A spot of Bricolage.

  As I mentioned in my last episode, Kim (Mrs Noah) is away visiting our daughter, Alyson, and is in fact at this very moment in the air heading for Turkey, to accompany her on a fortnight`s holiday. In the meantime I have a certain freedom to carry out a few repairs and maintenance, in between caring for the Ark`s multitude of personnel and especially the most demanding of all, the new arrival, Storm  However, it was not in fact a long-contemplated redecoration or building project which came my way on Saturday but a bit of an emergency concerning our little building on the other side of the village road. I have mentioned this anomalous possession before,  it has recently been re-roofed and we use it as a food store or larder. I had noted a bit of a problem with the door lintel, but when I went in on Saturday  for some dog-food, the lintel was sagging down to catch the door and it was evident that something would have to be done

  As you can see from the picture at the start of the blog, it is a typical Poitou outbuilding with metre-thick walls built of the handsome local limestone.The wall above the door is supported by a lintel resting on the surrounds of the door. This is obviously built in when the walls reach the height of the door during construction. If you have a nice slab of Limousin oak, this is used to `roof` the door opening. If not and you are too mean to buy expensive timber, the deficiency is filled by several pieces of tree trunk, roughly squared or left round, as was the case here. One of these logs had rotted or been attacked by woodworm and had to be replaced. The pic on the left shows the sad remains.
  As you can imagine, it is not easy to replace this support, when it is set into the wall and supporting the masonry above. What I did, was to hack the remains out of the wall at each end and clear out the socket, enlarging it a bit with a chisel. Then I cut a replacement beam from a long rafter that a neighbour had given me some years ago (NEVER throw anything away! ) I cut it some eight inches wider than the doorway. Then it was a question of inserting the squared end into one of the sockets and pushing it in until the other end could be entered into its socket. I could then centralise the beam. The two ends rest solidly on the top of the door surround and it should be nearly as strong as the original, though not so deeply set in. It is certainly stronger than the old beam, because that had rotted right away at one end and was waving in the breeze.

   All in all, quite a satisfactory bit of repair, which has left me feeling quite proud. All done with local materials at zero cost!
  Bye for now, heading for my bed..Kim is going to ring when she arrives at the Turkish hotel, which will be in the early hours!!