Demolition !

I've made a start on demolishing the old grange in front of the house. It was in a bad state structurally with the roof beams rotten and worm-eaten, the roof tiles all cracked and broken, and now I've started on the walls, I can see there is little strength in them other than the inertia of a lot of old stone walls half a metre thick standing there for a couple of hundred years - No effective mortar in them and a 4-inch wide crack right through from floor to roof in one corner.

I'm trying to do the job slowly and safely (!) and I want to re-use the lovely old stone elsewhere on the property. We had to ask for permission as we're only a couple of hundred metres from an historic monument but it came through in record time.

Here's what it looks like after a day's work. Nice how much its opening up the view from the front of the house. The old wall junction at the right-hand end is still full height and then there was the roof itself (which I had our builder take off for me).

Another hot sunny morning

Procrastinating when I should be painting the last set of shutters from the front of the house - here it is this morning (spot the missing shutters). Temperature currently 32 deg C (90 deg F).

Flowers everywhere

We came home from the Dordogne to find the flowers have arrived on our hibiscus tree in the back garden (its about 9 feet / nearly 3 meters high) 

and in the sunflower field opposite the house - I tried to get a photo of the house in the morning but the flowers are so tall that even from a ladder it looks like the house is drowning in a sea of sunflowers.

We've been here a whole year - so time for a review!

Well we’ve been in France full-time for a whole year now, we had the anniversary of our final move here just last week so it seemed a good time to take stock and think about the positives (there are lots if them), the negatives (there are only a few), things we’re glad we’ve achieved and things still to be done.

Weather

I’m not sure if this is a positive or negative, according to the locals this is the worst summer many can remember, not as hot as usual and a lot wetter. However it is certainly a big improvement on the weather in the UK this summer and for the last few summers we had there. As the temperature has stayed mostly in the 20s we haven’t had many problems sleeping as it cools down nicely at night. We also had a freezing week in early February that caused us loads of burst pipes and a sudden late frost in April that killed off my early plantings in the veggie plot.

Things I miss about the UK

- People - I miss going to school to collect Tommy and hearing about his day, we both miss popping over to see Jennie and Ian on Sundays and sometimes going to the Chinese restaurant. There don’t seem to be many Chinese restaurants in this part of France but one has opened this very month in Pons so we will be giving it a go very soon. We miss all our family, friends in general and some especially close friends and our maths and English students in particular.

- I miss shops being open at lunch time, I can’t believe how even quite big stores shut up shop for 2 hours at 12 noon – if you’re still in there with your shopping trolley they just switch the lights out on you! It is slowly improving as most big supermarkets don’t tend to shut at lunchtime anymore and some of the mega stores like IKEA don’t. However one chain just got fined thousands for daring to open on a Sunday! I miss going to the chip shop for fish or pudding and chips on the days you just don’t feel like cooking but really can’t be bothered to go out for a formal meal, I also miss M&S dine in for £10 meals.

Things I don’t miss

- The awful traffic on the roads, it’s amazing how soon you get used to be able to drive to the supermarket that is 7 miles away in less than 10 minutes. On most of our journeys we do not encounter traffic lights or traffic jams.

- Paying through the nose every time you need to park your car somewhere, here there are loads of parking spaces even at popular tourist destinations and it is mostly free, and even when you do pay in big towns or cities it is only a fraction of the cost you get charged in the UK. In Jonzac we’ve got a blue badge that we put in our car window with the time we arrived (like UK disabled badges) and just park in the centre of the town for free.

- The negative attitudes in all the UK press, the French simply do not have such negative press about themselves or their institutions. I couldn’t believe the stick the media gave Barclays the other week, it’s as if the country is on a self destruct course with all its big institutions, do they want everything to be foreign owned?

