Jacques of All Trades! Disasters in Rural
Jacques of All Trades: DIY disasters in Rural France
Le Ramoneur Anglais.. the joys of wood central heating.
After two freezing winters ("it never snows here," said the French neighbours), we decided that the romantic appeal of the 'poêle à bois' was becoming rather jaundiced. With firewood available from our little copse, and generous grants available from the French state, we decided the time had come to install wood fired central heating. (So ecological, so cheap, so simple!)
The first hurdle came in finding an artisan or 'professionnel' to do the job. We knew a French plumber who had installed our solar panels, the son of our immediate neighbours, so he had to be the first port of call. But his work had been expensive, and this time we decided to look elsewhere at the same time.
The moment he arrived the alarm bells began to ring.
'What is your budget?' he asked. An extraordinary question suggesting that his price would be tailored to what he thought we could afford. Despite our 'actuarially-reduced' reply, he scoffed at doing the job for anything remotely like the figure we had suggested. Instead, he said he would provide a range of estimates for several systems, ranging from the 'basic' to something which might meet our full requirements.
While he rubbed his hands thinking of how many 'sous' he might extract from us, there was a knock on the door. We were startled to find a second plumber standing on the threshold. We had asked him to call the next day!
To our embarrassment it was evident that the two plumbers were close buddies. A conspiratorial, whispered conversation in unintelligible French followed, and then plumber one bade us 'au revoir', promised the estimates in the next ten days, and headed out into the night.
The second plumber showed little further interest. He went through the motions of measuring rooms for the 'cuisinière' and 'ballon', but his heart was no longer in it. Promising us an estimate in the inevitable 'dix jours', he left.
'Une quinzaine' later, an estimate arrived from plumber one. The 'basic' price was high, but only provided for a rudimentary stove in the kitchen which would heat one radiator. Each subsequent estimate increased the price, culminating in the most expensive one, which promised an Aga-lookalike, which would heat three radiators; but not the hot water as we had requested. The price was more than double what we'd expected. Despite the tax rebates which would pay for half the price of the stove, the estimate was out of our range. (If you will forgive the pun!)
We never again heard from Plumber Two. His cosy agreement with Plumber One was that he wouldn't trespass in his 'territoire.' We told Plumber One, that we would 'réflechir'.
"Comme vous voulez," he sneered, when we telephoned him.
In the meantime we picked up the phone book and trawled through the 'plombiers' in other towns in a 50 kilometre radius. Having heard stories of 'alien' artisans being harangued by "locals" for 'taking the bread from the mouths of our children' when seen working in villages outside their normal territory, this was a strategy full of peril.
But we wanted wood central heating, we wanted a system that would heat the house and water, and we wanted it at a reasonable price.
Numerous other visits from disinterested plumbers later, we finally met someone who wanted the work, and received an estimate that fitted our budget. We rapidly signed on the dotted line and scrawled the statutory 'bon pour accord' across the 'devis'.
So far so good, but the 'cuisiniere' came in two colours (something of a novelty for a French manufacturer!) : an attractive 'terre' or red-earth colour which would match our kitchen fixtures, and a bland refridgerator-white, which looked clinical and unattractive.
Three weeks later, we decided to pay the deposit for the work. The plumber had his premises in a suburb of a nearby town. We handed the cheque to the young woman at the desk.
"We'd like the cooker in 'terre', " I explained. "And could you ask Monsieur B to contact us to let us know when he might be able to start the work."
She smiled. "Monsieur B will be telephoning you this evening. "
That night the phone began to ring frantically. It was a flustered Monsieur B, who seemed to be very upset with us.
"Mais, I 'ave already ordered you a superbe 'white' cuisiniere", he began. "Maintenant, it is 'impossible' to change the order. "
'Blanc' was the 'default' colour. Nothing but blanc could we have! We must be content with blanc!
When we expressed our astonishment that he had ordered the cooker before asking us our preference, he conceded that for a mere 250 euros extra, it might, just, prove possible. This was what his 'wholesaler' would charge him for changing the order. The new cooker had already been made. Our unreasonableness would cause massive problems to French production in the kitchen equipment industry.
