Work, Wood and French Taxes

Work

We have been working really hard for several weeks now and accomplished quite a lot but we hardly seem to have made a dent in our ‘to do’ list. Sometimes I feel like adding things to the list that we’ve done just so we can cross them off and get a sense of achievement. The biggest job we’ve done is sorting out the drive which I have to say looked like a builder’s yard! When I say drive then I don’t really mean just the drive, the entrance to the property is quite short and narrow (about 30 metres by 4 metres) but what we refer to as the drive is the gravelled area in front of the house which is quite big (about 60 metres by 12) and it’s that area that we’ve been clearing. Firstly we (mostly I) moved 15 pallets of roof slates, more than 3,000, to one area and stacked them getting rid of all the broken ones by taking trailers full of them to the commune tip. We had several heaps of wood, some were from the fallen tree from our neighbours, now cut into logs for the fire and stacked in an outbuilding – the hangar – to dry out, the smaller bits have been cut into kindling, the remaining wood was timbers from our half demolished barn and joists from the old floor in the living room. Now all sorted and either taken to the tip, stacked or cut into firewood. The result is we can now get a quote to re-gravel the drive area next spring, a real step forward.

Rhys decided that to move forward with converting the old kitchen to an office/spare room we first needed to sort out one of the outbuildings – the cellier. So we sealed and levelled the floor in there and re-built several cupboards that came from the house itself and hey presto we now have a really good storage/work room. Now all we have to do is move everything currently residing in the old kitchen into this store room, whilst trying to organise it well enough to be able to find everything that goes in there when we need it.

Rhys has also been trying his hand at the lime mortar pointing required for these old stone houses. The going rate is about 50 euros per square metre to have it done professionally, and we’ve got acres of it.  He’s getting good at it, as well as doing the walls in the cellier for practice he’s been doing the walls in our salon and they look fantastic. In the meantime I’ve been putting vitrifier (a sort of varnish) on the new skirting boards in the hallway and am ready to do the ones in the salon. After that there is only the beam to tidy up and the salon is complet.

The other job I’ve been doing is sorting out the garden borders outside which are now weeded, tidied and covered with a lot of sawdust and bark from cutting all the wood, and some more bulbs planted in them ready for spring.  I can’t do anything with the vegetable plot as it is too wet to walk on. We’ve had so much rain this autumn. I’ve started stacking the stone from the barn as well with plans to get the walled garden under way by next year.

If there is anybody out there who fancies coming over to lend a hand they would be most welcome – we have a self-contained apartment and two very nice guest rooms for visitors!!

Wood and Heating

As already mentioned we’ve got loads of extra wood from the fallen tree and the barn demolition, plus what we had left from last year and what we bought this year but our wood is all hidden from view, although it is beautifully stacked in another outbuilding – one of the maisons de cochon. One of the strange things I’ve noticed about living on the continent is what I can only describe as ‘Wood Pile Envy’. Whenever we go out and we see someone else’s wood pile you get comments about it such as ‘gosh what a big wood pile he’s got’, sometimes even including ‘his (wood pile) is bigger than mine’. This is not just my husband all my female friends here say that their husbands make exactly the same comments. I’ve even started noticing and commenting myself on the size of people’s wood piles now, I think I’m losing the plot! How many years of wood do you need to store?

Following on from wood for fires is heating. For the first time in 40 years we are living without central heating and I don’t miss it at all. We have wood burning stoves in the 2 main downstairs rooms and they are surprisingly hot and efficient, we have a few ultra-efficient heat exchangers (in the kitchen, the apartment and our bedroom) and the bathrooms have electric under-floor heating and radiators and we really are very comfortable, and reasonably ‘green’.

This leads on to losing our winter fuel allowance – apparently the UK government has decided that France is warmer than the UK but Italy which is further south isn’t! This is a result of the fact that to do the calculations the UK government fiddled the figures to include the French Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands to work out the average temperature. Strangely they don’t include UK Caribbean islands to work out the UK average! The EU is challenging them on this proposal but there’s even a rumour they’ll tax it as well.