Progress on the house and garden

I used to get frustrated that nothing progressed as rapidly as I wanted it to, I think it’s the project manager in me, however I’m slowly learning that sometimes it is better to take time over renovations as I’ve changed my mind about a number of things whereas if I’d rushed in and got them done it would have been quite difficult to justify re-doing them. In that respect the fact that the sale of our flat took as long as it did meant we didn’t really have the cash to throw at jobs so forced us to step back and think more which has led to useful adjustments.

However I still struggle with the fact that everything takes twice as long as it used to, when we go to Castorama (French B&Q) it’s a whole day gone. We have to make many trips to the DIY shops and even popping to the local ones takes several hours out of your day and you can’t go between 12 and 2 p.m.

Many people thought it was strange that we had a swimming pool built as a number one priority before we did bigger jobs on the house. We are still very happy that we did that first as the whole pool area has settled down from the earthworks involved in time for summer and we and visitors have found it a fantastic facility on the many hot and sunny days that we have had.

We also concentrated on renovating the apartment before our main house as it was in such a bad way that it really needed fixing as a high priority. It now looks wonderful and if we ever end up needing extra income we believe it would be very easy to rent out. It has already been used by several of our guests and it brings home to us and them the advantages of having some space of your own when visiting.

One of the things we have done that puzzles people is that we’ve reduced the number of bedrooms we’ve got – we started with 6 and we now have 4. However the bedrooms in the house are very spacious, the one in the flat is less so but then guests get a whole flat. We’ve still got the dark pink bathroom but that is due to go in September or October when we start getting the en-suites installed.

We’ve planted about 300 trees and shrubs, and though not all have survived enough of them have to make a difference. We now have an orchard in the making and a 100 metre hedge of laurels down one of our boundaries. We had a massive tree fall into our garden from a neighbour during a bad storm last November it was so heavy it embedded itself several feet into the ground. However the neighbour whose tree it was had it removed in March and we then worked with him to clear up the mess it left behind.

French red tape

France is notorious for its red tape and rightly so, they do like their ‘dossiers’. Our first challenge was getting into the health system; we were given all sorts of warnings about the difficulties involved but in the end we put together all the items listed on the appropriate website, popped into the office in Saintes, waited 10 minutes to see someone and left 10 minutes later with it all done. Our ‘Carte Vitales’ (vital documents to access the French healthcare system) arrived a few weeks later. Getting our cars re-registered was somewhat more challenging but we managed it one wet afternoon last November. We were both really sad to give up our personalised number plates as we’d had them for 10 years. We’ve now gone through our first French tax return which we paid someone to help us with and we’ve recently completed our hopefully final UK tax return but you can’t do it on-line in France, you have to print off paper copies, complete them and post them to HMRC!

Still to do

We still haven’t got our chickens, though we did the course before we left the UK and we have a place for them and know where to buy them from but various factors keep getting in the way of actually buying them. We do get visiting chickens from next door as they are very free range around here.

New Friends

We’ve made many new friends and have a busy social life, we’re also in touch with many old friends and have already had a number of visitors to stay even though the house is not completed yet but we do have very comfortable guest bedrooms. Our new friends are a mix of English-speaking and some French. We keep going to all the local events so I think all the locals know who we are by now. We’ve been welcomed and appear to have been accepted by the locals which is good; even the farmers give us a wave as they pass by on their various tractors.

French language

It’s hard to judge how much our language skills have improved, it’s like anything really, the more you learn the more you realise that there is still more to learn. I think the big problem is all the language courses want you to follow a structured approach but when you need to be able to do something like buy a sit-on lawn mower or get someone in to empty the fosse etc., it doesn’t fit within the structure so my approach to learning is very organic rather than structured.

French neighbours

Our immediate neighbours are lovely, the daughter speaks French to us slowly and clearly and throws in a bit of English if she thinks we’ve lost the plot, her elderly mother just talks at us rapidly and hopes we’ll understand something. I did understand her the other week when she was asking about us converting our outbuildings into gites and she was very relieved when I said we weren’t. Apparently many French people take it for granted that as soon as Brits buy a place with lots of outbuildings that their plan is to create as many gites as possible and let them out to tourists! We are going against the grain by actually demolishing some of our buildings rather than converting them. I have discovered you can have too many buildings and too much land.