Uncertain what to do, we told him we would ring him back with our decision.
Fortuitously, our bilingual English neighbour was also planning a new central heating system. She wanted an expensive heat pump with under-floor heating. A ruthlessly modern consumer, determined to get the best bargain possible, she had already contacted several dozen heating engineers, including the one who was planning to install our system.
Over a comforting glass of 'vin rouge', we explained our dilemma and her eyes brightened. Here was a challenge! She would soon put this artisan in his place!
"Telephone me tomorrow morning at ten a.m.," she said. "I have a 'rendez-vous' with Monsieur B who is coming to prepare an estimate for me. If you check that he's arrived, you can confront him directly."
We were on her doorstep about twenty minutes after his arrival the next morning. But Monsieur B was not there. Instead, he had sent his fresh-faced young son. Dressed in an ill-fitting suit, he was already nervous, and his face fell on seeing us.
We sat down with him over a coffee and politely explained our dissatisfaction with the fact that being forced to accept a wood stove in a colour we didn't want was hardly 'service de client'. His only response was a gallic shrug and a few sympathetic words.
"But Monsieur, Madame, " he began.....
"Ecoutez-moi!" interrupted our bilingual neighbour, exasperated and losing patience with him. She was an ex-head teacher, a feminist dragon, and did not suffer fools gladly.
"Ecoutez-moi," she continued, in perfectly fluent French. "Are you saying," she added, her voice dripping in irony, "that you expect Monsieur et Madame Fox to see before them each morning, a cooker which they did not choose and did not want? Do you really expect that afterwards they will think favourably of you, and recommend your work to others? Do you think that this is what is to be expected from a true French artisan? Monsieur, your attitude is inexplicable, unjustifiable, and absurd. Even if it results in extra cost to your father, you must know that customer satisfaction is the most important thing to you if you are ever to get any more work from the English in this area!"
By now, Monsieur B's son had wilted, and was agreeing enthusiastically with her on every point. He saw large swarms of euros flitting away into the distance, as he feared his father's company would lose not just one contract, but dozens.
"I am sure that what you say is right," he said, turning to us, an older and wiser young man. "I am sorry. I will do my best to convince my father about what you say. He will give you an 'appel' tomorrow."
True to his son's word, Monsieur B phoned the next day to confirm that the 'cuisiniere' in 'terre' was already on its way to him and that it would be installed within the next month. Of course, he agreed, the 'client' is always right!
Shunned by the Neighbours and Thierry's Revenge
Meanwhile, there were two further developments.
Our neighbours knew that their dearly beloved son (plumber one) had given us an estimate for an expensive central heating system. They anxiously enquired daily whether we had accepted their son's estimate and wanted to know when the work would start.
Embarrassed, awkward and plagued by guilt, we said we were still 'reflecting' on the decision. But finally we bit the bullet and telephoned their son. We explained we would not be accepting his estimate; it was simply too expensive.
The next time we saw our neighbours, they were out in the fields around their cottage. We waved to them. Had they seen us? They turned their backs and continued working.
Since our arrival, whenever they had a surplus of plums, asparagus, peaches, or apples from their productive small-holding, they would arrive at our door with a share in their bounty. There would be smiles, a pleasant word or two and we would offer them an aperitif.
Now, the supply abruptly ended. We tried little acts of contrition; a jar of our honey left on the doorstep, an exotic vegetable or fruit for them to try. But there was no response! We had been ostracized!
It was two years before they spoke to us again.
Meanwhile, Monsieur B's team arrived to install the stove and central heating.
The bulky cooker/wood burner only just came through the door. The hot water tank weighed a ton, and was only dragged up the stairs into the old 'grenier' with great difficulty.
Soon all was in place. A young 'ouvrier' called Thierry would start to install the pipework and wiring the next week.
Thierry was an enthusiastic, tidy and careful workman. He was a reformed alcoholic as we discovered when we tried to present him with a bottle of expensive wine as a thank you for his good work. This was to be the first of many 'faux pas.'
