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.

Autumn Update

Harvest Time

I’ve been busy harvesting the last of our crops and so are the local farmers. The Vendange (grape harvest) started last week which is much later than last year and I understand that this year’s crop is not good; what effect that will have on this years Cognac production (and prices) remains to be seen. Our grapevines were much less productive this year, about a quarter of last year’s yield and lots of undersized grapes. I’ve made most of ours into grape juice as we still have wine to bottle from last years grapes.

The walnuts are now falling off the tree and again not as many as last year and lots of black ones, probably just as well as we still have some left from last year.

Most of the veggies are now finished but we did well with tomatoes, onions, peppers, sweetcorn and carrots. Not a brilliant yield from the potatoes, peas and green beans but OK and 3 melons from our melon plant. The weather was all wrong this year, a late cold snap in April, then a lot of rain but then no rain at all from the middle of July until the end of September. The farmers’ cereal harvest was in early July – very much sooner than Britain – but the sunflowers were late and the sweetcorn even later, and there are some fields of both still not done.

The Business

We gave up taking in French students after suffering a really bad experience with an older student which is a shame as the young students were great. This last one had so many issues that we ended up counting down the hours until she left and I was so traumatised we cancelled the rest of out bookings! However the agency got in touch the other day to see if we were available for half term, I’m not sure which bit of “we’re not doing this again” they didn’t understand.

Demolition

Most of the barn is now down to garden wall height and we are keeping two of the walls as we are going to make it into a walled garden. We had a 6-day bonfire burning a lot of rotten and worm-eaten wood. We want to re-use the good stone but we’ve still got a lot of rubble to take to the tip so we decided to buy a trailer to do this. However this is where you get into French bureaucracy, if you buy a large trailer (ie. over 500 kgs capacity) then it has to have its own registration document (carte gris), it’s own number plate and its own insurance. If you have a French driving licence you also have to go and take a special driving test.  Needless to say we’re having a 500kg trailer. I went to the Mercedes garage in Cognac to ask the price of having a tow bar fitted and they quoted me 1,600 euros! I’m going to a local garage where they will fit a genuine Mercedes tow bar for just over 600 euros.

We’ve also just demolished the old blue bathroom on the ground floor, behind the hall.  The hall looks much bigger and brighter now, and putting the staircase into it looks even more the right thing to do. A lot more rubble to take to the tip though! Then we need the builder to get to work on it.

Wood burning stoves

We had a cheminée firm in to give us a quote for a new fireplace and wood burning stove in our new salon, and while he was here we got him to look at our existing wood burner in the other room.  He told us that what we’ve got was condemned in 1993!  However we had the chimney from it swept and the ramonage guy didn’t seem bothered, and gave us the necessary insurance certificate to prove it had been done.

We’re waiting for the log man to turn up with this year’s new supply of logs, all oak this time.  We’ve already got about a year’s supply but you’re supposed to have at least 3 years supply in, no idea why it just seems to be the done thing. I rang up to see when the delivery was scheduled for and all the told me was “after the 10th”. Firewood comes in ‘steres’, which is one cubic metre when the wood is a metre long, we have ours in half metre lengths so that it will fit in the fire and apparently when it’s been cut in half a stere is no longer a cubic metre but is a bit less.

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.