Aperos

A rather strange continental tradition – you get invited around to someone’s house for an aperitif and a few little snacks, usually about 5.30 p.m. then at about 7.30 p.m. and definitely no later then 8 p.m. you take your leave and go home and make your own dinner! Of course if you haven’t prepared it before hand you end up having dinner at about 10 p.m.

New business

Although we have retired several times already and I really thought this would be our last retirement, Rhys volunteered us for a new business opportunity. We now take in French students for anything from 2 days to 2 weeks and talk to them, and get them to talk to us, in English to improve their spoken English. I have to feed them typically English food for lunch and dinner, we have had 4 so far and they have all confessed after a few days that they expected the food to be terrible and couldn’t believe that I gave them food that not only could they eat but that they actually enjoyed. One student even rang his father to tell him how much he enjoyed my cooking especially the desserts! Another told me I was a ‘Cordon Bleu’ cook.

Sorry this is so big – feels like an annual appraisal, but I guess that’s sort-of what it is!

Update

We’ve been a bit busy (what's new?) but here's a general update for the last few weeks.

We had a visit from Jennie and Ian in April, and had a great celebration dinner for his birthday at the Hotel de Bordeaux in Pons - very good indeed.

Our first student of the year came to stay with us for a week. Victor was a really pleasant young man and his English came on really well while he was with us.

Audrey and George, our friends with a house in the Dordogne, moved in and we went over to help them.   Welcome to France, both of you. They came over to visit us a few weeks later, which was very nice as it was warm enough to use the pool. We had a dinner with them and our friends Penny and Adrian:

We bought and installed a new range cooker in the kitchen of the main house, and finished the apartment ready to take visitors. Here is the apartment kitchen ready for use, transformed since we took it on.

The house electricity system has a new GTL (consumer unit) which meets the latest standards, and Rhys now has some more work to do to install or modify circuits around the house to match, but at least its all safe now.

The village Maire came round for a meeting about our electricity supply from the public feed - we need it renewing in a new situation but the process is a bit complicated and we don't know what costs will be involved yet.

Jennie and Dorothy have been over to stay for a few days, as have Samantha, Mike and Elizabeth, who flew home yesterday.

And this week we have another student, Hélène, who is delightful, staying with us and working on her English.

Oradour-sur-Glane

On the way back from Limoges Airport we called in at Oradour as we had received several recommendations to go and visit the village. The village was destroyed by a Waffen-SS unit of the German army on 10th June 1944, a few days after the D-day landings. All the inhabitants - 642 people including 452 women and children - were massacred.  The men were shot just to injure them and prevent escape, in small groups around the village. The women and children were put in the church. Both men and women were burned alive and the village was partially razed. It remains today much as it was at the time immediately afterwards.

When General de Gaulle visited the village after the war he decreed that the village was to be preserved as it was as a memorial so that future generations should not forget. A new village was built next to the site of the old one.

 

When we noticed how close to our route Oradour was we took the opportunity to visit. It made a sombre and saddening occasion, but was extremely interesting and somewhat spooky. We bought a book in the new village's tourist office to better understand what happened there, and were glad we went, despite how uncomfortable it was.

On a happier note, after our visit we went to a bar in the new Oradour and met a very interesting couple, Terry and Jan, and spent a very pleasant hour while waiting for a restaurant to open for dinner. Terry (Terry Ray Martyn, a country and western singer) gave us his card and we looked him up on YouTube, and I haven't been able to get his rendition of Dance the Night Away out of my head ever since!

In the pool!

It's gotten warm enough for a dip in the pool this week. Pool surface temperature made it to 20 deg C and yesterday was hot, so we gave it a go.  Here is Elizabeth, who was first in:

Spring has sprung!

There’s definitely been a change in the season this week. 