French Taxes

The French tax year, sensibly in my view, runs from January to December and all the taxes become due in the last quarter of the year which does make life expensive from October to December. Ours has completely gone to pot. Due to an error on the part of our tax specialist the demands for our Income tax (due in September) and the first half of our council tax (Taxe Fonciere) went to Bristol.  Don’t ask me why. The local tax office re-printed the Taxe Fonciere and we paid it by its due date of 15^th October. However the head office said they’d have to recalculate the Income tax, I spent 2 hours at the Hotel des Impots (the tax office) in Saintes and they said we’d get the bill in November. Our tax specialist spoke to them this week as we hadn’t heard anything and apparently they’ve lost all the paperwork so the latest is that we have to re-submit it all again but now we have to pay it in January! In the meantime our Taxe d’Habitation (the other half of our council tax) which was payable in November last year has now turned up but is payable in December this year. I’m getting very confused and somewhat nervous. Just to add to the fun everyone’s home insurance appears to become due on January 1^st and we also had both our car insurances to renew on November 1^st. It really is an expensive time of year here.

However, we do seem to be coping, we’ve got a long way with the house and land, we’re improving our French little by little and we’re enjoying a social life. We attend a wine tasting ‘class’ monthly and we’re off to the theatre next week.

Wine, Walnuts and Broody Chickens

Wine

Well it’s that time of year here in France and the vendange (grape harvest) is in full swing all around us. Our own grapes were few in number this year and not a great harvest but the commercial vineyards don’t look a lot better.  I made all ours into grape juice which is delicious but there's only 4 litres of it.

However I got fed up with looking at the wine we made 2 years ago which was still in its large containers in my utility room so I thought we should taste it and make a decision on its future. Much to my surprise it actually tastes very good, a light red in colour, rather like a posh Clairet and a little on the sweet side but very drinkable. Instead of pouring it away we decided to bottle it. It took several hours to clean and sterilise the bottles but we ended up with 53 bottles all nicely corked and sealed. We then designed a label, with help from granddaughter Elizabeth and the whole thing looks very professional.

We’ve now attended 2 sessions of a wine tasting course at a friend’s B&B about 35 minutes away, really interesting tasting six different wines from the same area – we did the Loire this month and liked the Saumur fizz best – and you get supper thrown in, 2 courses with wine, for 15 euros each, it’s a bargain and good company too.

Still on the subject of wine we went to Bordeaux airport on Thursday only to discover my daughter’s flight had been cancelled due to a French Air Traffic Controllers strike. Whilst trying to make alternative arrangements I got talking to a young French lady who was flying to a wedding in Switzerland, she hadn’t realised that she couldn’t take liquids in her hand luggage and was told to get rid of the special bottle of wine she’s bought for the happy couple. She was so distressed I agreed to buy the wine off her and gave her the 30 euros she said it cost. We were all a bit sceptical about its value but since we got home we’ve Googled it and the cheapest we can find a bottle of the same wine & vintage is 32 euros so I’ve still got faith in human nature.

Walnuts

We appear to have a bumper crop of walnuts yet again but have absolutely no idea what to do with them. We still have loads left from last years harvest so I’ve made no attempt to collect this year’s harvest they just crunch underfoot every time I walk over them. Anyone with any useful suggestion for loads of walnuts please let me know as I’d be very grateful.

Broody chicken

One of our elderly chickens decided to 'go broody' about a month ago. The fact that she’s 9 years old, hasn’t laid an egg for I don’t know how long and we don’t have a cockerel hasn’t stooped Yvette from sitting in the nesting box day and night in the expectation of some chicks appearing! I’d chuck her out of the chicken house each morning to force her to eat and drink but the only time she showed any enthusiasm was went I went back a few hours later to open the door and she’d run all the way across the pen and dive back onto her nesting box. However suddenly the other day she came out of the chicken coop voluntarily and seems to have got over her broodiness despite the fact no chicks have appeared; maybe she just got bored. We’ve had a total of about 15 eggs from one or more of the others, though they stopped when Yvette went broody.

Renovations 

We’re down to the smaller jobs now – a never ending list that seems to grow longer no matter how many jobs we do. The local carpenter turned up this week and fitted oak skirting boards in our hallway and salon, fantastic job, he was here from 8.30 a.m. until 7.30 p.m. 

I’m trying to strip the wallpaper from our original kitchen, goodness only knows what they stuck it on with as getting it off brings plaster off the wall at the same time as the paper! It was certainly meant to last.

Chickens !

