South Brittany Holiday Cottage

I collected the new chain for my chainsaw on Saturday so the afternoon was spent playing around with it, fitting the chain, adjusting the chain brake, cleaning it etc etc. Oh and of course trying it out. When we arrived here we had to go out and buy all these toys that we just never had a need for back in the UK. I now have 3 chainsaws, a petrol strimmer, a petrol hedge trimmer and a ride on mower.
We have had small snow showers here! I thought we would have seen the last of that sort of weather in the UK. The showers never come to much but all the same it snowed.
I was at my parents cottage today fitting the metal partition walls ready to plasterboard in the kitchen area.

Bonjour tout,
Not a great deal happening at the moment, still workin on my parents cottage, upstairs still needs the three velux windows installing. Helena has been taking her time cleaning and tidying our holiday cottage after the visitors left.I have been spending a lot of time altering little bits on our gites web site, dividing the accommodation page into two and doing the same with the local attractions page and we added a frequently asked questions page aswell. A friend that lives around the corner helped me with doing the extra pages the same family that own the fishing lakes ( take a look at their site and see the size of their carp they have in those lakes!). Helena has gone to Vannes again to sell the jumpers on the market, so I went to feed the horses and chickens. I am going back to my parents house to carry on there for a while.

Brittany Gites:Gite Holiday In France-South Brittany Cottage

I spent all morning and most of the afternoon on the internet. Changing some of the metatags on our holiday cottage web site, submitting to as many search engines and directories as possible and answering emails to enquiries for booking our cottage. Then it was time for the big match England v France in the six nations rugby tournament! Who was I to cheer for? It turned out to be quite difficult as the first half England stormed away there wasnt much of a game, but come the second half, well..... England went to sleep, missed their kicks and France started coming back in to the game with England giving them penalties to kick.
So there it was two games and two losses for England and two games and two wins for France,(both games scrappy and just one) I knew it was a reason I moved to France!

Not much to say about today really, I spent most of this morning on the internet, sorting out enquiries and bookings for our holiday cottage. I then went to La roche Bernard to meet Helena who was working the market there.Then after lunch I continued with getting on with my parents cottage, putting up some plasterboard, and putting up some more metal stud work to form the partition walls.

Helena went to Vannes this morning to work the market there, which meant I had to feed the chickens and horses, only one horse is ours, the other belongs to the other English people that live just around the corner from our cottage,they own the carp fishing lakes. After feeding the animals I carried on renovating my parents house,(next to ours). I was putting up partition walls and fitting doors upstairs forming the two bedrooms.

Yesterday I went off to play golf with one of the people that is renting the cottage from us. And Helena went with the other two people to Nantes, to show them the way to get there. I went to Caden to play golf, which is around 12 miles away, it is only a nine hole course, but it is very long with plenty of water features and lots of trees! I think Martin enjoyed the course and we had a good day.

Today we spent the day at Vannes, trying to sort out the paperwork for Helena doing the markets(tax etc). We went with a friend that is fluent in French which was infaluable,as we had so many forms and questions.But in the end, we think we sorted it all out, making it viable for Helena to continue to sell jumpers on the markets around the areas near our cottage.

Not a lot done today here, a typical Sunday really! We took the dogs out for a walk, and I went to where my wifes horse is kept and put two posts in the ground so she can tie them up to groom them etc. When we arrived back to our place, the guests that are renting the cottage asked if we could talk to the woman that lives opposite us to ask if they could look at her other property that she has for sale, but when I asked her she said that it was sold. So the guests are going to La Roche Bernard tommorrow to look at the estate agents there.

The first guests of the year arrived to stay in the cottage today. All went fine, I had a few things to do this morning cutting grass outside the cottage, touching up a bit paintwork outside sweeping up and cleaning the patio furniture.

This morning I fitted a new light in the cupboard under the stairs and fitted a chipboard to divide the space under the stairs, so we can use it for storage space. Then I cleaned ot the lights in the livingroom and bathroom. Midday I went to La Roche Bernard,as it was market day there to meet my wife, she has a stall and sell wool English and Irish jumpers on various markets in the area. After lunch we went to the local Bricomarche (DIY store) to get some new blinds for the bedroom velux windows.We bought genuine velux as we thought they would fit better and be better quality,and as a bonus they were cheaper than the other make they had there for sale! So when we returned I got on with fitting the blinds, which were very easy. I then fitted the post box to the nice new pvc fence that I erected to the front of the cottage yesterday.

This afternoon was taken up by putting up a new pvc fence outside the front of our holiday cottage. A few days ago we knocked a wall down that was seperating the small patio area from the small front garden to open it up. And while we were at it we took down the old fence, which was wooden posts with pvc coated wire between them.

I spent this morning helping my mate again getting his 18 tonne swing shovel out of the mud in his drained lake. We had initially got it out of the mud, but the track had come off again so we had to try and get it back on again, which we did after a few attempts. We only had scaffold poles, a car body repair jack, and a hand operated winch. What a job! and I dont want to do it again for a while, if ever! So the Hymac is now out of the mud and up on the firm harder banks of the lake, so the lake can be filled again now. So I can get on with finnishing off the cottage, as we have guests staying for a week on Saturday.

Hi to all,
Hopefully I will be able to keep an online diary of owning and running a gite in South Brittany France