45 for some inkling of a Y-shaped river form.    

At last Mrs Snoutsworthy and I were driven to discover the point of convergence on foot.   
But first, the plot thickened before there even was a plot.  For we found that one watercourse at the edge of town was neither La Masse nor Le Vert, it was a relatively large "bief" or canal.   The bief borrows water from the Vert  then repays it all near the Millhau factory.  So we ended up in a cul-de-sac:  bief to the right, Vert to the left, and a nearly dry-topped dam that was still too vertiginous for Mrs Snoutsworthy to cross without swooning.  

So we doubled back to the other side of the bief and followed the utility lane, Chemin les Pradelles, (but doesn't Pradelle refer to pastures?) serving the back sides of some of the industrial installations as well as some houses marooned there.




This lane has become the back alley of the industrial park of Castelfranc.   The biggest enterprise is a large but financially very shaky wine wholesaler.  

This part of town does not fit into one's postcard of a medieval bastide town, but it's a good idea to looks at the things that normally don't make it through such filters.  One grafitto read, in perfectly colloquial English, properly spelled to boot, surely learned outside the classroom,  "Fuck the world".    


A round coring in the masonry suggested to the ingenious young artist the right testicle of a penis.



An unrelenting battle is engulfing a fine old Quercy stone house.  The 911 runs along the front of this house:  It is almost completely surrounded but not yet surrendering.




Further along, you come to the New's house,  still holding its own.  "Anna New, tutor of voice production, pianoforte, and cello."
   





We left the road at a walnut grove and followed the left bank of Le Vert.  Soon we drew near to a Gypsy encampment.  Everyone in the region tells terrible stories about the Gypsies, many of whom live in disreputable winnebago parks next to rivers.  As we stole past the camp, we couldn't help wondering if later they would find just our bones whitening on the riverbank.  Still, it was a beaten down path we were following, meaning probably a whole lot of fishing going on.  

We kept resisting the temptation to give up, but the skitters on the the surface of the water hypnotized us into continuing.



One rill after another.

Until finally, the holy confluence.  It proved impossible to get a really good photo from the left bank, at least not without waders.

But there it is ok, in all its anticlimax.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

War memorials







Most towns in France have a monument aux morts, a memorial to the local men killed in World War I.   They are often quite simple as far as public art goes, an obelisk, say, with the formula:  "Pour les enfants de XXXXac, morts pour la France" or "pour la Patrie."  And the names, either in alphabetical order or else by date of death.  They are very democratic this way, rich and poor intermingled.  Sometimes the commissioned and non-commissioned officers are given their rank but usually not. 

In March, I think, there's a kind of veteran's day celebrating the end of the Algerian War.  Someone with a deep voice reads each name on the monument and the rest of the crowd intones, "Mort pour la France!"  I've adopted my friend Bruce's practice of saying each name to myself. 

Often, the names of those who died in World War II are chiseled in on the back sides and even the dead from Vietnam and Algeria.  And that's about it.  France is apparently rather sad about its wars.  The Franco-Prussian  war of 1870-1 was a crushing defeat (that yielded surprisingly few memorials.)   WWI was a pyrrhic victory;  WWII was a complete defeat;  Vietnam ended in the "humiliating" defeat at Dien Bien Phu, though you would think the humiliating thing would be the inhumanity of lording it over an empire in the first place.  Algeria ended in defeat with France itself in a state of low level civil war. 

Well, Castelfranc has it monument aux morts like every other self-respecting town.  It's in the middle of a pretty, manicured park that seems oblivious to all the heavy truck traffic roaring past on the 911.  (By the way, the 911 was re-christened the 811 after 9/11).  


But just down the road there's different kind of memorial, the only one I've seen in France that actually glorifies a war hero.  The hero is native son, Jean Lavayssiere, born across the street. 



The plaque on the house just says, "Here was born Sgt Jean Lavayssiere, hero of Sidi-Brahim"




The battle is Sidi-Brahim fought in 1845.  According to wikipedia this battle was like Monty Python doing a parody of the Alamo. 
  A few hundred French pitted against many thousands of Berbers.  The French run out of ammo and resort to a desperate charge,  swinging their rifle butts and hurling glassfuls of terrible wine.  16 make it out alive, of whom five later die.  So Lavayssiere was pretty lucky, it would seem, having lived to the ripe age of 71.  And being awarded the coveted Legion d'Honneur.   And he got to be buried just across the 911 from where he was born. 

Today it's hard to see much of anything glorious in France setting out in 1830 on a decades-long effort to conquer Algeria for its resources.  Especially when it all ended with the horrors of the 1954-62 Algerian war that tore France itself apart and left Algeria still exploited and groaning under tyranny and ferocious unemployment.   



