Better late…

The computer died and then was resurrected and replicated; then we went to Italy, things have been busy.  But:  we do now have an indoor shower, our very own Timothy, and a working faucet upstairs.  And Mac and Viv finally came to visit us here, bringing genuine goo-goo clusters to Gabriel’s delight, and lots of good music, and we spent a wonderful five days drilling granite, testing lovely wines, and eating roasted chestnuts and foie gras.  And they even did us the honor of helping us pick out our new rooster (Dexter Gordon) and hen, naming her Flora, in honor of Mac’s piano teacher.

See?  (make sure you click on the photo of the granite workers, that is indeed a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that they’re using to cool the stone.)

Sylvain’s site

Jean-Jacques made a website for Sylvain and you can now peruse it at:

www.sylvaintirel.fr

(le Maffay made the cut!  you can see pix from here and other homes that Sylvain and his team have worked on, including Malin and Simon’s staircase made using the same technique that Brunelleschi did on the Duomo…)  check it out and tell your friends!)

Cooked dirt

click here for a slideshow!  (cliquer ici pour un diaporama)

(small note:  i have no idea what wordpress is trying to do with the photos but i’m irked that it’s giving you blue lines when it should give you thumbnails to click on.  so we’re trying slideshows via imageshack.  i hope it works better!)

Wahoo!  thanks to Aunty Izzy’s patronage and support, we were quite luckily able to call up Sylvain and ask him to drop by and put in the terra cotta tiles, which has been actively and passively giving me anxiety attacks (that’s a slight exaggeration, but not really, when you see the photos and read therein the delicatesse and skill involved in posing the terra cotta tiles).  So here for everyone far away is what it’s starting to look like:  Sylvain and Maxime did the office/laundry room/w.c. first, and tomorrow and Tuesday they’ll do the kitchen/living room.  We’ll pour the joints as well on Monday.  So far only the cats have walked on it, but they find it to be a delightful change from the sandy lime layer that we’ve been used to for the past six months or so… and I think, once we’re actually able to start gradually heating the coils underneath it, that I’ll join them on the floor for a nice nap in the sunshine.  Thank you Izzy for making this future nap a possibility.  Some notes:  first you have to wet the floor.  Then, put down a mixture of sand and lime, and then, make it all even and check the levels under the doors.  Then, you mark the reference line.  Then, you measure off a section and do three-tile thick rows, measuring the tiles amongst themselves as you go.  Before laying the tiles, you spread a thin layer of barbotine which is lime and water mixed together.  Then you tap the tiles into place and there’s a special sound they make when they adhere, that my ear is unable to distinguish.  Then you move down to the next row… and make cuts for the crooked bits around the edges of the room.  Then you let it dry a bit, (because the tiles soaked for 24 hours in a vat of water before they were laid), then you pour the joints.  Then you wait two weeks, then you clean them off and put on a special Josse product onto the floor (Josse are the kind people who made our terra cotta tiles, they’re located up north a bit on the coast at Plancoët).  And then you gradually bring the in-floor heating coils up to temperature.  And then you take a nap.)

[nb. je n'ai aucune idée pourquoi wordpress ne souhaite pas afficher les thumbnails, et je n'ai pas le temps d'évaluer le problème, donc j'exprime mes regrets publiquement et vous prie d'accepter mes excuses et espère que le diaporama vous apportera satisfaction.]

Grâce à la bienveillance de ma soeur nous avons pu re-inviter Sylvain Tirel et son équipe de venir poser les terres cuites.  Je suis ravie du resultat et peut-être encore plus ravie, si c’est possible, que ce sont eux qui ont fait la pose et non pas moi car il s’avère assez compliqué et pointilleuse et Sylvain, comme d’habitude, assure comme un maître car il en est un.  Les étapes:  faire tremper les terres cuites 24 heures dans un bac.  Faire un mélange de sable et chaux.  Mouiller la chape d’enrobage.  Verser le mélange chaux-sable dessus.  Niveler.  (hah).  Vérifier que les portes s’ouvreront toujours, et baser le niveau là-dessous.  Faire le trait de réference.  Etaler de la barbotine. Travaillant sur des planches, poser les terres cuites, en tapant dessus avec un maillet en caoutchouc, jusqu’au moment où ca fait le bruit que ca fait quand ca adhère.  Prendre les mésures pour vérifier que les espacements sont bons.  (Les terres cuites étant un produit naturel il existe des subtiles variations de taille).  Ensuite laisser sécher un peu, ensuite couler les joints, attendre deux semaines environ, les nettoyer, étaler le produit Josse qui va bien dessus pour les protéger, ensuite mettre la dalle en chauffe, ensuite faire une grande sieste là-dessus.)

