10 into 2 can go just...

The weather has been amazing over the last couple of days, we had the big paddling pool out for Fleur and the water temperature reached 29 degrees yesterday. At the hottest part of the day the temps reach 35 degrees again, wonderful. We filled a large trailer full of rubble yesterday and luckily I started early before the real heat got going. When we got to the tip we were told we should not bring more than 2 cubic meters per day, I think the trailer had about 10 cubic meters but we got away with it, then it was back home home for cold water and cold beers.

Part of the rubble was from room 3 where my labour of love has begun as can be seen from this photo. My estimate of 5 days was a little over the top as this is the result of 5 hours work so far. Based on progress s far I have another 15 hours work to go which is not as bad as I originally thought. So after another cup of tea it was upstairs with the hammer and chisel to carry on stripping.

It is was also Fleur's first day back at school today and she was very reluctant to go, she has got used to being around us all the time in the long summer holidays the French schools have, but in the end she went back again without too much problem. She is now in the bigger class, le Grand Section, so she now has to be there all day from 8:45 to 11:45 then 1:15 to 4:15, not bad for a four and a half year old.

Crazy Golf in Cognac

The 2 debutants! and guess who won? As you can see summer has arrived. In the morning the temperatures soared to 30 degrees and then in the afternoon they made it up to 35 degrees! We're not complaining at all.

Rain rain rain, but the sun is coming

What a week, rain every day and some very un August like temps, all in all making everyone feel a bit depressed. The locals say a poor summer like this happens once every 10/12/13/15 years depending on who you talk to, so we are quite pleased, in a way, that it has happened in out first year, when we are not open for business. In theory then it up hill all the way now, with some glorious summers to come. To cap it all I got a small attack of the Deli belly yesterday but all is well again today, just need to get my strength back.

The weather is looking great for the weekend with temps building up to 30 degrees by Monday, so that should make everyone feel better, even though the Brit bank holiday weekend signals the start of mass exodus of British folk back home again. I still have another week to go, so I've still got a chance to be able to go back to the UK with a suntan.

Time to start getting room 3 ready - a labour of love

This room looks ready to go, but its not, it is the next room after room 2 to be converted. This is the first room we used as a bed room hence it looks like it is almost ready, but it needs to be stripped, and a new doorway installed for an en-suite bathroom to be installed. I am going to attempted to expose the one stone wall in this room otherwise it is just going to look like a boring box. Having made a small test yesterday I discovered the stones under a thick layer of plaster and under that a layer of cement, so this is going to be a labour of love, taking about 5 days to strip, and is going to do my tennis elbow the world of good!

This is the next room to receive the Au Bellefleur treatment

A couple of shots of the next room to be converted into an en-suite bedroom, we had planned this room to be our summer bedroom but the way things are going it is turning into a good letting room, we will just have to see what the finished article looks like. It is just waiting for the builders to start work in September, and all things being equal it should be ready for occupation at the end of September. It should cost us a lot less than room one as we have so much stuff left over from the build of room one it will almost complete room two with just a 'few' extra bits. Sadly this room will not have any exposed stonework, due to the set up of the room, one stone wall has to be covered and water proofed for the bathroom and the other has all the electrical distribution boards on it, so this will have to be made safe from prying little fingers with a lockable cupboard.

A hidden floor and buckled boards

So it was back to more work and in doing some research for the next stage of the conversion we discovered a hidden floor in one of the proposed bathrooms which, when the first floor is removed will give us, an extra foot of head room give or take and inch or two, that 30cm in new money. You can see I have uncovered the frame work for the false floor. The bad news is that we will have to replace the floor joists before we can install the bathroom because the existing ones are not strong enough. This room was part of the farm buildings and it was probably used to store hay or something similar and so the joists did not need to be that strong. I also had to remove all the insulated plasterboard that the previous owners had installed as it had all buckled and bowed so no chance of sticking tiles on it. below the first picture is the stripped out room waiting to have the final floor boards removed so we can install new joists, we won't remove this until we have cleared out the room below. I 've done this work slightly out of order as this is not the next room to be tackled, or even the one after, but since the weather was so poor I needed to do some work inside.

Sand rain and a wild goose chase

It Monday morning, one week into my 3 week sojourn in Sigogne and guess what, i's raining. It feels more like November than the middle of August. The weather for the first week was not too bad, though it has nor been hot, and cloud and rain have been winning over the sunshine. The prospects for this week are not looking good having checked the forecast out to Thursday it looks like there will be rain every day.

We picked the best day of the week to go to the beach last week, and we were rained off the beach around lunch time, then the following day turned out to be the best day of week when I decided to do some work on the house. The one up side of this weather is that there is more work being done than sitting around in the sun, but not so good if you are my four and a half year old daughter who wants to play all the time.

I spent the first couple of days tidying out the garage, and putting down (humane) mice traps, so that my wife will go into the garage again and I have room to work.

