French apartment renovations, Day 128: Rixa vs. rocks

6,118 steps

I slept in until 8:30 am! Oops...but it felt great.

We suited up for some messy work: cutting channels for the electricity in the kitchen. Eric did the cutting with the wall chaser (rainureuse). Then I took over and started drilling out the holes for the electrical outlets and light swtiches with a diamond-tipped bit.

To fit the outlet boxes, the holes need to be about 3" in diameter and almost 2" deep. And...the cement was only about 3/4" thick. After that, we hit solid rock. I would drill out a bit, then take the jackhammer and chisel out the rock. Then I'd drill a bit deeper, then chisel. I had to repeat this about 3 times with each hole until the outlet boxes would fit.

While I was doing this, Eric cleaned out all of the channels with the jackhammer. We still need to chip away more of the stone, but it's nearly done. We might even be ready to start running wires tomorrow!

This short video also shows some of the other framing that we've been working on. The little areas near the floor are for all of the writing that needs to get to the other side of the room. Instead of trying to wrap around multiple corners where the wall bumps out, we decided to just build little "coffrages" (don't know the English word) and run the wires straight through.

 

Then we had our usual afternoon soccer practices. Dio had a game in La Trinité and all of the girls went to Cavigal.

I had two Zoom meetings in the late afternoon, so that wrapped up my day. Then dinner (fish that Eric caught), helping kids with homework, and bedtime.