Its nearly Christmas.....

Last weekend I completed a round trip using Easyjet from Luton airport, and whilst I still do not like the airport (and said so in a customer survey) the experience was better this time as the flight used one of the gates in the main, small, terminal building as opposed to the Easyjet shed. So it was better but still not up to the same standard as Stansted. So enough griping about airports, after all it is my choice to fly every weekend.

Its nearly Christmas so that means Christmas shopping, and preparing the car for the trip down to Sigogne from London. I went to Hamleys to do the stocking shopping for Fleur and although it was heaving with people there no queues at the tills which was very surprising, and meant I got everything I wanted and was out in less than half an hour.

I just have to go to the DIY shop for paint for room 3 which should be in a position to have some paint thrown at it over the Christmas period, and a visit to the supermarket for a top up of popadums for Fleur, nan bread, and a few Christmas things such as crackers and a Crimbo pudding…

Despite telling our web designer we cannot pay her until the end of January and then her telling us she cannot start designing the site until February (so in the end everything works out just fine), she has already started working on logos and giving us ideas for the site. Along with our speedy builders things seem to be moving forward a bit quicker than we expected on all fronts at the moment. The building work is still on target for a mid January finish, so things are looking very positive as 2007 comes to a close…

As of Friday (21st) it will be good bye London Bridge for 2 weeks and bonjour Sigogne, wonderful.. the only down side is that both Franca and I have picked up heavy colds, but hopefully after a coulple of days we will be right as rain.

So a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our readers, and maybe we will see you at Au Bellefleur in 2008…..

And more decorations

Christmas decorations

What is a village, without the Village People?

Speedy Builders

The building work on the third room is progressing well, walls for the bathroom are up, the first fix of plumbing is also in, and this week we will get the second fix, once the builder has got tiles in place behind the shower unit. Floor tiles and wall tiles were bought at the weekend, and we are starting to get a bit more savy about buying materials, so the all the main components of room 3 have been purchased at sale prices, so we are doing our best to keep control of the costs on this room, the only thing we have paid full price for so far is the water heater.

The main challenge we are facing in this phase is the eternal cash flow problem, because these guys are moving relatively quickly we need more money at the front end of the project than I expected however that will be solved this week and room 3 will be able to be finished on time, but it is certainly touch & go, who says we would not have made good TV, the only thing we do not do is shout at each other.

I will have to make sure we have the money in place for the next phase as this is the big one, as they say, so we may have a couple of months of inactivity at least from the builders point of view, whilst we build up enough money to pay for the next part of the project. Stay tuned folks it is going to get very interesting over the first half of 2008.

Luton airport is not for me

I’m back into the routine for a couple of weeks, so having fought my way through the morning rush hour traffic on the Bordeaux peripherique I am now sitting in the departure lounge of Bordeaux airport waiting for the 10:15 flight back to Gatwick, and the good news is the plane is already here to take us back to the UK, so we should be on time.

We have just had a very wet weekend in Sigogne, so a perfect time for putting up Christmas decorations and pottering around the house. Having said that, we spent Saturday morning playing catch up, because we left it too late to start, around the DIY stores of Cognac & Jarnac, hunting for tiles for the bathroom in room 3. We bought all the tiles for 300€, less the decorative frieze which will cost 200€ and is on a week’s delivery, but all in all the bargain hunting went well. Then it was off to Jarnac to buy a Christmas tree, the one we wanted, a Norwegian Pine was 60€ which was a bit expensive but it was 6ft (2m) tall, so we settled for an ordinary tree at 22€ but still 6ft tall and we will do some extra sweeping over the festive period if we forget to water it. Fleur then spent the afternoon decorating the tree, Fleur style.

I had planned for us to go out to eat at Hotel Karina on Saturday evening, but we went to franca’s friend Fabiola for dinner on Friday night and we did not get home until midnight, so I figured out that Fleur will not be such good company eating out again on Saturday night, so even though Franca did not appreciate it, we ate at home, but we will go there this coming Saturday. Dinner at Fabiola’s was very nice, they have 2 houses and I think 3 barns on their land, they have almost finished the smallest house which is where they are living whilst they work on the other buildings, and the reason for the dinner was to show us their new 90% complete kitchen which looked very nice, and was custom built by Patrick, Fabiola’s better half. Fabiola is not a typical French name, and that is because she is from Guatemala, Patrick is French, and he is one of the lucky public sector workers who are allowed to retire at 50, and he retired just three weeks ago, so he has plenty of time to work on the rest of their building project. Dinner was excellent and the company was fine and the whole evening was great for my French which is still struggling to get past the tourist stage.