Tuesday was beach day as you have already read, but the beach itself was a nice small bay with a long shallow shelf so ideal for children to play in the sea when the tide is in (it also appeared to have full time life guards on duty). There was also a kids club, with adult leaders and lots of activities, including a swimming pool. There were 2 restaurants one which purported to be open 7 days a week but when we looked was closed, so we went to the other one where the food was good and the service fast so we would recommend this as a good family beach, what is it called well it is by a place called Meschers sur Gironde and the beach was Plage des Nonnes, about an hour and 15 minutes drive from our house. As you may have guessed I had to run off and look up the names....

Wednesday was spent finishing off the painting to the front of the house that Gerard had done, I just had to do the bottom couple of inches all the way round where the roller did not reach. Then in the afternoon we went on a wild goose chase around the Charente looking for a supermarket that was open, which we failed to do, everything was closed, and so we went off to a special brocante that is only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and that was closed too. When we got back home we discovered that it was the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and that was why everything was closed.

Meet the chef

The Chef de la cuisine of Chambres d'hôtes Au Bellefleur.

Bonne Anniversaire

No need to say how old!

look out the guests are coming....

True to form it raining, so it must be Monday and it must be La Rochelle airport, after a very hectic long weekend, however not everything went according to plan....

I flew over to France a day early to help prepare for the arrival of our first fee paying real live B&B guests. We did not get off to a great start when on Wednesday our fridge stopped working, so all the food in the fridge had to go in the bin and Franca went out on Thursday to buy a new fridge, luckily we had not done the shopping for the weekend. We are doing that at the last minute so everything is as fresh as possible.

On Friday morning I prepared a boeuf bourguignon and put it in the oven to slow cook, then set about making crème brulee and meringues for desserts for the weekend. I cook meringues by turn the oven up as hot as possible putting the meringues in and turning the oven off to let them cook/dry out. We have two ovens, so guess what I did, I turned up the wrong oven and destroyed the boeuf bourguignon, so the guests got chicken breasts in a white wine and mustard sauce, always a good emergency standby.

Franca had especially ordered fresh croissants, pain chocolate and fresh bread, so she could pick them up at 8:00 on Saturday morning, when our supermarket opened, but the baker did not arrive until 9:30, not good if you are serving breakfast from 8:00. Sunday however was a disaster free day and we managed to serve what we planned when we planned it, and it was good fun too. Did we make any money this weekend, I doubt it, but in this case it does not matter, we covered our costs, and learned a great deal.

So thanks to Eric and Caroline (and Maxsu too) for being understanding guests to two newbie hoteliers (you may as well count me as a newbie, its over 25 years since I worked in a professional kitchen), and also a big big thank you to Gerard who proved to be a patient, willing, enthusiastic and overall fantastic assistant over the weekend, we could not have done it without you, I hope Gerard’s friend and family will recognise this description of him, he has done everything we asked of him and more. I hope you enjoyed your holiday Gerard, and thank you for the music, he can play a mean guitar as well (if the women will just let him play!). Some may say this man is too good to be true, hopefully after this write up he will recognise himself, as you have no doubt worked out we were pleased to have him around.

In between all this being hoteliers I/we (Gerard and I) managed to make a start on room 2 which is supposed to be our summer bedroom, but may turn out to be a good letting room. Having had the new roof installed over this room and new velux windows installed it is looking quite large and spacious. I have cleared all the rubbish from the room including in some places 3 layers of carpet!! It is now ready to start building.

Oh and by the way the weather was amazing this weekend, it is the first weekend since April that Saturday and Sunday were both fantastic with temperatures above 35 degrees on both days, Friday was not bad either, with temps around 28 degrees.

Well time to get on the plane, luckily it has stopped raining so we won’t get soaked on the way to the steps. I’m back on Ryan air again so it’s a later arrival in London, which means a long day whilst I get my 5 hours work in today….

Superman

Yes, believe it or not, Superman chose Sigogne as his chose vantage point for the Tour de France, he has a rather fetching hat which I can't remember seeing in any of his films.

Family Pietersen

Drinks and bouillabaise with the Pietersen family from NL. Caroline and Alfons and their 3 children, Caspar, Lotte and Pepijn. The sun came out at the end of the day, and we had a great evening after a day at le Tour de France.

New window

Specially from the UK, new glass for the window....ofcourse for bedroom 1!. Working together with Gerard.
'I love the sound of breaking glass'.

Le Tour and a marathon

It is Monday morning so it must be La Rochelle airport, but it is not raining, I did drive through the drizzly rain most of the way, but it cleared up as I drove into La Rochelle, and now there is some lovely warm sun beating down on my sun burnt neck.

