The Barn

Well, it has been very chilly in the Languedoc the past week. The lowest temperatures in 40 years were seen last Wednesday through Saturday. Overnight lows dropped to 8(C)(46F) on Wednesday and continued down to 3(37F) by Saturday. Back up to normal on Sunday  at 11c(51f) for lows and and 17c (65f for highs. The forecast is for continued seasonal for the next 30 days.

Still, we enjoy it here watching the French behave like Atlantans at the first hint of snow. parkas were dragged out and people looked like dead of winter at 40F.
We wish you were here to see the crazy things we do.

Below, I have started a series on how we transformed a very rustic barn into very livable space. It was a long, sometimes difficult,  path so I will break the renovation into 2-5 segments and try to let you see what we were up against.

In the beginning…

First glance

When we bought the old ruin, there was a large area on the back side of the house and on the second floor that had been used as a barn. It was never intended as anything else. It was the place where grain, hay, supplies, spare equipment and probably the hen house would have been. In our case, we found that all the useful pieces had been salvaged and what was left was debris of all ilk. Old doors, furniture, tiles, pump equipment, pieces of farm equipment, tools and pieces of broken tools were littered around the entire area.

The area was comprised of two rooms in an "L" shape. Our plan was to separate the two rooms into habitable space: an interior room that would be a "summer" kitchen and an outside space for a terrasse. The inside room is about the size of a two car garage and the outside space equivalent to a four car garage all together measuring about 1200-1300 square feet. At its tallest point, it about 6 meters (20 feet) high sloping with the roof to about 2 meters at the street side.

Various litter

Junk over the concreted area

Tiles, doublage, doors, trash

Part of the floor had been covered with concrete mixed very weak and was cracked and very crumbling. The rest was rotten wood originally a very thick tongue and groove. There were three large holes, the biggest about 3 feet by 10 feet. One hole was right in front of the door from the house to the barn and was partly covered with a crumbling piece of sheetrock “doublage”, two sheets of sheetrock with a cellular mesh between. You had to be very careful where you stepped to get out onto the barn floor. Other weak spots and small holes in the wood were covered by old doors or thick planks so it was easy enough to step from one safe island to the next.

Old pump wheels

Pump parts and pipes for wine making

Old furniture and junk

Hand made ladder from rough tree limbs

The walls were concrete render without regard to quality or looks. The walls were made of rubble, that is small, medium and large rocks stacked to form a wall. Ours is about 2 foot thick. My neighbor says our common wall was stacked without any mortar and then skimmed with a concrete finish layer. The walls were in fair shape, although filthy, since they were above the ground and not susceptible to rising damp. 

The barn had one door (two, actually, but one had been bricked up closed) and one exterior window with a pulley system that raised pieces from the street below into the barn. It was very dark when the window’s shutters were closed. So to get some light, you had to tiptoe island to island to open the shutters for light. The window is about 12 feet off the ground with no protection so the shutters were usually closed. I had to prop things in front of the door to keep Jake safe. Later I put up a little fence and Jake sometimes enjoyed lying by the window. 

Only source of light 

Jake's fence

Jake sans fence laying in filth

Debris through the dust

Debris thrown thru the holes in the floor

Starting the renovation process.

We did not start doing any renovation work on this area until February of 2013. We had been concentrating on the living quarters of the house and trying to outfit it into a home. When we turned some attention to the barn we knew it would be a long process.

Obviously the first step was to clear the area of the large debris and begin cleaning the 100 year old collection of dirt, dust, cobwebs and sacks. The sacks actually came in handy as they were used to collect the loose dirt and small bits and haul to the dechetterie (dump). 

The wood had to be separated from the metal and the rocks/broken concrete with each getting a different treatment. Some of the larger wooden pieces had to be cut up before we could handle them and some of the flat pieces, like doors, were ultimately buried under the new concrete floors that came later. The wood and dirt went to the dechetterie but we didn’t know what to do with the metal. 

Serendipitously, a young man appeared at the garage door one day and asked (in French) if we had any metal (fer in French) we wanted to get rid of. After a lot of yammering, I finally determined that he was a messenger from God and was here to help me out.  He pulled his camion (truck) around back and directly below the barn window and collected all the metal in the ground floor garage/cuvee first. Afterward, he  went upstairs and started throwing all the scrap metal into the street below. There was quite a bit of it and took him some time to get it all down. The long pipes fell cross-ways into the street, and he had to stop and go down and reopen the street he had blocked. All this is very normal in France and while the people who were blocked were not pleased, but it happens all the time here.

Then about a week of scooping, sweeping and scooping again the dirt, rocks and tiny debris off the floor. the floor was covered with 1/2 to 1 inch of powder dust that had filtered through the porous roof and back window. The sacks made many trips to the dechet until they had too many holes to be used for dirt and then they got used for concrete and rocks. Afterward, we could see better the tasks ahead.

Toward the outside room

Inside room

Looking toward the outside

First renov work

The bricked up door re-opened

I then tackled the chore of securing the large holes in the floor. This was necessary to support the concrete load that was to follow. I cut sturdy planks to span between the underlying roughhewn cross beams. Where it still seemed weak, I added a sheet of OSB to give it more strength.

Holes, Holes, Holes

I repaired two holes and poured a thin slab of light weight concrete that used vermiculite instead of gravel on the second.  The small holes and soft spots were covered with doors, or flat pieces of wood to keep us from falling through.The underlying structure is hand hewn tree branches which follow no repeatable form. they put a concrete plaster compound to span the cracks and the covered with the concrete skim coat or wood.

I do like working sitting down

Hand hewn timbers

I am good at demolition!

Before we started working in this area, I had knocked out the other door that had been bricked up and had my builder install a modern double glaze door in the opening.

More debris for Pat to collect

The window "door"

It wasn’t used for about a year until we began going into this area. Then we found out it was actually a window in the shape of a door! It only had a door knob on one side, so you could open it to go out but you couldn’t get back in. You know, they could have explained that at the store!! Now it is plastered in and not worth tearing it all out and get a new one.

Le Superviseur guarding the sacks

Coming soon.. 

The next chapter will focus on getting a new (and solid)  floor put down. Many photos with it.

A la prochain!