We've had some nice warm evenings, though the sun is still fairly low (so created this shadow pattern on the chai wall): Today its 21° C now (1.00pm) and set to be at least 22° later this afternoon.

This week we’ve heard the first cuckoo of spring; the first tiny lizards came out of hiding to bask in the sun:

The first blossom appeared on the fruit trees, though the narcissus are about finished; buds are breaking on the trees we planted and several existing ones; we’ve been eating outside on the patio next to the pool in the sunshine, and it’s warm enough for shorts. We've new lettuce and tomatoes growing in the potager, with the onions sprouting well but the potatoes have yet to show. We planted a lot of fruit bushes (raspberry, blackcurrant, blueberry, gooseberry, redcurrant) and last years strawberries are coming to life.  Here's lunch ready by the pool:

Might even get the sun-loungers out this afternoon, though I don't think we'll try a dip just yet. The pool temperature was 17° C a few minutes ago, so it still has some warming up to do.

Partridges in the garden!

This little chap (?) appeared in the garden this morning with three others. He is, I think, a Red-legged Partridge - not quite the same as the Grey Partridge we're used to in the UK.  They were a bit shy and cautious so didn't get close enough for a really good picture, but nice to see them anyway - lots of interesting wildlife coming into the garden. Er - do you think the grass needs cutting already?

A little excitement

We've had a hectic couple of weeks since we came home from the UK. The weather was very cold while we were over there, so when we got home we found the water pipes all frozen up and as we thawed them out several leaks showed up, including a couple where the ice had burst out of the side of the pipe like a dagger!
So we've been repairing them with new lengths of pipe and some sealing compound - 'epoxy putty' which is OK for some temporary repairs. We just have one final repair to do to replace a putty repair with a new piece of pipe now but all the water is functioning except the water softener, which had to be bypassed. The engineer is coming out to re-commission it this Wednesday.
However, whilst working on the water pipes the electric lights and power went off in the cellier - the outbuilding where the softener is situated. On testing it turned out that we had live mains voltage on both live and neutral wires so there is a short circuit in one of the linked cables. Unfortunately it's in a section of cable without any access and on doing more tests we discovered that the outbuildings are wired up in a somewhat unsafe manner so we've had to strip out all that wiring and make new connections, most of which is now all done. We just have one part where we have to run completely new cables into a section of the house that we've yet to renovate, so its not urgent but there is no light or heat there until we do.
So it's been a couple of weeks of unplanned work, that's set us back a bit from what we planned to do. However it all has to be done sometime so I guess its still progress of a sort.

We took the day off yesterday - Sunday - and had a day out with friends to St Georges de Didonne and a great lunch in Barzan, nearby. A beautiful sunny and reasonably warm day, and a nice break.

Update

Gosh - what a long time since we updated this. Must do better!
We've had a busy few weeks (again!) since the last blog, including:

• A visit to Chateau Thieuley near Bordeaux with our neighbours Joyce & Roger, for a wine tasting and lunch - very nice and we came away with a few boxes of very nice wine.
• Got an electrician started on the work to bring our house up to modern standards
• Had some fruit trees delivered from a local pepiniere - 4 apples, 2 pears, 2 apricots 
• Been to a Christmas carol service at Lorignac. Nine lessons and carols then mince pies and mulled wine in the local bar. Not quite just like home as half the carols' words were in French.
• Been to the UK for just over two weeks over Christmas and New Year - really great to see everyone if a little exhausting, and the sea crossings were rather bumpy
• Bought 87 trees in the UK to bring home with us - they have plant passports nowadays! They're mostly seedling size so they went in the car easily enough. Included a new variety of apple - 'Christmas Pippin' - it will be interesting to see how it does here.
• Went to the village mayor's annual review and got put up to be introduced to the rest of the village - that was a surprise as we had to do a little speech, off the cuff.
• Planted all the trees and also got and planted a lot of shrubs for round the pool and along the southern boundary. (Didn't hug any of the trees, though!)
• Been doing a lot of work on our gite / granny flat. It's now habitable in that the bedroom and bathroom are furnished ready to use. The sitting room is ready to furnish and we're well on with fitting the kitchen. 