Enrobage

Voilà un mot en français car franchement je ne sais pas comment dire ‘dalle d’enrobage’ en anglais. Sylvain, Maxime et son beau-père Québriacois sont revenus pour couler la deuxième dalle d’enrobage pour le plancher chauffant, après le passage de Simon et Olivier. Nous avons donc un plancher qui est presque au niveau, il faut juste poser maintenant la chape maigre (sable et tradical 55), ensuite verser la barbotine, et poser les terres-cuites-mains par les hommes/femmes aux doigts de fée de chez Josse à Plancoët. Gabriel était ravi de l’expérience et moi aussi même si cela a voulait nécessairement dire que la lave-linge était en retraite imposée pendant une semaine, mais je viens maintenant d’être à jour dans notre lessive donc tout va bien. Les terres cuites seront posées pendant le mois de septembre et après on aura un plancher fini et habitable. Ouf.

Briques de verre

Ou comment faire un wc d’autoroute chez soi. Les femmes n’auront pas cette même impression, nous aurons un wc baigné dans la lumière diffuse et parfois un peu de ciel bleu à travers les briques. Mais la première réaction d’un homme à qui j’ai demandé si l’hauteur et clarté était bien c’était, ben ca fait wc publique.

En tout cas le dernier rang a été posé aujourd’hui dans la neige (des véritables flocons sont tombés ici au Maffay, mimant les popcorn-fleurs sur les pruniers), vous pourrez bientôt venir chez nous rendre votre avis sur le sentiment d’autoroutabilité de nos wc.

Obsession: the Wall

So the reason that we haven’t written to Anyone or called Anyone especially the people who love us and who’ve been leaving desolate sad messages saying that we never call, is that I’ve been completely obsessed with the Wall.

It started out as a ‘terrassement’ project, because Simon and Olivier told us that we will soon have a tall wide-shouldered beautiful anglo-saxon (solar water heater/ballon d’eau chaude) in our house and that the little space that we have set aside for the mudroom is not going to be big enough for our very own Fröling. So I had to take the pickaxe and this big iron bar thing that you thump into the ground, that is very much like the pilon used all over Diebougou to squish millet, except that this one is used to dig down through rocks and packed earth (and a layer of ancient asphalt). This took me three days start to finish, which is nothing to be proud of really, because it was basically a 2 meter by 1,5 meter rectangle. I’m a bit of a dilettante when it comes to manual labor of this type and require many breaks for chocolate and computer work. It gave me a blister.

Then, the gorgeous anglo-saxon, because he is heavy (over 300kg empty, and is built to contain 1400 liters of water), needs a concrete floor. So Gaël and Romain came over and fixed my percentages of rocks and sand and concrete, and helped pour a small concrete slab. Gabriel and I put some little things into the slab as it was drying so that we will always be able to recognize our house: a small stone heart, two shells, an American penny (Lincoln side up), a parking token from Durango Colorado, and a Petain-era franc, found by the masons in the first days that they were excavating our walls, ‘Famille, Travail, Patrie’ side up.

Then, it was time to start building the wall. Sylvain delivered six million bio-bricks, which are exceptionally heavy. And a few more sacks of chaux. And the good people at Bretagne Matériaux rented me a very large automatic steak-knife, used for cutting bricks. And then the wall started to come together. It wraps around the new bedroom for our new hottie German friend, and the laundry room, and the bathroom.

It’s taken about a week to build and we finished it tonight, Gaël came over to help put in the top level (because it’s rather hard to lift biobricks up 2,7 meters into the air and place them exactly on top of the drying mortar, and I am lazy and regardless of all my devoted efforts, eating bars of chocolate has not prepared my upper arms to do this type of heavy lifting). So the wall, or multiple walls, are finished, as of tonight at 19:42.

Tomorrow is Saturday and I’ll put in the glass-brick portion. And we just found out the wonderful news that Rich is going to pop over from Ireland next weekend and do manual labor! Wahoo! We’ll keep you posted. Pictures of the finished Wall in the next post.

First slab

It’s not a very nice word, nor is it in French: dalle, which sounds like dahl, the lentil dish which has roughly the same consistency as the mixture of lime, rocks, sand and water that the amazing team Tirel poured into our house last Thursday. Sylvain and his colleagues specialize in ‘chaux’ or natural hydraulic lime – it’s different than regular ciment, because it’s more pure it’s more ecological and much less common over here in modern construction, although it used to be all that was used for any sort of masonry work. People used to make chaux with the rocks that they had in the area they lived, so there was little grey energy involved. I’m not sure which rocks ours comes from, but I believe they were somewhere in France before they became our chaux. The consistency when it’s poured out over the floor is similar to whipped cream zabaglione with raisins and nuts added,

or on a more savory note, dahl. In french they say, it’s more ‘gras’ or fat. They have to take their sacks of lime to the concrete factory to have it mixed up specially, and Sylvain and his workers are the only ones, according to the concrete truck driver,

who ask them to mix up this special type of ciment. It takes a bit longer to dry, and has less structural resistance; we won’t be able to add on six more levels to our house, quite fortunately.

But it breathes better than regular cement, and is more ecological in that there are fewer ingredients with multiple scientific compound consonants and origins and is more or less the same mixture that has been used in building around the world for as long as people have been playing with rocks.

This is the bottom layer of our floor. After doing a few more things in the house, like walls and hemp/lime stucco, a layer of cork insulation will be laid on the ground, and then the tubes for the heated floor, and then another slab.

