Running a Gite in Brittany

Foret De Villecartier

We went with the children and some friends to the Forêt De Villecartier - Villecartier Forest - this afternoon. It's a large lake within a large forest, with electric model boats for hire that take up to four people, various walks and cycle tracks around the lake and through the forests, picnic areas, a cafe, etc. However the most impressive thing was the 'aerial assault course' in the trees. It was huge, and looked like really good fun. There were three courses all suspended up in the trees with various ropes, death-slides, bridges, climbing nets and swings. They kitted you out in a harness with a couple of caribiners, that you clipped on and off the wires as you traversed the course, and it looked like you also got your own personal 'sliding wheel' which hooked onto the death-slides. The information desk said it cost 20€ and took about 3 to 4 hours to do the training and complete the course. If, unlike me, you were young, fit and healthy it looked like a really good day out.

Foret De Villecartier is just South of Pontorson at the bottom of the Cherbourg peninsula.

|   7:51:41 PM   Foret De Villecartier   

One week left

A month ago I said the first new gite would be finished by the end of next week.

Over two weeks ago I said the first new gite would be finished in a week or so.

Well it isn't yet! There's been a few distractions and things have taken much longer than expected. We have been busy most days but minor finishing touches keep cropping up and take ages to finish. Caroline has finished painting all the door frames and architraves, and put lassure (kind of varnish) on the oak window sills, various bits of wood trim and a window that I built. The oak window sills look really good, the lassure has brought the grain out of the wood.

I've put an unplanned door and some plasterboard under the stairs to cover the hot water cylinder. More painting and rubbing down in the downstairs bedroom, three loft hatches, some loft insulation (horrible job), cover for the fuse box, ... You get the picture.

The gite will be finished by next Saturday. It has to be because we've taken a booking. Arggg. As long as I don't slash my wrist open again everything should be fine. So, photos of the completed project next week :-) Fingers crossed.

|   11:48:45 PM   One week left   

Free web advertising for gites

Added our three existing gites to a free website advertising gites.

Cerise, Pomme and Poire

|   11:07:24 PM   Free web advertising for gites   

Website woes

As regular readers may remember I bought a new website about 4 months ago, partly out of vanity and partly, for superfluous reasons, it was easier to spell, fit on printed paperwork, and dictate on the phone etc. Well the old website, www.brittany-holiday-gites.com had been on the first page of Google for about 2 years, but since the change the new website, www.brittanygites.com, has languished down at page 5 or 6 and dropping fast for the same search terms. It's currently on page 12. The redirect was meant to be seamless and just transfer visitors and search engines to the new site without a loss in rankings and hits. It wasn't to be.

This is a bit of a disaster. We get nearly all our gite business through the website, and our booking calendar reflects the problem. Last year we already had quite a few bookings for the following Summer and a fair amount of out-of-season bookings. This year, nothing. It's serious. We do have some printed advertising in Chez Nous, here, but the brochure doesn't come out until November.

As a test, about 3 weeks ago, I removed the redirect from the old site to the new site and placed a single page with some basic information about the gites on the old site. Suddenly the old site pops back to the top of Google and stays there, with the new site still plummeting like a stone.

The up shot of all this is Caroline and I have been writing a new website for the last week to replace the single page on the old site. We needed new words and pictures to avoid being penalised by Google for duplicate content, and anyway, we needed to add the two new gites. As part of the exercise I decided to learn CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, to jazz up the presentation and make future changes easier. CSS hasn't been easy, especially with so many different web browsers providing varying levels of support for the language. It's been harder than I expected, but a nice intellectual challenge. The new version of the old site http://www.brittany-holiday-gites.com has been published and fingers crossed Google will continue to like the content.

With the distraction of the website design work, things have been going a little slowly on the gite renovation, and my friend Ian who helps out alot, has been on holiday for a couple of weeks. It's hard to motivate yourself when working on a large project on your own everyday. It's easy to find excuses to get another coffee, or finish a bit early etc. Hopefully with the website redesign out of the way and Ian coming back things should start to move along a bit faster.

|   12:19:35 AM   Website woes   

Build an oak window sill

Along with all the minor fiddly jobs I've been doing in the gite, one of those I have put off for a long time has been making a window sill in the lounge. It's a slightly complicated shape with a large sloping return on one end. The window sill I made last week for the kitchen was a simple straight run, but was a useful test run.

Three bits of oak plank planed and thickness and then glued edge to edge larger than the finished size. I stuck a large 50kg weight ontop to prevent bowing or twisting.

Glue dried and ready to shape. At it's widest point the planks are about 54cm. I didn't have any oak that wide, hence the gluing.

On the underside of the long edge I had to rebate out a shape that matched my finger. That's because the inside edge of the window frame has mastic sealant run along the bottom edge.

Cut into shape with a circular and jigsaw. The top edge has also been rounded with the router. Just needs a jolly good sanding down.

Installed in position and ready for a tint and oil finish.

|   8:31:40 PM   Build an oak window sill   

Straw chateau

After the sighting of the straw people the other day, another object has appeared in a field on the other side of the village. A gigantic straw castle. It's not quite finished yet, but still pretty impressive.

|   5:07:19 PM   Straw chateau   

Gite renovation timelapse

For a bit of fun I've created a 'slideshow' using Picasa of the gite renovation in pictures. Broadband users only.

|   8:48:15 PM   Gite renovation timelapse   

Installing a wet room shower

After a small layoff I've started to get back into the renovation. Yesterday I decided to make a window sill for the kitchen out of an old piece of oak I found in my workshop. It should have been a short job, but due to the irregular shape I ended up having to use:-

• A planer/thicknesser
• Sanding machine (belt and disc)
• Router, for the curved edge and a rebate to fit the window
• A handsaw
• Bench circular saw

All that, and a couple of hours, just for a window sill.

