Running a Gite in Brittany

Stairless

Finished removing the stairs from Poire. Now we just have a hole in the ceiling waiting for a new staircase. Judging by the gap between the beams and the height of the upstairs we are going to have to get one specially made to fit. More expense, but a necessary improvement.

|   5:08:00 PM   Stairless   

New Laundry room

Started phase one of the move of the kitchen from the first floor to the ground floor. It will be nice to have a kitchen on the same floor as the living space, especially in the summer, as it will save multiple trips up and down stairs with BBQ food.

The new kitchen area is currently occupied by the laundry room/cupboard, so the first job has been creating a new laundry room and bigger cupboard for the extra linen etc. Back into DIY plumbing, electrics, plasterboard and of course I get to use The Van. It's coming on nicely, just a bit of painting then shelving for the linen.

I doubt the kitchen will be done this year, with all the other renovation work, but at least the preparation will have been done.

|   6:30:44 PM   New Laundry room   

Brittany Ferries plans increased service to France

Brittany Ferries plans increased service to France

Can't see the prices going down, even if Brittany Ferries take up the slack.

|   6:09:50 PM   Brittany Ferries plans increased service to France   

P&O Ferries close routes to France

BBC NEWS | Business | P&O to slash workforce by 1,200

The group announced the closure of four of its 13 ferry routes and cut eight ships from its fleet. Three of the four routes on the firm's Western Channel service will go - from Portsmouth to Cherbourg, Le Havre and Caen.

I really hope this does not reduce the number of visitors to France, but I have a feeling that prices may rise with the reduction in competition. Not good news for us.

We have heard on the grapevine from a Brittany Ferries employee in France that BF are going to buy the two biggest P&O boats. Not sure which route tho'.

|   5:53:38 PM   P&O Ferries close routes to France   

White Van Man

We are now the proud owners of a 2002 Peugeot Boxer 2.8 hdi, 330M bought at auction today. It was actually amazingly simple, if very nerve racking. I've been to an auction in the UK once before and just found it much too daunting and never went back. Here was much easier even though it was all in French. I can still hear those quick fire numbers rattling in my head, huit mille six, huit mille huit, neuf mille, vendu, and the friendly glowing LED display spinning round like a fruit machine.

The auction was open all day Sunday for viewing with the sale today. For each vehicle for sale they allowed access to the vehicles to check things if necessary, run the engine, check oil etc. The service book was available and they performed a a full controle technique (like a UK MOT) on each with the results listing all the faults stuck on the windscreen. Also shown was the estimated sale price and the 'book' value and whether you could claim back (our business can reclaim) the TVA (Value Added Tax @ 19.6%). They also provide a 12 month guarantee for an extra couple of hundred Euros. The only down side was an additional 10.7% auction fee on top of the hammer price.

We spent about an hour familiarising ourselves with the bidding process and then took our positions in the 'ring'. I sat on my hands daring not even to scratch and Caroline bid for lot #220, our white van. We knew it was going to be ours, we could feel it in our water. Well there was definitely something going on in our water. A shake of the hand and a couple of subtle nods of the head and bingo, Caroline secured the winning bid. One of the auctioneers runners releived us of a blank signed cheque and then it was off to the 'checkout' to receive the ownership documents and the keys. The book value of our van was 13,800 euro and we paid (fees and 12 months guarantee included) 10,200 euro (about 6,800 pounds) and we get to reclaim nearly 20%. Not a bad days work.

Let the renovations begin.

|   8:21:26 PM   White Van Man   

New staircase in Poire

Emptied Poire of it's furniture ready to remove the old staircase. The current one is a little steep with some uneven steps, so this winter weare going to replace it with something more comfortable. Changing the staircase should also mean I can enlarge the master bedroom to include an extra window. |   6:52:42 PM   New staircase in Poire   

Freedom day...

...for the chickens. Now the gites are empty the chickens, goose and ducks, get to roam around. We shut them up at night because of foxes, but during the day they have the run of the place. It really helps the eggs, the yolks are much more yellow (almost orange) and the shells are tougher. I'm suprised it makes that much difference as their pen has grass and mud in it, but I guess there is a greater variety outside the pen. |   5:47:44 PM   Freedom day...   