Hedgehog

Ack! We apologize for the lack of news, it’s the fault of jetlag and work and travels. We have been long gone, to the other side of the Atlantic, to a snowed-in country, playing with family and colleagues at work. Gaël sent us photos of the evolutions of our home, to keep us company while we were away. It was sunny here for two weeks straight and only started to rain the afternoon of our return. And while we were gone, the house unpeeled other layers of skin, spouted new veins, and has a new layer of rocks in its nether regions.

In French, they call this layer of rocks, “herisson,” or hedgehog, perhaps because the hedgehog is a small mud-level creature which skims the dirt. The layer of rocks is the first part of the slab: it also skims the dirt, and is ventilated by ribs of pvc pipe,

pierced to let the air run through and the water run out in the event of rising waters or the end of the world.

On top of the herisson, are black plastic tubes which hold the electrical wires, and other plastic tubes, pale white, which hold the pvc water lines, both hot and cold. It looks a little bit like the movie Brazil in here now, or a tropical, technical jungle.

Right now as I write this Sylvain, Philippe, Cédric and Maxime are pouring the first slab over the rocks of the herisson, the one that goes underneath the cork insulation, which goes underneath the tubes for the radiant heat floor, which go under the second slab, which goes under the sand/lime mixture, which goes under the terra cotta tiles, which will go under our feet. Photos coming soon, really.

St Valentin

Question de traduction : Robert Haas, un poète américain, écrit dans le magnifique poème ‘Meditations at Lagunitas’:

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances.

Et j’ai envie de le traduire :

Aspiration, comme on dit, parce que le désir se nourrit

de soupirs sans fin

Et c’est presque drôle avec le jeu de mots avec ’soupers’ surtout pour ceux qui sont gourmands de la vie. Ceci l’éloigne du sens originel qui est plus abstrait, et non pour le moins savoureux. Mais je pourrais aussi le traduire comme suite :

Languissement, nous disons, parce que le désir s’emplit

de langues distantes sans fin.

où on retient la concentration sur le double jeu dans ‘languissement’ même si celui ou celle qui a dit le mot pour la toute première fois, n’a surement pas voulu évoquer quelque chose d’aussi basse qu’une langue, même si le languissement est souvent étroitement étreint avec le physique et la langue peut à son tour prêter son sens à la chose dont tu te sers pour lècher qui se trouve juste derrière tes dents et celle dont tu te sers pour être ou apparaître qui se trouve sur le côté gauche de ton cerveau. Mais cette traduction là est aussi un peu trop ‘tongue in cheek’. Essayons plutôt:

Languissement, nous disons, parce que le désir s’emplit

de longues distances sans fin.

Ce qui est le plus proche (je crois) à ce que voulait dire le sage Mr. Haas, mais qui répose sur un double sens sonore dans ‘languissement’ avec ‘longue’ donc je vous prie, chers lecteurs qui causent français, d’entendre les sons plutôt que le sens.

Et souhaite à tous les amoureux et tous les amoureux de tout, une très belle fête, que vous vous soyez proches ou loins.

Nous sommes loin, mais les travaux se poursuivent. Celles ci montrent le passage entre la cuisine et le bureau/entrée, qui double de cave à vin. Avec mon voisin nous avons percé des trous dans des traverses en chêne pour laisser place à des empiètements de spot, ou bien je reprends: lui a travaillé pendant 2 bonnes heures à faire quatre trous avec une énorme scie-cloche dans 15cm de chêne vert, qui paraît très facile à la lecture mais allez essayer de le faire, pendant que je regardais en disant qu’il faisait sacrément froid à l’hauteur de mes pieds, et que ce serait chouette qu’ils mettent un plancher chauffant dans leur atelier. Les trous sont magnifiques. Le passage, © Philippe et Cédric de SARL Tirel, les trous et photos © G, merci.

Ce qui donne ceci, une moitié de notre future cave. (Les bouteilles logeront dans le mur en pierre avant d’illuminer nos repas).

Our house

Things have been moving so quickly these past few days, and it’s been awhile since you’ve seen our house amidst the photos of food and mud. Here is what our house is starting to look like: we have a front door, you can come visit; we have windows, meurtrières like a château fort, so that Gabriel can practice being a good knight; and as of yesterday, we have a huge window in our living room/kitchen which looks out towards the sea, the trees.

Pierre-Yvès said that houses made of bauge or packed earth, like ours, are a phenomenon unique to Ille et Vilaine (where we live) (read more at:  http://www.arbedkeltiek.com/galleg/livres/architecture_terre.htm) and to one other region of France.

If you’ve been following the images here and you’ve seen the mud or walked in it, this should really come as no surprise, it’s a tribute to the imagination of the people who came before us, a few hundred years ago, that they figured out something constructive to do with all this muck. When it’s cut through you can see roots of old plants in it, and the thick walls are an extension of the ground itself. The color is a warm sienna and is the perfect counterbalance for the glaz of the Breton sky. Plus there’s that great living-like-a-serf feeling that you just can’t get in a concrete block home.

We love watching Philippe and Cédric coax our house out of the dirt.