Recess in concrete floor for shower.
Shower tray.
Tray installed plus waterproof band.

Today I decided to tackle the walk-in shower tray that's been staring at me for months. One of the gites has a downstairs bedroom and en-suite bathroom designed for handicapped access, so it needed a flat 'wet room' style shower installed. The recess in the concrete floor and the drainage was finished at the end of last year, but I've been putting off fitting the actual shower tray until today. The tray (from Wedi) is a pre-formed unit about 4cm thick with the necessary slopes and angles built in ready for tiling. The center of the tray has a push in siphon/tray that lines up with the pipework in the floor. The whole lot was then stuck down with a flexible tile adhesive and I also ran a waterproof strip around the edges of the shower to prevent water ingress between the floor and wall. Fortunately the recess and underfloor plumbing all lined up perfectly. Something I have learnt is that good preparation is worth the investment. It just needs tiling now!

Because things went smoothly I decided to tackle another job I've been putting off - architraves around the doors. Last time I did it I painted the architraves before fitting, and the finish wasn't that good. This time a friend suggested I undercoat both sides, fit the architraves and then paint the door frame and architrave at the same time. More cutting in, and potential gloss paint splodges on the walls, but I'll give it a go. Apart from getting a huge blob of 'No More Nails' glue (Ni Clou Ni Vis en Francaise) in my hair - which I didn't notice for 3 hours - that's another job ticked off.

Still got a fairly large list of finishing off jobs - but I think it's getting smaller.

|   8:06:23 PM   Installing a wet room shower   

Gite changeover day

All three gites needed a changeover today. It's the first time for a while that everyone has left at the same time. Fortunately no repairs were needed this week. Quite often something needs fixing on a Saturday, and with three gites to clean and prepare for new guests it doesn't leave much spare time to go shopping or get the toolbox out. The most common breakage seems to be toilet seats. I've no idea why or how they get broken but now we are used to it and keep a couple spare. We know some other gite owners and they all have the same problem with toilet seats. Bizarre. Maybe French loo seats aren't designed for foreign bottoms ?

We completed all the repairs after our water leak by Thursday afternoon. The plumbers replaced the pipework on Wednesday and Ian and I then relaid the floor tiles and filled in the hole in the patio putting everything back ship shape. You'd hardly know we been. The incident put a minor dent in our renovation schedule for the new gites, but nothing too serious. Hopefully we should have the first new gite finished within the next week or so.

|   6:09:37 PM   Gite changeover day   

Straw people

A couple of days these two appeared in a local field. As an indication of their size the ladies earrings are made from car tyres. Very artistic farmers we have in France.

I think they are going to be used to advertise the local agricultural show in Les Champs Geraux next month.

|   5:48:19 PM   Straw people   

Speed cameras in France

I found a useful site that lists all the locations of the fixed speed cameras in France and particularly the speed cameras in Brittany.

|   6:19:57 PM   Speed cameras in France   

Water leak

Well I thought I was all set for a lazy Sunday afternoon yesterday after watching the Grand Prix until one of the guests noticed water seeping, well pouring almost, out of the stone wall at the back of one of our existing gites near the laundry room. Either we had discovered a new underground spring below the floor or something was seriously amiss with the plumbing. The odd thing was there are no water pipes at the rear of the gites and no sign of dampness or water inside the gite.

A little investigation later revealed a water leak under the concrete floor at the front of the gite where the main water supply enters and then runs off to supply our house and the other two gites. A leak in the rising main under a floor is not good, especially after looking at the dials on the water meter spinning round like a demented clock. Being a Sunday, and fully booked there was little remedial action we could take. We agreed with the guests to turn the water off at 10pm after everyone had eaten, washed etc. then turn it back on at 8am the next morning; today. There was still enough water pressure to run the taps, showers etc. Fortunately the water was running through a void under the concrete floor and escaping below floor level at the rear. No real damage except to the bank balance.

This morning the plumber arrived and after a little excavation and removing a few floor tiles it looked like the leak was caused by a faulty elbow joint in the 32mm plastic supply pipe buried beneath the floor under the front door. Access was almost impossible without taking up a large part of the floor in the gite. Not something we relished. So the plumber cut the pipe in the wall at floor level and blocked off the end of the pipe then rigged up a temporary supply from the water meter round the back of the house and into a connection near the boiler. Effectively the water was flowing into the system backwards, bypassing the original supply running under the courtyard. At least we had water.

The plumber had another job this afternoon so he left us with instructions to dig up the patio at the front of the gite so we could gain access to the original incoming pipe, which could then be cut and a new section fed under the door sill, under the floor and back up to the floor and reconnected. The idea was to pull out the damaged section and replace it with a new pipe. That meant my friend Ian and I have been digging a fairly large hole all afternoon and clearing an opening from outside to inside the gite below floor level for the new pipe. It took a while but we eventually found the supply pipe under the patio about half a meter down. Now we are just waiting for the plumber to arrive tomorrow and replace the damaged section.

That's the last time I plan on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

|   6:53:36 PM   Water leak