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| work in progress (tea break not withstanding) |
This week I ’ave been mainly freezing my n**s off
renovating our barn. It’s a slow
process because there’s only me working on this building site but then that is
keeping the costs down and it also means that I won’t run out of news to blog
about anytime soon. The walls
start off in stone (une soubassement en pierre) and then turn into cob. They’re over 60 cm (2 ft) wide at the bottom
and taper, ever so gently, towards the top. The door and windows are held in place by an apparently
earthquake-and-hurricane-proof double frame of solid oak that spans the width
of the wall.
I’m doing it ‘à l'ancienne’ and these ‘double carrés en bois’
consume an awful lot of oak. Now
there’s a couple of problems here:
a.) that’s going to be expensive and b.) the oak available to buy is green
(soft, new, fresh from the forest) and, although it’s easier to work (chop
mortises out of, for example) it’ll twist and bend and move as it dries. I needed old, stable oak … and for as
little as possible!
I looked at the pile of oak floor joists that I replaced with engineered wooden I-beams;
was there some good wood left in the heart of these aged beams? After four days spent on my knees with
various power tools, many cups of tea and equal measures of patience and
frustration, followed by a couple of days in friend Jim’s workshop, I can
affirm in the positive.
The
downside of using old oak is that it’s as unwelcoming to woodworking tools as a
lump of granite. It took a long
time to plane up the roughed out wood and then chop the mortises, the latter
accompanied by a fair degree of acrid smoke, however slowly I descended the
cutting bit. I’m sure I left my
generous friend Jim with a set of blunt tools at the end.
I’m currently making sure that the gable wall is fully
supported before I break out a hole large enough to insert the new, larger
openings and have room around them to work. The idea is to not have the rest of the gable end fall on my
head, quickly followed by the new roof!
Neighbour Serge, who’s ‘in-the-trade’, is supervising this important
stage and will check what I’ve done before I remove anything substantial.
