First sight of the newly decorated Gite

Back in May I wrote about the green flocked wallpaper in our Gite being removed and the lounge, stairs and upstairs hallways all being redecorated. 

The work was all finished that month, but despite having had perhaps 10 sets of guests staying since then, we hadn't seen the results ourselves. 

So when I arrived at the Gite I was excited to see the results of the decorators labours, and not disappointed, it all look really great and a big improvement.  Very clean and fresh. 

Goodbye green flocked wallpaper

Time to say goodbye to the green flocked wallpaper in our Gite.

Decorating tastes of course vary around the world (witness the enthusiasm for Scandinavian minimalistic for example), but to my knowledge there hasn't ever been a fashion craze for French decorating. 

When we were house hunting to buy our Gite in September 2003 we saw a number of "interesting" wallpaper styles in the properties we viewed, and fortunately the Gite we eventually did buy was relatively "normal".

Except for the little girl's bedroom in pink and purple that is, but several costs of paint and it's all neutral cream now. 

The lounge, stairway and upstairs hallway were all wallpapered in what I can only describe as a flocked like material.  The paper must have been expensive at the time and in a green colour was liveable with. 

Over the 14 years we've had the Gite there have of course been minor accidents, a few places where a drink has been spilled, and being a fabric you can't easily wash it off the wall.  Also I think the flock is slowly starting to come off, it's not visible, but we do get dust in the lounge quite a lot and we think its from the wallpaper.  

And so now it's time to say goodbye to the green flocked wallpaper.  Tomorrow Simon the decorator starts and all the wallpaper will be stripped off and the walls painted a neutral colour.  

So for old times sake, here's a couple of photos of the lounge as it currently looks before the green all goes. 

Boiler servicing

Some things are sometimes more of a challenge than they need to be.

About 5 years ago we had a new oil boiler installed at the Gite that runs the hot water and central heating.

All was fine until we accidentally ran out of oil and the muck in the bottom of the oil tank got pulled through into the boiler and it spat some black smoke out as a result.

The plumber who installed the boiler advised me of a local company in Rohan who could service it and so I logged a 'please contact me to come and clean the boiler' request on their website for when I was next coming to France.

They never phoned nor emailed me so the following time I came over to France I tried again via the website, but again no response.

This time when we arrived at the Gite I noticed that there the boiler was blowing out more black sooty smoke that was deposited all up the outside wall.

This time I avoided the electronic 'contact me' and drove over to their shop to book an engineer visit.
Yes I was told, would be probably Thursday, but the technician would phone to confirm.

By the end of Wednesday after having had no phone call I went back to the shop to confirm the appointment.

No, not Thursday, but would be Friday at 2pm. Definitely.

And here he is, the technician arrived as promised on Friday, the boiler was very thoroughly cleaned out, a new nozzle fitted and it's all running perfectly.

What a hassle though.

Got a new trailer

Just arrived at the Gite.

Our big new acquisition was a trailer that we brought over with us.

Every time we come to the Gite there is plenty of gardening to do and it's a bit difficult stuffing all the branches in the car (plus Liz complains at me for messing up her car).
Putting the cuttings in the hedgerows is another option but it's not ideal and always makes me feel guilty.

And so the trailer is going to be really useful to take stuff to the déchetterie.
Top tip for the ferry: it was cheaper to put the trailer on the roof rack and pay for the extra height than to tow it behind us.

Sorted!

New bushes planted, despite the stones

We brought over to our Gite four laurel bushes in tubs, intending to plant them along the fence by the patio. Then at a French car boot sale we bought two spirea shrubs, making six to plant in total.
Toby decided that this was something that he wanted to do, so on Sunday he started digging the first hole.

The hole digging continued on Monday, then Tuesday, Wednesday and finally finished today, Thursday!

Unfortunately Toby hadn't reckoned on the incredibly stony ground we have in Brittany and so each hole became a mammoth task with several large stones having to be dug out of each hole he tried to dig. There was so much stone excavated that for the last shrub he ran out of soil to fill in around the shrub and had to dig some out of the compost heap.

Mind you, I hadn't anticipated the size of one that he dug up, which turned out to be a concrete angular post, about 12 inches in height, looking a bit like a distance marker from the side of the road, only without any writing on it.