Next on the agenda is to finish the flat, make some progress with the electrics, and another brief trip back to the UK for Peter's birthday. In the meantime its been quite cold but mostly dry and sunny.

A visitor

This kestrel seems to have set up home on the telephone wire above one of our bedroom windows.  He (we think it's a he but it's a bit hard to tell at this distance!) has been there most evenings after dark when its raining so he is obviously enjoying a bit of shelter under the eaves, and doesn't seem at all bothered by our comings and goings, or even having the camera flash at him.
Unfortunately there is a little bit of unwelcome evidence of his visits directly below his perch on the path at the front of the house as a result !

Another nice day - Saintes

We took a trip to Saintes this morning, delighted with the continuing great weather. Here's the River Charente there basking in the warm December sunshine!

Saintes is getting ready for Christmas and the Christmas market is to open tomorrow (OK we went too early!) next to the Arc de Triomphe, or Arc de Germanicus, in the town centre on the river bank.  This Arch is much more ancient, having been built in the year 19AD, than the rather more famous Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which only dates from the early 1800s. Here is is surrounded by Christmas trees.

Saintes is our nearest city, where there are lots of public buildings we've had to visit to get our French health service arranged and to re-register our cars so we have French number plates, etc. Our bank is also there, right next to the cathedral which you can see through the left hand arch in the photo. Saintes was the capital of the ancient province of Saintonge, now swallowed up in Charente Maritime.

Nice weather isn't it

We've been having some really nice days - warm and sunny although it gets a bit chilly at night and we've lit the logburner most evenings. We went off to Royan yesterday mainly to see a tax expert who operates from there, but it was such a nice day - the beach looked inviting but it was not really quite warm enough to dive in. Nearly 20 C though, which is pretty good for November.

After we'd had our consultation we had a good look around the town and caught this sunset over the Atlantic.
Then we headed home via Pons, where we had a delicious meal at the Hotel/Restaurant 'de Bordeaux' and had an enjoyable evening with some interesting new people.
Back to work now though - it's a public holiday here tomorrow so our builders will be away and we'll be doing three days of painting in our annexe.

Visits and Progress

After previous visits to us we had a trip to the UK, staying with David, Lynne and Charlie and then up to Manchester for a few days. We'd have liked longer and to see more people but we crammed as much in as we could, and we're planning to go back again in a month or two. Then we went over to see Samantha, Mike and Elizabeth in Alsace, and had a nice few days with them, away from the stuff going on at the house. Then Peter, Lianne, Jack and Tommy came over to us for a week and we had the swimming pool filled just in time, but the water was too cold even for Jack.
Work has progressed well on the house, with the pool more-or-less completed and the apartment has been transformed. New walls and ceilings up, electrics mostly in, new windows. Nothing quite ready yet but getting close and we'll put some pictures up when its all presentable.
Another milestone today when we've got our cars re-registered here, so they'll have French number plates tomorrow. The procedures were a bit horrendous but we got there in the end.

20 September Update

Our fourth set of visitors this summer left after a good few days, weather-wise, and we enjoyed having them here. The builders have started on the pool - an Ash tree has come down and there's an ever-widening hole growing in the garden. Meanwhile, I managed to catch a fleeting shot of a red squirrel enjoying the fruits of the walnut tree (it's left more than enough for us though!) Here it is running up the fence into the tree very fast, hence the blur.

We've got far too many walnuts to eat so I'm looking at getting a press to extract the oil, which we can use for salads and cooking. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall used one for hemp seeds on his TV programme this week - the same model will do all sorts of nuts and seeds.

Winemaking

Rhys has been having a go at making some wine! We inherited a row of grape vines with the house - about a dozen vines of two or three different varieties, but we don't know what they are. The previous owner said they were eating / table grapes but there are far too many to eat. We picked them this week and there were 69kg of grapes.