End of the season

The last full day of the season. All the guests staying in our gites go home tomorrow and there is nobody new arriving in the afternoon. We have got days to do the gite changeovers rather than the usual couple of hours. It's really nice having people around, (in some ways the place needs people), however I'm really looking forward to having the run of the place next week. I can use all my boys toys power tools, anytime, without disturbing anyone.

It has been a good year for us and much better than last year, both financially and emotionally. All the gites have been just about full from the end of May to today, that covers the financial side, but the emotional side is a bit more complicated. Last year we worried too much about everything. Were the guests happy? Were we providing a good holiday environment? - we needed feedback from the guests, but didn't want to be intrusive. This year we have both relaxed much more (part of our raison d'être) and it's been more enjoyable all round. We clearly weren't doing too much wrong last year because we had several repeat bookings for this year, but next year our repeats have really shot up.

It's been a good year for all us, me, Caroline and the children, and to cap it all, no molehills for three days !

|   10:01:50 AM   End of the season   

Winning the mole wars

I think the mole 'shotguns', http://www.rixensart.com/jarphirix/eradic.htm, seem to be working. Another explosive charge went off this morning and the number of mole hills is reducing. There is a bit more certainty that you have scored, because the only way the charge fires is when one of the little blighters pushes up the plunger. Adds a bit more excitement to my day.

Added links for our three gites to a new holiday search website for a trial period. A bit more free advertising never hurts, and it might help to fill the gites during less popular parts of the year outside of July and August.

 

|   2:13:20 PM   Winning the mole wars   

White van man in waiting

We have been shopping for vans for the renovation works. Builder = Van. I don't think we realised just how complicated choosing a van is; long, medium or short wheelbase, high or low body, load capacity, number of front seats, ... The only constants are colour and fuel. The most common larger models on the road round here are either the Peugeot Boxer or Citroen Jumper, so It seems sensible to buy one of those especially as we plan to sell it once the renovations are complete. |   9:30:35 PM   White van man in waiting   

Two years in France

Today is the second anniversary of our arrival in France. To 'celebrate' I have written a story, Finding a Gite business, that details why we came to France and the events from selling our house in England to moving in to our new gite business and lifestyle in France

I intend to follow the story up with an account of the first 12 to 18 months after moving in. After that my blog takes over.

|   8:15:13 PM   Two years in France   

Mole casualty, perhaps.

Just come back from checking the explosive mole traps, and one had gone off. Hopefully killing a mole. I did dig down to find it, just out of curiosity rahter than a morbid obsessive fascination, but no corpse. Apparently the BANG shocks them and then they die, so maybe it crawled a little way first. Here's hoping.

|   9:09:45 AM   Mole casualty, perhaps.   

Mushroom hunting

Today was the last full changeover for the gites. Because we finished the cleaning quickly and the new guests arrived in good time we went armed with a wicker basket and the Edible Mushroom Guide and we all ventured out to some local woods mushroom picking. Unfortunately, not a very successful fungus foray, only bagging a couple of edible mushrooms. The most frequent find was the Common earthball (Scleroderma citrinum), also known in the U.S.A. as 'pigskin poison puffball', marked as poisonous in my book. The other specimens looked like Chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) or Autumn chanterelle (Cantharellus tubiformis), both edible, but we couldn't make a positive id considering the number of lookalikes. We have been told that in France you can take a mushroom to the pharmacy and they will identify it for you. |   9:00:19 PM   Mushroom hunting   

Planning for the Fosse Septic

With the builders due to arrive in a couple of weeks we thought it was time to double check the plans, paying particular attention to waste and water supplies. The first job of the builders is to break up the existing floor and lay a new concrete floor with the necessary waste pipes buried in the floor ready to take all the foul water out to the new septic tank. The positions of the pipes protuding from the floor is critical as that is where the downstairs toilets, kitchens and shower will be sited. We have moved a few things around, partly for asethetic and practical reasons, so that necessitated lots of Tipex, redrawing, photocopying, moving cut-out beds and kitchens around etc. We also reorganised some of the upstairs rooms to make the path for the waste pipes easier. Moving one small thing has a knock-on to lots of other things. I wished we had an electronic copy of the original architect's drawings as it took an awfully long time jiggling about. |   8:59:47 PM   Planning for the Fosse Septic   

Now it gets personal

My battle with the moles enters a new phase. The traps have never caught anything and the smoke cartridges just seem to deter them for a few days so a neighbour has lent me two explosive mole killing devices. It consists of an small explosive charge, about the size of a biro top, with an electrical connection for detonation. The charge is placed in the gallery (mole run) and the firing mechanism sits on the surface activated by a plunger placed in the mole hill. The idea is that when the mole moves the earth in the hill the charge fires and bye bye mole. I've just set the two of them on a patch of lawn out of the front of the house. My neighbour swears by them, this year he hasn't had any moles at all.