Anyway job done now, thanks Toby.

All pumped up, ready to go

In May 2012 Geoff and I fitted a sand filter and high powered pump onto the swimming pool at the Gite, and it's made a big difference, the pool has really been sparkling clean and it's been a lot better for our guests.

Unfortunately in the middle of the season this year the pump died, not a simple fuse blown, looked like the motor had burnt out.

Geoff fitted one of the little pumps and I promised to get a replacement sent over to France.

Luckily I found what appeared to be an identical pump on eBay which I bought and had couriered over to France. It took more than a week to arrive, but when it did, Shirley reported that it had clearly been damaged in transit as there was a big hole in the box and bits of pump were falling out.

The parcel got sent back to the couriers depot and then the fun started...
Without photos of the damage I was unable to complete a claim for damage so I had to wait for the pump parcel to be re-delivered. And I waited and waited and waited. Every day checking the courier website but the box wasn't seemingly going out for re-delivery.

Finally nearly a month later the pump was  sent back to the UK courier who declared that it hadn't been packed properly and so they couldn't accept a claim for damages by the courier. Had to make a claim on eBay against the seller to get my money back.

So then looked for another pump, but this time located near enough to collect - no more postage for me!

On our trip to Brittany we bought the (second) replacement pump over which was a lot easier to fit than I anticipated. One thing I definitely did right was to leave the solvent weld joints overnight to properly cure so when I did turn the pump on it all worked perfectly, no leaks at all.

All oiled up for next season

Today's task was oiling up.

Or to be more precise, oiling the hardwood outdoor furniture at the Gite.

With a large table on the patio, 6 chairs and 4 sun loungers, on the top, bottom and sides of each, that's an awful lot of wood to cover.

Fortunately I have a large masonry type paintbrush and had bought several bottles of teak oil from England, so it didn't really take too long to do; and it was really lovely and warm in Brittany today so it was enjoyable work.

After oiling I then repaired a broken chair back and a few slats on a sun loungers - the replacement hardwood slats all came from the bottom of Toby's old cot which had fallen out because he jumped up and down too much! I knew the wood would come in handy one day, and today it did!

Toby meanwhile spent the day digging a hole to plant a shrub in. The job was made harder by the inevitable Brittany rocks that lurk wherever we try and dig.
Only 5 more holes and shrubs to go Toby!

Hard at work already

After a few hours sleep catching up after the drive to the Gite, we were up and about, starting work on a few jobs.

Toby decided that he wanted to prune the bushes and shrubs in the garden - which was an excuse to use his survival knife for the cutting I thought!

I started putting up guttering around the wood store to stop the rain causing moss on the walls. Unfortunately I ran out of the guttering so will have to bring some more from the UK next time we are over.

What time is the déchetterie open?

Unfortunately the garden doth grow at the Gite and so it was out with the hedge cutters and secateurs to bring the bushes back under control.

One bush in particular in the flower bed behind the swimming pool was really large this year and looked as if it was trying to climb into the pool!
After pruning it back I realised that it wasn't something we had planted and it was in fact a self-seeded sapling, so it had to go. Toby set to it with his axe and an hour or so later the errant bush was gone, as was a fair amount of the flower bed and retaining stone wall as we pulled out some 10 linear feet of roots that had grown through the bark chippings.

By now the sapling, its roots and all the other branch,  flower and shrub cuttings from the garden were making a rather large pile so I decided to take it all to the déchetterie (i.e recycling centre) in nearby La Cheze.

Unfortunately I then remembered that I couldn't remember what days of the week and times the déchetterie was open. Several times in the past I have loaded the car up, driven to the déchetterie, only to find that it wasn't open that day of the week.

Ah, but last time this happened I took a photo of the sign with the opening times on and wrote them down so no such mistakes next time.

But where did I write down the opening times??

10 minutes later I remembered, I had written the déchetterie opening times on a plasterboard wall in the unrennovated half of the Gite - thinking that whilst I might have lost a piece of paper, I couldn't possibly manage to lose a wall!

But quelle surprise, I had managed to lose a wall for when I went to read the times I couldn't find them on the wall.
Turned out that the piece of plasterboard wall in the upstairs corridor that I had written on was one that I'd then taken down to change the wiring behind. Fortunately I still had the plasterboarded sheet ready to be put back up when I had finished the wiring, but it turned out to be near the bottom of the pile of plasterboard sheets so I had to move and lift them all up so I could find the opening times written on the wall!