This week we've collected out first hens, given to us by a friend who is moving away from the area and can't take them with her. They are 9 year old show-variety bantams and have lived in the same chicken-house and run for the last 7 years, so moving them at all was going to be a big shock to them. To make matters worse they're not used to being handled and our first job was to catch them and put them all together in a box for the ride home to our home, all in a temperature of about 29°C (84°F) so they were all a bit stressed. However we got them home safely and moved them into their new hen-house, that I converted from an old dog-kennel that the previous owners of our house had used.  

Here they are just after they arrived. Clockwise from the front, they are Geraldine, a Poland; Yvette, a Buff Pekin; Lily, a White Pekin; Wendy, a Buff-Laced Wyandotte, and Beryl, a Belgian. We were advised to leave them in their new house over the first night, to let them settle and get used to their 'home' surroundings, hence the grain and water in the house with them. The perches are so low because these hens are so small and old. We let them out into their new run on Monday morning and they've been exploring and having a good scratch about. On Monday evening they had to be ushered back into the house for the night, but yesterday and today they went in by themselves just before twilight.

Tonight when I went out to close up the hen house I found that one of them had laid an egg during the day!  I know that's what hens are supposed to do, but these hens are the human equivalent of 90 years old.   In this picture the egg on the left is a standard medium free-range egg from the local supermarket, and the one on the right is our surprise egg from one of our chickens. I don't think it's going to make much of a breakfast on its own though. As it's a white egg it's most likely from Geraldine, possibly from Beryl, though we don't know exactly what sort of Belgian she is and many bantams eggs are white or near-white. Pekins' are cream/white so probably not them. And it's definitely not from Wendy, as Wyandotte's eggs should be brown.

Two Year Update

It’s been just over two years that we’ve lived here in France, so time for another review.

The house

Building work is almost at an end ( hooray !) and we’ve been putting in finishing touches all over the place. 

We now have a fully functioning new salon / sitting room with log burner to keep it warm in winter in a new stone fireplace, and although it’s a big room, we’re very comfortable using it. It makes the house feel more balanced and complete as well.  The hallway is complete apart from the skirting boards which Monsieur Jolly – the brother of the staircase maker  – is making for us at present. It has a nice little cloakroom and of course the new oak staircase. The old living room is now the formal dining room and the old elm staircase sold very quickly. The old kitchen has also been dismantled and just awaits redecoration, now that the new kitchen is working. It’s great having it at the back of the house overlooking the garden and pool. Upstairs the landing has just been finished – new landing floor and skirtings, the new main bathroom is completed, the en-suite in the master bedroom is done and we’ve nearly finished the one in the main guest bedroom, which should be done this week.

Outside

The garden and the rest of the land continue to demand a lot of time and effort.  Jeanne has planted potatoes, onions, sweet-corn, peas and beans, strawberries, tomatoes, courgettes, melons etc. in the potager, to go with the permanent stuff there. The borders are full of new bedding plants and the perennials have been in full bloom for a few weeks. The lavenders are full of humming-bird hawk-moths.  All but one of the fruit trees we planted are doing well and most have a few fruit on them. The old fruit trees are also cropping; this year the cherries have done well but the two plums have a only a couple of fruit, possibly because of their heavy crops last year.  Jeanne has made jam from the cherries (and it’s delicious, especially the jars with a little cognac in with it).   Our new trees are mostly coming on quite well and this year we have about fifteen oak saplings which we are growing on to plant out – thanks to our friends Audrey and George who gave us acorns and some little saplings. We’re spending a lot of time watering our veggies, and fortunately our well shows no sign of running dry.

The site of the old barn is becoming a little overgrown and badly needs some time spent on it to turn it into a proper garden, and we’re hoping to do that later this summer. It does show, though, that the mortar that was between the old stones the barn was built of is little more than soil, and will support plant growth.

Meanwhile the pool has been getting plenty of use, almost every day in the current weather, at or above 30°C for a few weeks now.

People

Rhys’ mother has been staying with us since the end of November and has recovered her health and strength a lot while she’s been here.  She wanted to return to Swanage, however, and we arranged for that to happen in early July.  

Before then we had friends from the US staying and we’ve some more visitors coming later on in the year, but we’ve still got diary space for more visitors this summer.

Here are our friends Phil and Carole, on the left, together with Rhys' mother, in the middle, and us outside our front door at the end of June.

Whilst in the UK, we went 'up north' to see family and friends, We were right on time for the arrival of  Dylan - Jennie and Ian's new baby. We were delighted to be able to see the newly enlarged family several times during the week. Here is Dylan at just a few days old.