Caroline has finished painting all the windows in Cerise and everything looks much better. A few coats of paint works wonders. I'm a real fan of French style windows. Because they open inwards it means you can clean and paint the outside without resorting to ladders. In addition they easily lift off the hinges so you can take them all downstairs and paint in the sunshine.

|   9:10:00 PM   Now it gets personal   

Back online

France Telecom came and fiddled about with the wires up the pole over the road, and the crackle on the line has disappeared. My dial-up connection is much much better, more reliable and I always get 45K now. It's only got to last a few more months and then we should be on broadband.

Finished Do Not Pass Go: From the Old Kent Road to Mayfair -- Tim Moore, last night. The book recounts the story of Tim Moore's journey around the Monopoly board of London and is full of anecdotes and trivial about each of the stops on the way. There are a few diversions about how in The World Monopoly championships they actually play for real money, and that all the main line railway terminuses in London were built during Queen Victoria's reign. Even if you have only ever walked down just a few of the Monopoly streets then this book is still very very funny.

Tomorrow it's time to start, The Da Vinci Code -- Dan Brown, which is the book I have actually been waiting to read for ages. It arrived in my Amazon order a while ago and has been staring at me from the shelf say, 'Skip Bond Street, go straight to Mayfair'.

|   9:05:45 PM   Back online   

Telephones

It's a bit ironic that after France Telecom phoned about ADSL last night our telephone line has gone on the blink. It's still useable for voice but it's so crackley that modem speeds are way down and we keep losing the connection. Caroline phone FT this morning and they arrived this afternoon to fix the problem after testing the line remotely. Unfortunately, Caroline was out and I was round the back and missed them. They are coming tomorrow morning to have another go. Pretty good service really.

I've spent quite a while rubbing down the windows and door in Cerise ready for Caroline to start painting tomorrow. We've had a clear spell of weather so while it's dry we may as well take advantage. Hopefully we should get a couple of coats on before Saturday when we have people arriving.

Seventeen mole hills popped up today, and to really rub my nose in it, they where all within a few feet of my mole deterrent. I reckon there must be a whole city down there.

|   9:37:17 PM   Telephones   

ADSL is coming

Caroline took a phone call tonight from France Telecom trying to sell us ADSL. He didn't have to try very hard, we have been waiting to buy for two years. Yes, Yes send me an order form. Rural France is not well supported by Broadband so we hadn't held out much hope, but the great news is it's coming on the 2nd of December. Fantastic news, I'm getting a bit fed-up with dial-up now more and more sites expect high speed connections. Roll on December.

|   11:35:14 PM   ADSL is coming   

Running gites - what do you do all day ?

It's like being on holiday every day. Well actually it not quite like that, running gites is fun and rewarding and also hard work. It involves a much more than drinking wine in the warm summer evenings with the guests. It's nice to have a holiday atmosphere and we both enjoy a glass or two outside the gites and the trips to the beaches with the children, but there is much that goes on behind the scenes to make the gites what they are and to giving people a nice holiday.

For us the season is split into two fairly separate chunks; the 'summer' months (Easter & June through to September) when we have guests staying in the gites, and then out-of-season with the occasional guest, but usually the gites are unoccupied.

During the Summer months we have much more of a routine. It varies with the weather and job list in the garden but it generally fits a similar pattern:-

• Saturday - All day cleaning and preparing for the next guests due to stay in the three gites. It can be a bit touch and go sometimes if one of us has to rush out and buy a replacement item. Any urgent remedial maintenance. Buy fresh bread and croissants for the welcome pack.
• Sunday - Load after load in the washing machines. It's just a continuous stream of washing and drying. If possible we try to go out with the children because we are busy all day Saturday.
• Monday - Tidy and clean our own house and shopping. Bit of gardening and weeding and mowing the lawns. Hours and hours of ironing gite linen.
• Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday is our weekend. There are always things to do around the grounds, we are effectively running four houses, but our time is much more flexible and we spend more time together as a family.
• Friday - Bin day, strimming and mowing lawns again, replenish stocks for gite supplies and prepare for gite changeover day tomorrow.

