this St Patricks Day - stay safe

An extra entry as I am sat at another airport waiting for a flight. This time I am waiting at Shannon airport in South West Ireland waiting to fly back to the UK. I have been working at my ‘during the week job’, the one that pays for the French building work. I have been visiting our Irish software supplier. This will be my 4^th flight this week, with Wednesday being the only day I have not been flying somewhere, such is the way of our modern life style, I must have a pretty big carbon footprint this week. I do have an offset this week, 4 trees have been delivered to Aubellefleur which will need planting out this weekend, thought I think something is going to have to make way for our mini orchard, otherwise our garden will be all trees and no open space.

It seems strange to me that here in south west Ireland the locals that live west of Limerick seems to talk with an American twang in their voice, not sure if that is the influence of Shannon airport, which is crawling with Americans arriving for St Patrick’s day weekend, or if this is where the original Irish American accent originated, my Irish history is pretty poor so I have no idea.

St Patrick’s day is of course a huge celebration in Ireland but what surprised me is the powerful messages being put out on the radio, that by Tuesday after the celebrations are over there are likely to be in the region of 20 people who will have died, mostly through drink driving related deaths over this one weekend, quite scary and the authorities are quite open about it, though it seems they are struggling to reduce it, so if your Irish stay safe this weekend, and enjoy…

It is strange that we British just cannot celebrate St Georges day in the same way as the other countries in the United Kingdom & Ireland do, and probably most other countries in the world, who have a national day. There seems to be something inherently bad about the English celebrating anything apart from the odd Jubilee.

Time to wander up to the gate and see if we are going to on one of Ryanair’s 90% of on time flights…

Back to work again...

With my cold now out of the way it was back to work this weekend, the first task was to make some sign boards to go on the wall outside, for our final bit of compliance with the local tourist board regulations, and to make it easier for our guests to find us. It took more effort to drill the holes in the gate post than to make the signs themselves. Getting electricity 60m up the garden from the house entailed joining three extension leads together ands then making sure the joints did not pull apart. But in the end we got the signs in place, so another step forward.

I have started again with building work and I have started to create the new laundry/scullery room by demolishing a wall to create one room from two existing old rooms at the back of the house joining onto the garage. We now have a nice large space to work with, and having fixed in place one of the two beams allegedly put in place by our builders to strengthen the floor of Nature we can continue with putting up the walls and the ceiling over the coming weeks. This has ended up as my project whilst the builders get on with the rest of the house. So far I have built a supporting wall, or rather finished off a supporting wall, put some dividing doors between the garage and the laundry room and made a small start on the walling. Over the coming weeks I have to insulate the ceiling and then plasterboard it over, put up the framework for the walls, insulate them and then install the plasterboard walls. I am considering if I will lay the tiled floor or if I should get the builders to do it for me. I will also have to sort out the water and electrics, which could also prove a challenge. In the end it will come down to seeing how far I get before the room is required, time being the oldest enemy here.

Our builder Bogdan (fine French name) came over this weekend to look again at the work we require doing in the next phase, and I still think he is only just starting to understand what we want in the next phase. The replacement of the roof is just the start, since we are going to create one room with an en-suite bathroom and annexe room from the existing from the existing 4 rooms. This entails the demolition of several internal walls, the replacement of the floor/ceiling joists over the kitchen and then the construction of new walls, a high ceiling following lines of the roof inside the house, a new bathroom and a new landing area on the first floor. This is just for starters, because have to make sure we can keep the money flowing to pay for it all. All this will start in May and hopefully be more or less complete by the end of July.

We have more guests this weekend, and we had a couple of problems with the menu as our butcher had run out of tournedos streaks, almost unheard of in France I would have thought, and the supermarket had also run out of lemons, another strange one but I guess it happens. Otherwise things went well and the guests seemed to like everything we served them and everything was convivial around the table. As soon as the Laundry room is working we will have to get the second dishwasher in, as one dishwasher cannot cope with the output from a 4 course meal!