We had a day with David. Lynne and Charlie on the way north, spent time with Peter, Lianne, Jack and Tommy duringn the week, iincluding a fun day out in Blackpool with Peter, Jack and Tommy. Here is Tommy driving Jack on one of the rides at the Pleasure Beach.

We’ve very much enjoyed seeing several sets of friends we have made here in France, some very local and others a little further away, both at our own home and at theirs. 

Finally, we plan to take on some geriatric chickens in a few weeks time. We went to visit them last weekend and here they are - all show varieties somewhat past their laying days. 

That's all for now. More soon.

More visitors - not all wild!

A few more recent sightings:

These chickens belong to our next door neighbours, but seem to like foraging in our garden.

At our neighbours on the other side, this splendid cockerel would, no doubt, like to get amongst them!

Rather more genuinely wild, both of these visitors turned up yesterday (24th March): We think the owl is a Long Eared Owl, though the "ears" are just feathers, not ears. This was in the early afternoon in the middle of our land.

This toad had taken a swim in our pool but we took it down to the stream.

Progress on the house

A couple of  major points of progress, with pictures this time.  The main part of the fireplace is now installed, courtesy of our local artisan stone fireplace specialist. Here it is:

The shield in the centre recognises the name of the house - Chez Bouclier (Shield House) and the motif on it is a slightly ambiguous design mixing the French symbol of Fleur de Lys and the English symbol of the Prince of Wales feathers. Whether anyone in years to come will recognise all of that and its present relevance may be doubtful but I think its fun. 

A log burner stove is due to be installed in the fireplace soon and we will have a matching top built for it later, to make it a truly grand statement. Once the stove is installed we will have the floor tiles laid and this will make the room close to habitable. We're not likely to light a fire in the new stove and fireplace until the autumn as it takes several weeks for the stone to dry out properly and by then we shouldn't need a fire lit.

Our other main progress is in the kitchen, where one half incorporating the cooker is nearly finished. Here it is:

There is the extractor hood to install in the over-mantle and just a few bits of finishing off to do to this side. On the other side, the sink, dishwasher, fridges and base units are all installed but we are waiting for two dresser cupboards to arrive to enable all the wall units to be fitted.

The builders are still going (fairly) strong, so we now have a reshaped main bedroom with en-suite almost completed - again just waiting for some bits to arrive. We bought the new flooring for the bedroom today and hope to be in it within two weeks. Then the old main bathroom can be altered to get the new staircase into the landing from the hall below, and then we want a break from builders work while we catch up.

Update - late January

Another busy spell - builders hacking bits out of the house and more slowly putting other bits back together and we've been out shopping for stuff to keep them going.

The builders opened up the chimney from what will be the new salon / sejour, to the sky, which gave us a nice surprise as it appears to be in remarkably good condition and just needs a flue liner inserted and then resealing. Unfortunately we've had a lot of rain and its been pretty chilly so not ideal to have such efficient 'ventilation' just at the moment.  They've also opened up two holes in the back wall of the house to take drains from the new en-suite out into the chai, further increasing the ventilation. Just what we could do with!  They've taken down the built-in wardrobes in the two rooms that will become the master suite and the ceiling didn't fall down, so more good news.  We nipped out (merely a 5 hour trip!) to Leroy Merlin in Bordeaux yesterday to buy new doors for the rooms - remarkably good value and they'll paint well - plus an electric heating mat for the floor which we're hoping will not need too much use, and some new light fittings for the new kitchen.

Speaking of which, the granite worktops are now in place and look terrific. They're a nice blue-ish tint that contrasts well with the cupboards. The kitchen supplier came back last week as well with most of the missing bits and I fitted and plumbed in the sink and dishwasher (having already completed the electrics) so we're using it as the proper kitchen now, although the wall cupboards have yet to be fitted. The old kitchen has become the bureau and storeroom for tools and materials.

The hall now has new wall linings all round and three quarters of a ceiling, and all the electrics in, and the salon has two new wall linings and a new floor, just waiting to dry out sufficiently to lay tiles. But the tiles have to wait until the stone mason has installed the new fireplace - at least the hearth - in the next week or two.

So its all good progress but we need to source new floor covering for upstairs, keep the builder on track finishing off what can be finished and catching up on some of the details that have slipped, before laying the floor tiles downstairs, finishing the flue and chimney, doing the en-suite and opening up the hall ceiling / landing floor ready for the staircase builder to make final measurements and get cracking. Then we'll have a staircase for sale ... and so it goes on.