    



Monday, April 6, 2009

Goujounac tympan


When I ran out of chestnut for the stair treads, I asked Mrs Snoutsworthy to go along with me to Goujounac to buy more wood at the Christian Seguy scierie.  It was at the end of the day so I stowed our bikes in the back of the Kangoo since Goujounac is a fine place to start a randonnĂ©e from.  And it was the most beautiful sunny day you could imagine.   

At the sawmill we pondered one last time the range of water-based finishes available from the Blanchon brand lineup, settling at last on a water-based oil finish.  It looks great on a sample piece I tried when we got home.  It costs a fortune.

The planks lashed to the roof of the Kangoo, we found a farm lane where we could change into our bike clothes.   We parked next to the halle in Goujounac, just across from the romanesque church.  I made the 24 step pilgrimage to the tympan to pray for a safe and beautiful bike ride.

The village is incredibly peaceful at 4pm on a summery afternoon except for the semis on steroids that roar along the D 660 now and then.  The streets of Goujounac are barely wide enough for these behemoths.


 Conflict and angst exist perhaps under the surface, among townspeople, but they certainly mark its history.  When the church and the tympan were built in the 1200s, the 100 Years War was raging and Goujounac was on the frontier between the two poles:  from Montcabrier, the power of Paris and the king's butcher, Simon de Montfort, aided and abetted by the bishop of Cahors;  on the other side, the counts of Toulouse and England.  So much of what makes this region beautiful, the fortified churches and farms, often on hills, results from the paranoia and violence of the 100 Years War.  And then, some decades later, the War of Religions between the Protestants and Catholics.  The Protestants burned the church in 1590.

The tympan represents Christ and symbols of the four Evangelists.

The winged bull of St Luke

The lion of St Mark:

The eagle of St John:


The angel of St Mark.


I love the zoom on this camera since you wouldn't be able to see the facial expressions unless you had a long ladder and didn't mind risking being run over by a huge truck. Consider the faces of the angels floating over the Christ.





The blessing worked;  the bike ride was ideal.  We saw:  some wonderful gardening, wisteria in bloom, lilacs coming on strong, still flowering fruit trees.  Sheep, cattle, horses, donkeys.  Hay and wheat.  But mostly we wound our way through chataignieries, chestnut forests.  

Chestnuts grow in complete disorder and it must drive the French farmers crazy.  When they log these forests, they take everything and stack it neatly, from 12" logs for my staircase to stout posts for the ends of rows of grapevines to kindling to whips to make brooms from.  All of it neatly stacked, some of the stacks bearing spray paint dots marking the top row to discourage pilfering.     


     



 

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Marcel, the dog


Before I took off for another load of chestnut in Goujounac, I wrote down the time and odometer mileae.  I don't usually go to Goujounac except to park there and start a bike ride. But now that I'm getting chestnut for our staircase at Seguy's sawmill in Goujounac, I thought it might come in handy to know to the minute in case I found myself tempted to race over just before the 2 hour midday pause.

They have closed off the D45 for utility work at the village of La Masse so you have to take the back road to Les Junies, then the obscure D151 back to the highway.  My split-second time check went out the window when this flock of sheep showed up around a bend.  I had my camera on the seat in case there were interesting pictures to be had at the sawmill.



I pulled off and stood stupified at the sight of these just-shorn sheep and Marcel, the dog.  The owner yelled over to me, "They are very young"  So I guess they were past being considered elderly lambs.   I was getting my tongue together to ask him about training the dog:  did the dog grow up with the flock, did an older dog assist with the training, showing the young one how to "wear"--get a mean look on his face to concentrate the minds of the flighty sheep.

I asked how long it took to train such a dog.  He laughed and said "That depends entirely on who does the training.  Bonjour!" and gave me a big handshake.  He had no time to waste but even so put the dog through his paces just for me, a private show.  He yelled, "Marcel, boite!" (box) and Marcel started running the sheep into a compact mass.  "Marcel, gauche!" , "Marcel, pied" (which seemed to mean, crouch motionless until I say different.)


Before I knew it, this fat man had taken off running like a bat out of hell, evidently concerned that the electric fencing was intact all around this pasture.  I saw his wife working her way the opposite direction. 

Babe is a cult movie in my house but I didn't have the nerve to say to the guy, I know a better way and start the secret sheep obedience mantra,   "Baa, ram, ewe!  To your fleece, to your breed, to your sheep be true!  Sheep be true!  Baa ram ewe1"  If it had worked, Marcel would have felt awful.