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.