Wall to wall sunshine

We have just had another glorious weekend in Sigogne, 2 days of icy clear mornings giving way to wall to wall sunshine and 20 degrees. The price we pay for this lovely weather is fog, this morning it was not too bad, only affecting the first 10 Km and the last 20 Km of my journey to Bordeaux airport.

Rather than give in to temptation and spend the whole weekend in the garden, we got on with finishing room 3, Tournesol’, so the final coats of paint were applied to the ceiling and walls and skirting boards installed. Sadly I did not have enough skirting board to complete that task, and since I bought them in Bordeaux, I will have to finish that job next week. I took the windows off removed the double glazing and gave them a good rub down. I think this is the first time since the windows were installed that the secondary glazing has been removed, there were lots of tell tale signs of folks painting round the secondary glazing. I painted the windows with the same emulsion as the walls, which will keep them consistent in the short term with the rest of the room, and will act as a good under coat and they can have the top coat applied later when the room is not booked. The finishing touches should be applied next weekend such as putting up curtain rails, and curtains as well as a few maintenance jobs in the bathroom then it is finished. One small fly in the ointment is that we cannot get the water in the bathroom hot enough so we will have to speak to Frank our plumber and see if he can check out the new boiler he installed for us. One of the advantages of the nice weather is you can take a few jobs outside and so I was able to paint the door to ‘Tournesol’ again with emulsion for the first coat, then next weekend we have to work out what the top coat will be.

We were invited for and ‘extended’ cocktail by our neighbours, well actually they are three houses along, but they are the people Franca sees most often. This was always going to be a struggle for me, an evening in French after a full days work on the house, but we got by with Franca doing the majority of the talking, but even she was running out of things to talk about and I was not really helping, with moving conversations on as I cannot form a sentence quickly enough to be of any help, at least I am understanding much more now. A familiar pattern seems to be forming as this is how I learnt Dutch, I will have another few months of listening and understanding more, then I will make my first tentative steps into conversational French and finally get past the tourist stage. It’s a pity because they have a collection of old/classic cars which I would be very interested in seeing and even helping with, however that will have to wait until my French improves.

The big news of the week was that we had an inspection from the tourist board in Jarnac, a nice lady who is also a parent at Fleur’s school. She liked what we had done to the house so far and we will be added to their web site. We have to do a few things to be fully compliant such as including the price of breakfast in the overall cost of the room, putting price lists in each room and outside the gates. Since we are now official we have to get our public liability insurance and 3rd party accident insurance in place and register at the Marie for a ‘breakfast licence’. We will then investigate the process for getting and alcohol licence which has to be applied for in Cognac. So we have a few hoops to jump through before we are as legal as we should be.

Below are some photos of progress on room 3 'Tournesol' showing the bathroom construction, knocking two rooms into one and then the not quite finished version, just dressing the room to go as they say on all the lifestyle programs.