This was the weekend that the Tour de France passed through Sigogne, so needless to say we had to be there at the roadside to cheer on the cyclists. The village put on a good show with the usual beer tents and barbecue in full swing for the whole day and the atmosphere was friendly. I must admit Le Tour is not the greatest spectator sport in the world, you see each cyclist whiz by your chosen vantage point in the blink of an eye, then you have to wait one and a half minutes to see the next one whiz by, and this went on all day as the 141 cyclists left in Le Tour all took their turn over the 55km time trial from Cognac to Angouleme. It was a showery day so some cyclists that caught a shower whilst on the course were at an obvious disadvantage, especially through Sigogne as there were two large drain covers right on the apex of a sharp corner which they had to slow down for. But all in all it was a good day. There were a surprising number of Dutch and German and even Australian people around and one Dutch family from Nieuwerkerk on holiday near Barbezieux Alfonse, Caroline and their three children came back to our house for an aperitif and toilet stop. As everyone arrived back, the sun came out, and so did the drinks, so they stayed a little longer, and we had a lovely end to the day, swapping stories and chatting, since everyone was enjoying themselves we got some bouillabaisse soup on the go because no one had really eaten all day, so that kept everyone going.

So you are all dying to know how it went with ‘ma petite voiture’, well it could not have gone better, more by luck than judgement I seem to have picked a very good little car, it is also a very fast car so it kept up with everything on the road, and passed quite a lot as well. I left South East London at 12:00 having visited Sainsburys to stock up on food, and finally arrived in Sigogne at 10:00pm local time (9:00am UK time), in all I was on the road for 10 hours, and I could not have done it much faster in my Jaguar.

Where does my sun burnt neck fit into all this, well Sunday was a work day, though most people in our household slept until around 11:00. One of the things I brought over in the car was 20 pieces of glass to replace all the old glass in the window in room 1. Little did I know what I had let us in for, we think that the old putty (if it was putty) had been there for so long it had almost turn into a rock, it was certainly rock hard and took hours to get off the 20 little frames in the two windows. The sun was not really shining indeed it was raining from time to time, with just the odd glimpse of the sun, but some how we got sun burnt, or wind burnt maybe. Having started work at 12:00 we did not finish until 8:30 in the evening, and it was not my best bit of glazing working either.

So who was the ‘we’ in the glazing marathon, Gerard who is a Dutch friend of a friend recently mailed us and asked if we needed any help on the house in exchange for some food and lodgings, this was too good an opportunity for us to let go, so Gerard arrived shortly before me on Friday evening for two weeks, so after a leisure day on Saturday to recover from the drive from Holland, ands to watch Le Tour we got stuck into the windows on Sunday, and it was just well Gerard was helping otherwise only one window would have been finished by 8:30, as we just managed one window each and we were not slacking.

Whilst I am sitting at the airport Gerard is getting ready to start the mammoth task of painting the outside of the house, which was to be my task for the three weeks of my August ‘holiday’. I shall still be doing some painting, after all Gerard is on holiday so I can't expect him to work everyday. Hopefully the roof will be finished so I will be tidying up the back of the house which to be honest looks awful at the moment, so we will be doing our bit to make the village look a little bit nicer.

It is now only 2 weeks to go until my August ‘holiday’, and next weekend we will get our first official Bed and Breakfast guests who are driving down from Belgium on Friday, so I am flying back to France on Thursday to help prepare as much as we can. Luckily we have our able assistant Gerard with us so everything should go smoothly. You will find out in the next missal from the airport.

A little foot note for Stellios at Easyjet, last weeks flight took off late but the chaps on the flight deck made up most of the time on the way back to Gatwick, only to loose it all again because we could not get off the plane for 10 mins because of tunnel congestion, (you can’t mix inbound and out bound passengers), in the end we had to be bus’d to the immigration hall. So nice try Easyjet, we almost had an on time journey. To be fair it looks like most of the problems stem from the fact that Gatwick airport appears to be struggling to cope with the throughput of flights it is currently handling.

This will be my last Easyjet flight for a while, I am on Ryanair next week because I booked the flights months ago when I did not know about the Easyjet service. After that I will be using the services of a cross channel provider as I will be driving down for my three week sojourn in Sigogne, but I have not booked anything yet so its going to be expensive. I don’t know if I will be flying Easyjet again this summer, because I don’t know when their trial summer service finishes.

Well I just saw the plane circling round so its on time or even early so that’s enough waffling from me for now, time to get in the Speedy Booking queue to get my front seat on the plane...

High Society- a new roof for our B&B

As you can see the guys are getting stuck in to the roof repairs, and because of the wierd weather we are having this year they are doing it in sections. This is the first section, with two Velux windows being installed on this section, for what we are calling the emergency bedroom, and what will probably be our summer bedroom when the B&B is in full swing. This is almost the end of week one so I think the 2 weeks to complete the job estimate is looking a tad on the optimistic side. So fr the weather has been on our side, but it will be interesting to see what happens when we reach the traditionally wet Monday (traditional for this summer).