Even his Job-like patience began to dissipate when my wife, well-intentioned but lacking in empathy, decided that all the radiator pipes had to be hidden behind walls. This meant that upstairs, Thierry had to crawl in pitch-darkness on his hands-and-knees through a roof cavity at the eaves, half-filled with fibreglass and other detritus. He had to avoid obstacles such as live wiring and existing water pipes, and wild creatures that had been trapped, and expired there.
He protested that the pipes would lose heat into the void. But to no purpose; his words fell on deaf ears.
The next drama occurred when he began to drill a hole through the living room doorway, to route the pipes to a large radiator. Anxiously, he enquired whether there was any electrical wiring hidden in the walls. As I hadn't installed any wiring in that room, I blithely assured him that all was well. There wasn't the slightest danger.
Mounted on a step-ladder, he took out his huge 'perceuse' and began drilling enthusiastically through the plasterboard. Soon, a cloud of dust rising around him, he was through the stone walls into the rubble-filled cavity beyond.
There was a blinding flash. The drill stopped abruptly and the smell of cordite filled the air. All the lights in the house were suddenly extinguished.
Trembling, Thierry staggered from the step ladder, and explained that it appeared he had hit a main electricity cable.
I apologized profusely. But for the rest of the work, he seemed a broken man.
Thierry's Revenge
I should have noticed the gleam in his eye; I should have guessed that his silence was more than just concentrating on the work in hand; but finally Thierry began to install the tube from the 'cuisinere' into the chimney.
The ancient chimney was already lined with a stainless steel tube for the old wood stove. But the cooker stood to the left of the chimney breast, and the connection had to be routed at a tight angle. I should have watched carefully, I should have realized the implications, but I was busy drinking coffee at the time and dreaming of balmy winter evenings in front of the new radiators.
An enigmatic smile on his face, Thierry attached a 70 degree bend in the centre of the chimney and clamped it to the vertical tube. From this he took a two metre piece which went horizontally through the chimney wall, protruding into the room directly above the stove. Here he attached another right angle bend, and a further 30 degree section which made the connection via a short piece of straight tube to the top of the cooker.
It looked a little odd. The chimney twisted tortuously from the stove and through the wall, like a large metal snake seeking a cosy lair for the winter.
But everything worked perfectly when the central heating boiler was first lit. It seemed sensible to seal off the bottom of the main chimney to retain the heat in the kitchen. The fact that the right angle junction in the tube could no longer be accessed seemed unimportant at the time.
Now, I'd heard all about chimney sweeping 'rules'. I knew our chimney should be swept once a year. I knew that if you had a fire and the chimney hadn't been swept by a card-carrying certified chimney sweep, with a doctorate in 'ramonage', then your insurance was invalid. And the 'pompiers' would ask you to pay their bill if they had to turn out for a chimney fire. This was French regulation at its worst.
But what I hadn't realized at the time, was that Thierry and Monsieur B. already had a subtle plan in place for their revenge on 'Les Anglais difficiles'.
Next: Fire! And how I learnt to become a chimney sweep.
Part 2 of 'Jacques of All Trades: DIY Disasters in Rural France
Fire! And how I learned to become a chimney sweep.
The first few weeks after the wood powered central heating was installed proved to be a revelation. Within 30 minutes of a fire blazing in the firebox, the 200 litre tank was full of scalding-hot water; the kitchen was tropical; the tiny bathroom with its oversized radiator suddenly became a sauna! We could even bake good bread and roast potatoes in the stove's oven. We planned pineapples in the parlour and date palms in the dining room!
We had no doubt we'd made a good investment, and now we could face the coming winter with equanimity, whatever it threw at us. We even had a big tax refund to look forward to the next year.
We didn't worry too much about the strange twisting chimney and I mentally made a note to call the 'ramoneur' at the end of the winter.
It was about three months later, in late December that the problems began. For some inexplicable reason, the cooker wasn't as efficient as it had been. Smoke blew out from under the hot plates every time the kitchen door was opened and shut. The oven refused to reach temperatures much above 100C. The radiators were tepid and the wood sulked and refused to burn, preferring to smoulder.