As you can probably see they're not all ripe but some were over-ripe and wasps etc. were starting to get at them, so we thought they'd better come off. Also quite a few are rather small so we probably need to prune the bunches while they're growing next year, to get bigger grapes. About two thirds of them are black, the rest white.

We bought some kit to make them into wine (we hope!) and David and Lynne helped us to strip the grapes from their stalks. After mashing the fruit up we put the lot into kegs with their skins so we aim to get red wine but its a lot of trouble keeping the skins below the liquid. Anyway we've now removed the skins and the must is fermenting nicely with the addition of some wine yeast (as well as the natural yeast) and sugar.

Rhys now needs to be patient and leave them to do their thing for a while! The must is now all in one big keg with an airlock, but probably a bit too much headroom at the top.

We'd better get collecting some bottles to decant it into when it's finished - fortunately that's not too hard here with lots of good wine on the table from Bordeaux, the Medoc and Blaye nearby. Good excuse for a bottle or two more as we need the bottles. We'll let you know how ours turns out (unless it all turns into vinegar!)

Two lots of visitors

We've been delighted to have two lots of visitors over the last few weeks. First Jennie, Ian and Dorothy flew in for a few days, but unfortunately the weather wasn't great. However they seemed to enjoy themselves, and here is Jennie on the lawn tractor. Plenty more behind her still to cut though.

Then last week we had David, Lynne and Charlie to stay. They had mostly very good weather - up into the 30's C. We took them out to the beach at St Georges de Didonne one day; here he is with Jean on the sands:

And here are another couple of pictures of Charlie - one concentrating hard on his strawberry ice-cream at the Coq d'Or in Jonzac, and the other at our house.

David and Lynne helped with a few of the jobs including in the garden and stripping the grapes from their stalks ready for making into wine (we hope!) but there are still plenty to go at so we'd better get on with it.

Update on progress & trip away

The house and garden are continuing to make progress and we now have the third bedroom decorated, the new windows installed in the living room that we've created by knocking a wall down, the grass has had another cut or two, the water softener is working for the whole house and we've had the fosse emptied (guess you didn't want to know that!) and we've had a builder looking at some of our plans for further work.

We had a trip away for a few days to the Creuse, to stay with Deni and Doug at Chez Jallot. (The house featured on Grand Designs Abroad as The Creuse House). As usual they were very hospitable and this time we had hot sunny weather for our day out out to Lake Vassiviere nearby - picture:

On the way back we had lunch and a stroll in Jarnac, in the centre of the Cognac producing area. We liked Jarnac much more than Cognac town itself - it's much prettier and generally more pleasant, in our opinions. A number of the big Cognac (brandy) producers have their headquarters there, including Courvoisier, Hine and Delamain, rather than in Cognac town. So we think that's where we'll take guests to who want to do a distillery visit. Here's Jean with our lunches just arrived (braised ham with Madiera sauce):

We had a look around the town, which had a great public garden in the town centre on a big island of the Charente river. We may take a boat trip there next time. The river is very wide and shallow in parts, and children play in it. Here is Jean on one of the bridges:

As you can see we've been having hot sunny weather, with temperatures up to 30 deg C.

Progress - wall down!

In between other jobs we decided to take a hammer to the wall between the two bedrooms that had been made of the original second reception room. It was a partition made of terra-cotta blocks, plastered, but the rooms it created were narrow and not very useful. Fortunately there was no wiring in it and it just went up to a huge beam in the ceiling which is self-supporting. Here it is in pieces all over the floor!

It's now all outside ready to go to the dechetterie and the room looks very much better - big and square so we'll be able to tidy it up and bring it back into use. The window bays have beautiful stonework around them that we'll restore, once we can get off the green and blue paint and various sealants. The wooden floor - the last on the ground floor in the house - has a bit of woodworm so we don't know yet if we'll treat it to keep it, or replace it.