Along with the time required by a young family we also spend a while chatting with the guests and answering queries, checking the play equipment works, making sure the play area is tidy, feeding and cleaning the chickens and other animals, recycling glass etc. Granted it is not a full time job every day, but the mental commitment is full time and during the summer we are always available.

It is much easier with all the gites together on the same property with our house. I don't think it would be possible if the gites were scattered around. Day to day maintenance and emergency repairs are much easier if you can DIY. Having to call on a plumber for a blocked drain or some other problem at short notice will certainly be difficult, if not expensive.

Out-of-season is our chance to make larger changes and improvements to the gites and the grounds. Apart from any remedial and maintenance work done in the Summer this is our opportunity to update each gite. For example last year,

• we replaced a fixed window in Pomme with a new opening window to allow more fresh air into the gite.
• fitted a new staircase in Cerise, replacing an old steel spiral staircase.
• resculptured some of the gardens to put in three new flower beds and some hedging around the lawns.
• replaced some old fencing.
• painted the windows and doors at the front of our house and two of the three gites
• shifted 30 tonnes of gravel

This winter the planned changes, apart from creating the two new gites, are to change the staircase in Poire and enlarge the larger bedroom to include a extra window.

In addition to the work on the gites there is the paperwork required to run a French limited company and our End-of-Year accounts to prepare and submit. No easy task in a foreign language. Marketing and promotion via printed advertising and our web-site needs updating, checking and supplementing. You can't just sit back and hope guests will arrive.

Last year I spent a couple of weeks pollarding, copicing and chopping down trees for firewood. All the wood needed logging and splitting for storage. Most of the wood is stored for a couple of years, so it vital to plan ahead and replenish your stocks. We use wood burning fires exclusively to heat the house, and just keeping them stocked and running is no mean feat.

I haven't included the problems of finding your way around, learning the language and culture, putting the kids into a foreign school, making new friends, living and working with your spouse 24 hours a day. The activities outside the day-to-day routine is not that easy, but maybe that story is for another time.

It's not all work and no play. We have fetes and festivals we can attend, English and French friends we see for dinner and repas. There is often something going on and the French culture involves the children much more. We rarely have a baby sitter and usually take the children out with us, especially the French events.

We have had wonderful guests and take great pride in what we do. We both worked for IT companies and then for ourselves in England, but this is much more satisfying. It is very hard work, in fact I've never worked harder in my life, so why are we doing it ? Giving people great holidays is very rewarding and the choices and benefits you gain by being self-employed are worth it, even if we will never be rich. It's not the easy life, or the quiet life, but it is the good life.

|   11:11:32 PM   Running gites - what do you do all day ?   

Walnuts

Walnut trees, Juglans regia, are deciduous trees that grow up to 30m (100ft) and bear fruit in September/October. The timber is also used for it's beautiful markings. The leaves, when crushed, give out an aromatic smell which is said to produce light-headedness, drowsiness or even nausea.

In our garden we have several walnut trees of various sizes that produce many kilos of walnuts each year. Most of the time we just leave the walnuts to fall and to rot or be collected by squirrels etc. but added to an apple pie they are delicious.

The walnuts are green on the tree, oval and about 5cm (2") long with a thick fleshy husk. Inside is the walnut fruit with it's wrinkled shell. I understand that you can collect them when they are green and pickle them.

One trick I have used to increase walnut production is to beat the walnut tree trunk and branches with a stick in early Spring. Apparently this frightens the tree into a generating more fruit to reproduce. It's most probably an old wife's tale, but this year it worked for me. Last year's harvest was much lower than this year's, but the weather last year was hotter and drier. So who knows, but as the proverb goes "A dog, a wife, and a walnut tree: the more you beat them, the better they be."

Two other walnut tree facts;

• that a walnut tree can bleed to death if pruned. That's what some books say, but in late Spring or early Summer I have lightly pruned some overhanging branches and a few internal branches without any obvious problems.
• dashboards for Rolls Royce's are made from the walnut wood in the heart of the roots. You don't get much, but maybe that's why they are in Rolls Royces.