Desperate to get the cooker going one morning, my wife piled on lots of twigs. She opened up the ventilation, pulled out the ashtray, and left the stove door ajar to let more draught penetrate.
She put a match to the scrunched up paper beneath the twigs. The paper burst into flame and she turned her back on the fire. It was time to feed the cats and dogs.
Five minutes must have passed when I came downstairs and into the kitchen. I had heard what I guessed was a
Rushing outside to find my wife, I saw black smoke pouring from the chimney and there was an acrid stench of incinerating soot.
My wife came rushing back from serving the cats' breakfast, to discover why I was panicking and screaming.
"The house is on fire," I roared.
Back in the kitchen, I continued panicking while she calmly thrust wet towels against the front of the firebox door, sealing off all the air. The towels were soon adding their steam and smoke to the fume-filled kitchen.
But after another five minutes, the roaring began to subside; the stove groaned, then gulped in protest and began to cool down.
Ten minutes passed, during which the chimney tubes, once pristine shining stainless steel, changed colour from glowing red to a shade of burnt-caramel.
They were still too hot to touch.
Another half hour passed, and realization dawned; perhaps it was time to sweep the chimney!
How to Sweep a Chimney in One Easy Lesson
The next day we telephoned an English friend, a self-taught plumber, who was prepared to turn his hand to anything when asked.
At this point, the thought of dismantling the warped and disfigured chimney tubes caused me some trepidation. But it had to be done. To remove them, I had to lever off the heavy metal plates which formed the top of the cooker and then wrestle the whole assembly sideways until it came away from the base.
Ten minutes, three falls, and a submission later and it was done. But would a chimney brush go horizontally through the wall, and twist its way into the vertical chimney?
Our friend wasn't even going to try. He was determined to sweep the chimney from the top, down. This was the macho approach. Sweeping from the bottom was for wimps!
Shinning up a ladder, and borrowing a wonky home-made roof ladder made of fragile, wormy timbers, he managed to crawl safely up the chimney breast, where he removed the chimney cover and found the egress of the tubing. He thrust his sweep's brushes down the tube and twisted them round and round. Meanwhile, in the kitchen below, I stood balanced precariously on a stool, a bucket in my hand, hovering below the tube where it came through the wall.
Two or three tiny fragments of black 'coke' rattled down the tube into the bucket with a faint 'plonk'. These were followed by a dozen tiny particles of soot. And that was all. Where was the rest?
Before I could ask our friend, he had slid back down the roof to safety and had come in to inspect the fruits of his labour.
"Couldn't have been very dirty!" he snapped, seeing the pathetic quantity of black powder and ash in my bucket. I explained about the chimney fire, and he gave a grunt:
"Must have burnt out all your soot. Your chimney's been cleaned by the fire. "
He laughed, "But don't do it again, it's highly dangerous. The tube could melt and the fire could spread into the main chimney and set your house on fire."
But the job had been accomplished. We could now relax. We sat down at the kitchen table, and opened a celebratory bottle of Pastis. We topped up each glass with water from the well, and congratulated each other in the traditional way.
"Santé, prospérité et bonheur!" I joked. And then we talked about the trials and tribulations of wood stoves, chimneys, homes full of dust and wood ash, and the on-going debate about whether chimneys should be swept bottom-up, or top-down.
An hour later he staggered from the table and clambered into his car.
Feeling confident that I was now capable of solving any problem thrown at me, I reassembled the stove and forced the recalcitrant 'snake' back into place. Convinced the wood stove was as good as new, I built a large fire in the firebox and put a match to it.
For some peculiar reason, the match went out as soon as I held the flame in the firebox. I tried again. The same thing happened.
Finally, with the third match the paper began to burn anaemically, but the smoke billowed back into the room.
"Must be too cold," I thought. "As soon as the fire heats up, the smoke will go straight up the nice clean chimney."
I shut the stove door and waited.
It must have been just a few seconds later, but by then smoke had begun to pour through the hotplates of the stove. It was even coming from the gaps around the chimney fittings and the edges of the steel plates which comprised the top of the cooker. It was even coming from under the oven door!