I am having to travel to Bordeaux from Luton for a couple of weeks in December as BA do not appear to be laying on an afternoon flight from Gatwick to Bordeaux, or its completely sold out which is unusual, there is always space in club class at a price. Luton airport really is awful once you get through to the departures area. It is very bleak and dark going through to the Easyjet shed, and that is the only way I can describe it. It is one of these so called silent terminals, but there appear to be unintelligible announcements every few minutes. I am pleased that I do not have to use Luton every week, it would be a truly depressing experience, I always thought Luton was a modern airport like Stansted, to be honest I would say give me Ryanair from Stansted over Easyjet from Luton any day.

Well time to get on the plane…

What else is November famous for

It was fleur's birthday, sadly as it fell on a Wednesday I could not be there for the actual day but we had a small party on the Sunday before and Franca's mum came down as well so Fleur did not miss me completely. She was spoilt with lots of great presents, how many children of 5 have a real telescope (no I did not buy it), trouble is the weather has been aweful since so we have not been able to use it yet. If you look on Franca's blog she has posted lots of photos of the parties, she had three, and by special request I had to bring the cakes from the UK, which made for some amusing comments as I went through security at Gatwick airport, but all three arrived unscathed in France.

November also sees the start of the BBC's Children in Need, well, to be more precise Strictly Come Dancing, which apart from Ceebies is Fleur's favourite program. She insists on getting dressed up as soon as the program comes on, she has two special princess dresses which look like ball gowns, and she dances along with who ever she can get to dance with her, oh well girls will be girls.

What happened to November

Well November sort of passed me by in a flash, I’m not sure where it went but appears to be December already. As you will have seen room 2 (Nature) is finished and this week our new builder begins work on room 3. Franca though a change of builder was in order after the debacle of the last room, so hopefully room 3 will get finished by the middle to end of January, and since we have purchased a few of the big items already we will be able to keep the cost of this room below 10,000€. We have also had a slight re-design of our planned layout which has resulted in Fleur loosing her room for the time being, not that she used it very much, so to have such valuable real estate sitting around doing nothing did not really make much sense. So Fleur’s room and the adjoining room are going to be knocked into one to create a large double room with an en-suite shower room. We decided that our previous plan would result in two quite small (and therefore not so saleable) double rooms, whereas this layout should give us a flexible enough space that it can be a double room, twin room or even a small triple, lets see what the finished item looks like in January.

So what have I been up to in November, well the project I am employed to work on in London is reaching a very busy stage, so I have been over to Ireland to checkout how the developers have been getting on with building the new system that I am supposed to implement. I have now switched to using Bordeaux airport for the winter period so I am getting used to fighting my way through the Bordeaux morning rush hour to catch my flight. It is still worth doing as I gets me to the office 2 hours earlier than using any other airport. The recent train strike in France just goes to show the grass is not always greener on the other side, as I lost a Sunday driving to Paris Charles de Gaulle to get a flight to Ireland, then the following Friday I had to take the Eurostar back to France to collect my car from Paris and then drive back down to Sigogne. It cost me a fortune which I am trying to get back via insurance, wish me luck!

So in summary I have been earning corn during November, and since we had basically run out of money that was not bad thing. We now have enough cash to pay for room 3, then we will have to save up for the next huge step, which will include completing the roof refurbishment started last year and replacing floor joists over three rooms including the kitchen. We really need to get this completed by around May 2008 if we are to get much of the 2008 summer trade, it is going to begin early in 2008 as Easter is so early. We will also have to take a bit of a flyer as they say, in starting to put out advertising for 2008, otherwise we will definitely miss the boat. This will include getting our new website off the ground in January, so it is going to be another cash intensive start to the new year. That means of course that I will continue to work in London to earn the cash to pay for all of this, and the reality is dawning on me that I will be working right through 2008 to pay for the rest of the building work, and maybe into 2009 to be able to pay for the swimming pool complex which is right on the back burner at the moment.

Well enough waffling from me for the moment, hopefully I will be back with another instalment before the end of the year, time to jump on the plane….