The green fruits, pictured, eventually fall from the tree in September or October and husk slowly dries up going black as it does. Eventually it falls off the internal seed revealing a light brown wrinkly walnut we know from the supermarket. My walnuts are slightly smaller and oval shaped rather than the ping-pong ball sized versions you buy commercially.

If you collect the walnuts with most of the blackening husk still attached and pop them in a string bag (like you buy oranges in) and hang the bag up away from rodents and squirrels, eventually you end up with a bag full of walnuts. When they are relatively fresh the shell can be removed easily to expose whole walnut fruits. By the time Christmas arrives you end up with the ritual grunting and groaning with a pair of inadequate nut crackers.

When collecting walnuts where the husk has already started to go black, beware, as they ooze a dark brown liquid which stains. Even on fingers the walnut staining lasts for quite a while.

|   7:22:18 PM   Walnuts   

Garden flowers competition

We got an official looking letter from the Marie of Les Champs Geraux today which we opened with some trepidation. After consulting the French-English dictionary to verify, it turns out that we have won a prize in the Concours de Fleurissement, a competition to discover whose house had the best flowers in the commune of Les Champs Geraux. There were three categories;

1. Façade avec balcon - house front with balcony
2. Façade cour et petit jardin - courtyard and small garden
3. Grand jardin - large garden

and we won the third category, large garden with the best flowers. Caroline was absolutely thrilled to bits, she has worked really hard this year, raising cuttings, planting, propagating, weeding etc. I did the easy bit and drove her Valentine's present (a rotovator) around the lawn (a la Tom Good) to make the flower beds. Obviously we try to make the gardens nice for the guests staying in the gites, but this is a unexpected and pleasant surprise, in fact we didn't even know we had entered a competition. We get presented with a prize at a village ceremony in January.

Must add picture of prize winning gardens to web site :-)

|   8:38:23 PM   Garden flowers competition   

Permis de Construire

The 'foreman' for the renovation works arrived today on a flying visit to nail up the sign with the permis de construire number and various other information, the local Marie, building surface area, contractors names etc. Every site has a board, I think it's a requirement to erect it 2 months before work commences to forewarn everyone, however he told us work will be starting in the beginning of October. |   5:27:17 PM   Permis de Construire   

Green monster

Bit of a gardening marathon today. Looks like the weather is about to turn for the worst so we both got stucvk in and blitzed the mowing, strimming, weeding and general gardening stuff. While Caroline was digging she came across this huge green catepillar/slug thing with white and black diagonal stripes. The front end is bottom right and it's got a spike (tail) at the rear. The picture is about life-sized, 6–7 cm long. A very odd beast, identification comments welcome.

|   5:25:17 PM   Green monster   

New gite renovation blog

I've started a separate category to blog all my entries regarding the gite renovations in one place. All the renovation posts will still be logged here in my main blog but will copied and collected together in a separate gite renovation blog for posterity.

So, to just read about the renovations visit gite renovation blog (or use the link top left) otherwise just continue reading here to see everything, old gites and new gites.

|   9:13:46 AM   New gite renovation blog   

Retro motoring

Nativite N.-D.

Took the car in for a service today to a local garage and received the most wonderful courtesy car. It's a very old Peugeot 30something (the badge has fallen off) that rattles more than a milkfloat, the steering wheel seems to be only loosley connected to the front wheels, no power steering, no air conditioning, no central locking, a manual choke (remember those ?) doors you can see daylight through round the edge, no hub caps, very very shabby paintwork, and a boot jammed shut. The speedo doesn't work at all and I suspect that most of the other dials only give the vaguest indication of the true reading. It does however have velour seats :-) a 5 speed gearbox and electric windows, that work (well the drivers door) !

