Building Cepheid Studio Part 1: Razing it to the ground

Many moons ago when we bought our dilapidated castle (okay it’s a small cottage, but it felt like a castle to us) we knew we wanted to renovate the little outbuildings that stood next to it. In rural France it’s practically a legal requirement that you get some tiny weird bonus buildings (‘dépendances’) with your old timey house, and ours was no exception.

When you see people renovating on TV, these dépendances are quaint stone botheys or Victorian-era glasshouses, but ours were a couple of little breeze block monstrosities. One had been there for decades and housed the washing machine, an oil tank, ironically considering what happened later, a fire extinguisher. The other dépendance had been built more recently by a relative of the previous owner as a room for processing honey, because he kept bees.

We’re going to be talking about the washing-machine-oil-tank-dépendance here, and I’ll call it the studio throughout (even though it didn’t officially become ‘the studio’ until a couple of weeks ago).

Between us visiting the house for the first time, and us putting a low-ball offer in on it, there was some high drama involving a fire in the studio - local gossip refuses to agree on exactly what happened, but it’s safe to say that the oil tank found itself aggressively on fire one night. The neighbours called the firefighters, the building was uninhabited anyway and filled with junk, so no real harm done. It was, however, a mess. The firefighters had tipped sand over the whole site to keep the flames down and the asbestos roof had completely collapsed. One of the first things we did when we got the keys to the house was to secure the area, so the dog wouldn’t get oily paws and so we wouldn’t get asbestosis.

Believe it or not, this is what the building looked like AFTER we’d cleaned it all up:

Something that became immediately clear as we moved away all the old rubble was that the old breeze block walls had been irreparably damaged by the heat of the fire, and were really brittle. There were cracks running all along the walls and the only thing holding the place up was a rusty metal joist and a whole lot of luck. It had to come down. After a bit (a lot) of paperwork to secure permission from the council, we invited our strongest friends round and waggled the walls like a wobbly tooth until they came down:

This was only step 1 of the demolition - next we had to get rid of all the rubble we’d created, and we had a plan: waste not, want not. On the other side of the house is a big slope down to the garden which we wanted to become a parking space, so we used the rubble from the studio as hardcore to flatten out the slope and create some semblance of a parking space. No photos of this yet; that’s a different project entirely.

There was quite a long period of time during which our washing was on show to the whole village. Also yes, we’re a two-wheelbarrow family. We’ve gone up in the world.

Once all the rubble had been moved, it was time to pour a solid slab for the new studio to sit on. The old floor of the studio was cracked and damaged from the heat of the oil fire, and we needed a solid surface for laying our new breeze blocks. We pulled out our trusty cement mixer (yes, we’re now the sort of people who own a cement mixer) and spent a full day doing nothing but mixing and pouring foundation concrete. It was important to do it all as one big pour so the area would ‘set’ as one piece, thus avoiding cracking and shifting in the future.

Laying down the rebar for the concrete pour

Wooden frame in place, about 30 loads of cement down already

The slab had to cure for a few weeks before we could start building on it, but soon enough it was time to fire up the cement mixer again. Believe it or not, using breeze blocks (parpaings to our French friends, cinder blocks to our American friends) was prescribed by the guild of French architects in our planning permission - gotta stick to the culture of ugly agricultural buildings, I suppose!

The first layer of blocks took ages to do because these would set the trajectory for the rest of the build. We spent a long time making sure the walls were straight, the blocks were level, and that the little wall dividing the studio and the plant room was in the right place.

We also added a moisture barrier at the second layer to prevent rising damp, and had regular on-site inspections from Chapeau, our dog:

When we planned the building we decided to keep the location of the windows and door pretty much the same as the original structure, but with an additional window facing the house. We call this the ‘coffee window’ because we used to pass our drinks through it during construction, before we added the glass.

Each opening in the building needed a specific wooden frame to fit the space, so we could build the breeze blocks up to it, and subsequently use them to support the lintels during construction. Most of the openings are on the non-road side of the building, facing the garden, so we’ll get a handsome view of the goats while we’re working.

We designed the windows and door to all finish at the same level, so instead of installing multiple lintels we could pour a ‘ring’ of concrete around the entire structure at that height. This served two purposes: creating lintels where we needed them, and reinforcing the rest of the building. It’s only a tiny structure but we wanted to be SURE it was sturdy!

Once we were satisfied that the lintel had cured, we took off the wooden frame and finished building up the breeze blocks to the same level as the original building (you can see it in the back of the photo above). We had to cut a bunch of breeze blocks down to size using an angle grinder (terrifying spinning disc). Lots of precision work, and totally worth it for a unified look.

Almost as soon as we got the last breeze blocks on, Storm Ciaran rolled into the village and put everything on pause, so I think this is a good time for time for me to take a break from writing, and bid you adieu until the next installment in which we put a roof on this building!