For the second time that day I began to panic. I summoned my long-suffering wife to the task of extinguishing the fire, which by now had really begun to take hold. The kitchen was full of smoke, the smoke alarm was bleating in protest, and the dogs had taken cover under the table, whimpering.
We opened the kitchen doors on to terrace beyond and pulled the still-blazing wood on to the gravel, where we doused it with a nearby bucket. The mess was terrible and so was the smell.
"What's happened?" I coughed, angry with my wife for no reason at all. "Why won't the b****y stove work any more?"
Images flashed through my mind: tubes completely parted or burnt through half way up the chimney; dead pigeons jammed in the junctions; hornet nests melted like liquid fudge in the interstices of the cuisiniere.
A return wrestling match was played. Soon the tubing submitted and lay in a warped pile on the kitchen floor.
Next I balanced one-legged on a tiny stool with my hand plunged deeply up the tube through the wall, like James Herriot at the backside of a heifer with a breach birth on a bad day.
Straining further into the pipe, my fingertips came across a mass of thick crusty powder. I scooped some into my palm and extricated my arm, now a deep black colour along its entire length.
"That's your best sweater!" snapped my wife, looking at the now ruined garment!
My hand was full of burnt soot. At the junction of the vertical chimney tube where it met the 90 degree bend, there was a congested mass of soot. Everything our friend had pushed down the chimney was stuck there. A total impasse of soot. And virtually unreachable, unless a friendly orang-utang or a freak from a circus with a love for burnt carbon was somewhere in the vicinity.
A light bulb flashed on in my brain. This is a job for 'Super-Vac'!
Dismayed and disillusioned by our long-suffering Dyson, which positively refused to sweep up plaster, building rubble, metal shavings, sand and mortar dust, without becoming completely blocked, I had made an impulse purchase of a wet and dry R2D2-lookalike from a DIY superstore. This baby was up for anything, and was prepared to get down and dirty. Or so I thought.
Shoving the protesting vaccuum tube into the chimney, it finally made contact with the mass of black sticky magma. There was a sound like someone with chronic constipation who has in desperation been given an overdose of an enema.
Dust and debris hurtled down the vacuum tube into the machine, which coughed loudly in protest and then began to whine as the bag filled, the tube blocked and the flow of soot ended. R2D2 was dismantled (where was C3PO when you needed him?) the tubes unblocked, the filter beaten clean, the bag emptied.
By now the kitchen looked like a landscape after a pyroclastic flow, only everything was black rather than grey.
By the time R2D2 had submitted to his colonic irrigation five times, the chimney was finally clean.
The chimney tubes were reconstructed (it was getting easier each time!) ; the cooker reassembled. Normality had been restored as a refreshing blast of cool air blew up the chimney and a lit match sent its smoke swirling into the darkness beyond.
No, I'm not really implying that Thierry really knew that this would happen. But to be honest, I'm not sure!
It's just that now and again I have this graphic dream. Thierry and Monsieur B are in a bar, joking and laughing over an aperitif .
"You remember, " says Monsieur B, " 'Les Anglais' ? Zee ones who made me change la couleur de la cuisinière! Vot vas wrong wiv zee poêle blanc?"
"Oui!" replies Thierry. "Et I 'ad to 'ide all zee 'tuyaux' be'ind zee walls. Zere were millions of araignées zere! Et ze Anglais tried to électrocute moi!"
"Oui! Mais 'ave zay managed to sweep zere cheminée?" giggles Monsieur B.
But the years have passed and we have grown to live with our wood central heating. The water is always piping hot; we still bake bread; we run four large radiators. And as long as you don't mind sweeping the chimney at least five times a year, there's absolutely no problem
Practice makes perfect. We have discovered that chimneys can be swept from the bottom up. R2D2 has become proficient at doing his stuff, though his filters are ragged and worn. A good shower soon rids me of the soot on my skin, in my hair, in my eyes and beneath my nails.
It's my clothes that have suffered the most. Most of my sweaters have a left sleeve which is mysteriously darker and dustier than the right.
That's me, 'Le Ramoneur Anglais.' At your service. If you've a difficult chimney to sweep, I'm your man!
Posted by Bertie Fox at
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