I love it.

|   6:33:41 PM   Retro motoring   

Woodworm treatment

Upstairs in the barn is one large void (15m ^x 6m) with old oak beams and bracing and cross pieces. As you can see it looks fantastic and I hope to leave much of the best woodwork exposed when renovated. There is evidence of woodworm on some of the structure, so just to be sure I have sprayed, using a garden spray, wormwood treatment on all the wood. I bought a 25L drum but ended up making an early afternoon trip to Rennes to buy another two drums. I've got one left for the ceiling beams downstairs. It was a horrible hot job, goggled and masked up, balanced on a wobbly working platform with a 500W halogen lamp warming the place nicely, not to mention the 200 m² of black slate 'radiator' above my head.

|   6:31:54 PM   Woodworm treatment   

Bread on wheels

Saint Bertrand

The mobile boulangerie has come to town. Living in the French countryside does have is drawbacks, one is you have to drive everywhere. One of those places is the bread shop. Sometimes we visit it twice a day, French bread seems to go stale about 10 minutes after leaving the boulangerie. From tomorrow the local bread shop is running a delivery service, door-to-door. It only comes on Tuesday and Friday, but we don't have to order anything and just buy from the back of the van. Hopefully he should do a bit of trade when we have guests.

It takes me back to 1972 when I remember living in a small village in Devon and looking forward to Thursday night when the mobile fish and chip van came. Half the village would appear and queue round the village green for "cod and chips twice please, no salt and vinegar". Delicious, though I often thought that the dangers of driving a van with 50 gallons of boiling hot fat slopping about behind me as an occupation best left to others.

|   8:35:04 PM   Bread on wheels   

Beach navigator

Saint Raïssa

Kelloggs Crunchy Nut Cornflakes for breakfast.

Pheww, most probably the hottest day (37C) for about a month, so we did what just about everyone else did on a Sunday and head for the beach. Quelle suprise, we got stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the beach. It wasn't too bad because we stopped by the road side and had a picnic with a glass of red wine, which helped enormously. The beach was very busy, busier than high season in August, mainly I think because the weather this summer was much cooler and wetter than normal. Good surf for the kids on the beach and the water was remarkably warm, very pleasant afternoon.

Because of the traffic Caroline did some demon navigating with her large scale 'OS' map along some very minor roads and it only took us a few minutes longer than normal. I felt a bit like a rally driver with a co-pilot, 'left 100 yards, over cross roads, second right, sharp bend....'. Got to see lots of new countryside flash by.

One of Caroline's new chickens laid an egg this morning. So when the man said they were point-of-lay, he was correct, well for one of them anyway.

|   9:14:49 PM   Beach navigator   

Repeat gite business

Saint Rosalie

Apart from the usually full-on manic Saturday, which is gite changeover day, we have both taken advantage of the improvement in the weather over the last few days. Lots of weeding, mowing, strimming and general tidying, which is much easier now the children are back at school. They have had a great summer especially with our friends from England over the last week. We all had a great time.

One of guests, who has been to our gites before, knew we were partial the Kelloggs Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, and so when they arrived they presented us with two boxes. Yummy. We have started getting quite a bit of repeat business with gite bookings for 2005 and beyond. Repeat business is great for both of us, the guests know exactly what they are getting, and for us we know what to expect and it makes us feel good that people want to come back.

|   9:13:19 PM   Repeat gite business   

Things have changed

Saint Ingrid

A minor pause in the weblog due to a few late nights with our friends who came over from England to see us. One family stayed in our gites and another in a gite just around the corner. It's a shame our kids went back to school this week as they could only play with their friends (one boy & three girls) from England on Wednesday and each evening, although we all had a lovely day at Pen Guen beach yesterday.

Early to bed for school gave us a bit more adult time to catch up on things in England and the things the other kids and everyone else has been doing. After just two years we have realised how much our lives have changed compared to what it would have been like if we had not moved to France. I suppose the most notable thing was the amount of time we have compared to everyone else. We seem to have more time to socialise (with friends and our children) and the competitive 'rush rush' attitude in England does not seem to exist here. It helps that we don't spend half our day in the car getting to work or school. I guess this is what search for 'quality of life' is about.

Finished clearing upstairs in the barn and removed old steel sliding gate from the front ready for the builders. Some of the floorboards were a bit rotten and there was evidence of woodworm. I think I may have to get the garden spray out and dowse everything with woodworm treatment before the plasterboard and insulation gets fitted.

Caroline bought 6 new point of lay chickens this afternoon. Two brown, two black and two white. At the moment they are all sticking together like new children on the block with the 'old hands' probing the youngsters from the edge establishing the pecking order.

|   7:34:42 PM   Things have changed