What a waste of a weekend

I guess it had to come to an end, the run of fantastic sunny weekends is over, this weekend was cool and cloudy, and I spent almost all of it in bed fighting a cold. It came on during Friday morning in the office and by the time I got to Sigogne the fever had arrived and condemned me to a weekend in bed. So the weekend was not so great for anyone in our family. Fleur is not quite old enough understand what being ill means so she didn’t know why I didn’t want to play very much and kept falling asleep during the day.

Back to Bordeaux airport this morning, and amazingly there were none of the usual traffic jams on the way into Bordeaux so instead of arriving at my usual 9:00am I got here at 8:00am, so plenty of time to write my blog. I am going to be powered by Lemsip today, because as a freelance contractor, unless I am missing both my arms and legs, I turn up for work otherwise I don’t get paid, luckily the fever has gone and I am just left with the cold. March this year has the added pressure of being the month with Easter in it, so I will loose a week’s work to statutory holidays and a couple of extra days off so that I can stay in France for a week. Being as Easter is so early this year Fleur does not have school holidays around Easter apart from the bank holidays, her spring holiday is in April, so she will be at school whilst I am in France.

We appear to have picked up a couple of extra bookings this week which is always welcome, and we were checked out on Sunday night by the family of some French guests who are going to stay with us in July this year. This is going to present a challenge for us, the bookings we have mean that we now have a window of approximately 12 weeks to get the roof fixed and the major works to the 4^th room complete before we start accepting guests in July. We will talk with our builder either this coming weekend or the weekend after to see if it is possible and more importantly how much it is going to cost. The exchange rate is not doing us any favours at the moment, the pound is at it lowest level against the Euro for some years, meaning that we are getting on average 2000 less Euros for every £10000.00 than we were last year. £10000.00 used to equate to just under €15000.00 but now it is down to €13000.00, quite a big change.

Franca came up with the highlight of the weekend, she has got herself a job working for an American TV company that is making a programme similar to a place in the sun. The job is as a Production Assistant, but appears to be a local fix it person, but it is all good experience and since it pays real money we are not going to turn it down, though there appear to be some details that need to be worked out. It is all being done in conjunction with our Estate Agent Matthew who seems to be quite good at getting TV companies over to France to film in the Charente. I’m sure it will be good fun and it is handy that I am in France when they are over so I will act as child minder to Fleur whilst Franca goes to work! If we can get a bit of publicity in there for Au Bellefleur then that will be a nice bonus.

Notre rêve for 5 minutes of fame...

This is the article that has given us, well Franca mostly, our 5 minutes of fame.

Celebrity status for Franca

I am going to sound like a broken record soon, but another fantastic weekend weather wise, on Saturday I was in the garden with just a pair of shorts on with local thermometers (on shops etc..) showing temps in the shade of 21 degrees, and much hotter in the direct sunshine. There were lots of red faces at the airport on Sunday evening as we waited for the flight back to Stansted. We do have to bear in mind though on the climate change front that this is, in theory, very unusual for the time of year, or is it now… That was my last Sunday night flight back for a while, thank goodness, because I really miss Sunday evenings in France. If I have to fly back to the UK on a Sunday evening I only get a one and a half day weekend.

It may not be the Oscars but Franca has reached local celebrity status in the Charente as she got her photo in the regional paper telling the story of how we found our B&B, how the renovations were going and what our future plans are. By the time we went out on Saturday night the news had spread around the local villages so Franca was recognised by the owner of the restaurant we were eating in when we arrived. Don't worry, we will be keeping our feet firmly on the ground after all todays news is tomorrows chip paper as we say in the UK. Thanks to the power of the internet, and our mailing list, by the time you read this the news article will be all over Europe, and the publicity was much better than I thought it would be.