My mother seems to be settling down well, putting on a bit of weight and really storming ahead with her correspondence and phone calls! Our carer, Andrea, has taken her out for a few walks and drives into Jonzac as well as us taking her out more often ourselves. We took her out to dinner on Thursday to the Hotel de Bordeaux in Pons on Thursday and we all enjoyed a nice meal there. She even went to the hairdressers in Jarnac Champagne this week. (Dentist and chiropodist to follow in the next week or two!)

We're getting through our firewood at a considerable rate this year - the wet weather makes if feel colder than it really is, and we need to keep the house warmer than we'd usually do, for my mother - we can't just leave her in her warm apartment all the time.

New Year Update

Gosh, what a long time since we updated this!  A lot has happened, so here’s a summary (though its still a bit long!).

We’ve had a mostly grey and wet autumn and winter so far, with occasional beautiful bright days, but looking on the bright side we’ve had very few sub-zero nights and no snow (so far) and there are some signs of spring in the air as many plants are sprouting.  Rhys pruned the grape vines today.

Although the builders returned later than planned, mid-November instead of October, the house has made significant progress. What used to be the dining room is well on the way to becoming a super kitchen. The base units are in and once a local artisan stone fabricator turns up this week with the new granite work surfaces then the rest of the units can be fitted. The room no longer has a ceiling that looks like it might fall on your head mid-meal!  It also has new patio doors that are twice the width of the old ones so they let in lots of light and give a great view of the garden and pool.

The hallway is now back to being a proper entrance hall and no longer contains granny’s ‘wonderful’ dark blue bathroom.  A local craftsman, Philippe Jolly, is making us a new oak staircase and Rhys has been busy doing the re-wiring with our builders fixing the floor, walls and ceiling.

The salon is starting to take shape and the same local artisan who is doing the kitchen work surfaces is making us a stone fireplace to give the room a focal point and a source of heat as we’ll be installing a wood-burning stove in there. We are busy trying to scrape blue and green paint off the original stone window surrounds; it is a mystery to us what possessed people to put thick layers of gloss paint on the beautiful pale stone.  We need to change the wood burning stove in the other room as well because apparently the type we have there became obsolete and was condemned in 1993! However, according to the stone chap, the fireplace itself is quite modern as it’s only about 100 years old!

We’ve had a number of jobs done outside as well so our hangar, cellier and pigsties no longer flood when it rains, which is a bonus, due to a new concrete floor and proper drains to take any rain to a soakaway. Our half-demolished barn is still only half demolished as we’ve not had the time or the weather to complete it but we’re sure we’ll get there before too long.

We still seem to be of great interest to the locals as cars slow down to take a good look at what is going on (we’re surprised there hasn’t been a accident yet!) and we seem to get local groups of walkers who blatantly stand at the fence pointing out things to each other, but our French is not quite up to challenging them yet.

One of our neighbours, a cousin of the chap from whom we bought the house, told us that it was actually built in 1856. We have no idea how he can be that accurate but it fits with what our stone artisan has told us – he guessed at just before 1860 to 1870 when the phylloxera plague wiped out most French grape vines and destroyed a lot of wealth here.

We still haven't got chickens of our own but the ones from next door are regular visitors and the red squirrels have been very busy in the garden this year, so we’re expecting oak and walnut trees to spring up all over the place as they keep planting nuts and acorns.

Rhys’ mum now lives with us in our apartment; she came out here on November 25^th and because she has quite poor health we are much more frequent visitors to the doctors than we have been before so we know lots more about the French health system than we did. So far it’s very good and she’s impressed. Hopefully we won’t have to test it too far ourselves for a while.

The village now benefits from a new boulangerie, where they seem to be very busy with customers coming from many of the surrounding villages, and we hope they'll be successful. The restaurant/bar/café has also re-opened and it also serves as a shop for basic supplies, and we hope these people can make a go of it, unlike the previous 2 proprietors.

We had lots of visitors last year and are hoping for many more this year. We’ve made many new friends here but very much want to maintain our old friendships and have family and friends to visit especially as we’re no longer able to get about as much as we’d like due to Rhys’ mum not being able to be left to fend for herself for long.

We'll try not to leave it so long till the next update.