Fleur and I got our potage (vegetable garden) under way this weekend and I dug the first 3 feet by 10 feet bed, in which we planted peas, tomatoes carrots and some herb in a little herb garden we are making. It amazing, it looks so small having dug it, double digging mind, but all my muscles ache as if I had been doing something really strenuous, definitely out of condition, still I have a few more beds to dig so I should get used to it by the end. I am not sure how many beds I will end up with but we need a bed for the salad plants, some more veggies and franca suggested we have a fruit bed too, after all we have to grow our own charentaise melons. You notice though no offer to help dig the beds. I will probably wimp out and borrow a rotivator from our kind neighbour Jean-Luc, that will get the job done much quicker than with a fork, a spade and a rake. Fleur has been very helpful this weekend, she helped me clear out the garage, before moving on to start the veggie garden, in fact when I left on Sunday afternoon she fell asleep on the sofa. I think that’s the first time I have worn her out, but to be honest she probably wore herself out.

An historic visit....

I am at La Rochelle airport for the first time this year, being half term the BA prices are sky high, and there is no Monday morning flight this week or next week from Bordeaux, so hobsons choice. I flew out on Easyjet from Luton to allow me to collect my car from Bordeaux, so that I could then drive to La Rochelle, then next week I will use the Stansted/La Rochelle route in both directions. La Rochelle is closed on Mondays until April so I am on the Sunday evening flight which basically means this weekend and next weekend are short weekends for me. I discovered even worse news this week, normally after April Ryanair have a Monday morning flight in the summer timetable but I cannot find a Monday morning flight on Ryanair back to the UK from anywhere in SW France. So this may get a little more complicated, but more of that when it pans out.

More lovely weather this weekend, its amazing what 600 miles further south can do to the temperature, it’s the same sunny weather in the UK but the wind feels much cooler in London keeping the temps down even in the sun, but here in Sigogne the sun is higher and stronger and the wind is not so keen, so lunches outside again and working in the garden.

The big event of the weekend was we had the last French owners of our house round for an aperitif as I mentioned in my last blog. They of course were emotional, but in an enthusiastic way which meant they bought loads of photos, and had loads of stories for us, we have learnt lots as well. We thought the house was built in three stages, however we now know that the house was only built in two stages, the first in 1829 and the second in the 1980s. Our house was in fact a sheep farmer’s cottage with a large barn and a granary. Lots more info will come now we know the family Valoteau and where they live. We had too many questions for one session, especially trying to understand the replies, but at one point allegedly the Germans used the house for parties. The house itself was owned by the Valoteau family from 1939 and it was they that converted the farmers cottage into a ‘new’ Charentaise long house. I could go on for ages but I will save that for another time. We are now busy scanning in their black & white photos, which we will blow up and make a little display somewhere in the house. We have the name for the last bedroom upstairs, since it is where the granary was then the room must be called Le Grainiere (hopefully spelt it right). May be the bedroom underneath will be called Valoteau, but we will think about that one.

Otherwise being a short weekend we did not do very much, recovering from our latest visitors and relaxing, but it will have to be back to work next weekend.

More wall to wall sunshine...

Well what can I say another glorious weekend has come and gone, more wall to wall sunshine and temperatures in our favourite corner of the garden reaching 30 degrees. This was the first weekend of 2008 that everyone was in shorts for at least part of the time.

We also had guests staying with us, not only for the weekend, but in total almost a week. They arrived on Thursday evening and with them came the good weather, if a bit unusual for the time of year. Franca picked them up from Saintes railway station as they flew into La Rochelle but did not want to drive down to us. They were house hunting for a place to retire to somewhere in the Charente. They were a very nice and friendly couple, full of stories so they were fun to be with. For the first three nights they ate with us, which to be honest took us a little by surprise but was none the less fun, as we spent the weekend doing things we wanted to do such as cooking and researching food and drink. With them eating in more than we thought it allowed us to check the routine we will need when we are fully up and running and by the end of the weekend we had things under control and it was good fun. We even had time to experiment with Fleur at making a home made French fruit tart, we got the pastry worked out and that was fine, but we need to work on our fillings a bit more.

With guests around it meant that major messy building work was out of the question, that all gave way to cooking and cleaning, but we did have time to visit the small valentines market in the centre of Sigogne, with the fine weather it was a nice walk round to the town centre, and of course we met with a few people we knew, before having to rush back and carry on the dinner preparations. On Sunday I also found time to chop the fire wood I had collected on Saturday so even though the weather is not lending itself to evenings round the fire side we now have enough wood should the weather take a turn for the worse. I have now moved 6 car loads of wood but it still does not look like I have dented the pile of wood that represents our old roof. Luckily our neighbour does not appear to be complaining as technically it is all on his land, the bit we would like to buy if he ever decides to sell it.

Next weekend we have the last French family who lived in our house coming to look around and have an aperitif with us. We hope we will get some history of the house which will give us some much need input to create some character and ambience, as we continue with our rebuilding, and it will be another severe test of my poor French. They promised to come armed with photos and other info so it will be very interesting, I wonder if we will get any shows of Gallic emotions as some of the older members of the family return to their house, in all I think 3 generations that know the house are coming and one that doesn’t but he knows Fleur and that’s where this all started.

I am back at the airport and Franca is left to look after our guests until they decide to leave, I think it is either Wednesday or Thursday. Franca is very good at looking after the guests, her corporate hospitality and hosting skills are obviously coming back to the fore, which is great to see.

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.

The bathroom under construction

Note Fleurs pink walls are still to be painted or covered over

The Finished article.... almost

The almost but not quite finished en-suite bathroom with impressive but un-tried massage shower!

Room 3 or Tournesol before

Well part way through the conversion, but this is what happens when 2 rooms become 1, it took 6 coats of paint to cover the strong pink colours!

and Tournesol after....

The Bedroom of Tournesol waiting to be 'dressed' as they say in the makeover programs. Its had the stone wall repaired and pointed, a nice new wooden floor, spots in the ceiling and of course white paint every where. As you can see from the light shades the accent colour will be yellow.

Good news week..

I am back at Bordeaux airport again after a good weekend. I arrived in Sigogne on Friday evening nice and early thanks to a following wind which put us in Bordeaux 20 minutes early. That meant I was able to get out of Bordeaux just in front of the rush hour, which takes 20 minutes off the journey, or at least 20 minutes off the time it takes to get out of Bordeaux.

There was more good news to greet my arrival in Sigogne, Bogdan the builder has finished Room 3, as far as his work goes, which means it was finished on time, and within budget!! So now it is over to the family Porter to begin the process of finishing the room. So on Saturday morning all three of us, yes all three, set to work on rubbing down and then painting and by the end of Saturday we had the base coat on the walls and ceiling, and it was looking pretty good. Hopefully Franca can put some of the second coat on the walls during the week which will leave me with the skirting boards to buy & fit, the ceiling to paint and a few other little jobs such as fitting a heated towel rail, then we can move the furniture in and the room will be ready for guests. Bogdan suggests we get on and varnish the floor before the first guests arrive, but the wooden floor smells and looks so new I would rather leave it for a few months before doing anything to it. I am not keen on varnish anyway so I am going to see if there is anything else hard wearing we can use.

Even more good news in Sigogne was that the heating was finally fixed, and it is now so efficient we have to have the setting down almost as low as it can go. The house feels so cosy now that the heating is working properly, it makes such a difference to the feel of the house.

Yet more good news is that we have a booking for a week in February, from a house hunting couple via our estate agent Matthew, so the challenge is get room 3, we are going to call it Tournesol, ready for these guests on the 8^th of February. If it is not ready then we may well test drive it, and the guests will get the tried and tested Porte Bonheur. I am pleased that business is starting to come, and from real guests, not just friends.

And finally... even more good news, on Sunday the skies cleared nice and early, and from 12:00 we could sit outside and enjoy some quite strong January sunshine. In the afternoon in our favoured spot in the garden the temp reached 24 degrees, and Fleur was running around in her bathing suit, not bad for the middle of January. I set a bonfire going because we had lots of stuff that needed burning, despite taking lots of stuff to the tip. Unfortunately they do not do skips in France and there is a limit on the amount of rubbish you can take to the tip, so what cannot be burnt for heating has to go on the bonfire.

New Year's Eve

My mother-in-law is still popular with the guys!