Success, the déchetterie is open today so I could fill the car up and take all the garden waste away at last.

Phew, what a palaver.

And, note to self, in case I lose the wall again, the La Cheze déchetterie is open every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 9am to 12pm.

Brrr, maybe spring hasn't arrived just yet

In my last blog posting I wrote about how lovely the Gite was with the spring flowers just peeping out, but maybe I spoke too soon.

Got up today and we've been reminded by the weather that we're not into the halcyon days of summer just yet awhile, it was cold last night and there's a frost on the grass.

I'd spent a bit of time over the last few days removing the few leaves from the pool that had fallen in (see last picture on my earlier post about the swimming pool), but today the pool has a layer of ice over it.
It wasn't just a thin sliver of ice either, I carefully pushed the edge of the pool out and eased my finger down to judge the thickness, and it felt like the ice was about 1cm thick (¾ of an inch in old money). Not sure how cold it has to be to freeze this much but made me glad that Geoff had disconnected the pump pipes from the pool and had drained the water out of the pipes so that any frost wouldn't damage them.

By mid morning the sun had come up and burnt off the frost from the ground. We didn't try swimming in the pool though ..

Spring has arrived in Brittany

A couple of lovely photos taken last week of spring flowers at our Gite.

Child labour still in use at our Gite!

Actually not true, Toby enjoyed making himself useful servicing the fleet of bikes and chopping firewood (from when we had the oak tree pruned 2 years ago) when we were over at the Gite

The pool is sparkling clean

After all the hard work of installing a sand filter and heavy duty pump last year, I was really pleased to see how sparkling clear and clean the swimming pool was. 

The little pumps you get supplied with the pool are really not up to the job and previous tines I've visited the pool at the end of the season there would usually be algae and cloudy water.

But not any more!

The few leaves that had blown in as a result of the cover coming off were not really much trouble to fish out, but Toby thought it'd be easier if he got into the pool to remove them!!

It is February and despite a bit of sun the pool thermometer was only reading 8 degrees C. I did warn Toby that it would be cold, but of course like all children he thought he'd try it anyway.

Only managed to stay in for about a minute before admitting that Dad was right ...

The Gite is looking good in Brittany

Got to the Gite ok after driving down through France (via Leroy Merlin to buy some electric cable for the renovation project of the second Gite).

Despite spraying weedkiller on the gravel before we left the Gite in August last, I still had my usual job of pulling weeds out for half of the first day after we arrived. If anyone knows of a way of stopping weeds growing in the gravel then I'd be eternally grateful ....

Panda Power brings a touch of French language

For 8 years now we've been renting out our holiday Gite to anyone that would like a tranquil holiday in our lovely little corner of Brittany. In that time we've had the majority of our guests from the UK, a smaller number from Ireland, and a few from America, Canada, Holland, Sweden and even Australia!

But the one country we've never had any guests from is perhaps the most obvious, i.e. France itself.

Obviously never having had any guests from France I'm not sure of the precise reasons for this, but one thing I have considered in the past that may put potential French guests off is that our holiday rental website is written entirely in English.

So hence on my "wouldn't it be a good idea to do" list for some time is the idea of having a small sub-set of our Gite website pages written in French in order to make the property more accessible to French speakers and residents of France itself.

Unfortunately like many of my well meaning ideas the French site has just never got done. Although I can "get by" in conversational French I don't think the quality of my written French is good enough, and similarly using an automated service like google translate comes up with a passable conversion, but again I don't think it would look professional enough to put on my website.

So the only remaining option is to find someone who can speak good French and good English and ask them to do the translation.

There are plenty of professional companies that will translate anything you like - for a fee - but its the size of the fee that has put me off. Fees vary quite a lot but are typically around the 10 to 15 pence per word mark, so even translating a core subset of our website (which has 20 plus pages) would be a few thousand words to translate ... and a price to match.

And so there the task has sat.

Until last week when I read an article on lovemoney.com about taskpandas, a new way to make money from doing odd jobs. The idea of taskpandas.com is brilliantly simple, it acts as a marketplace to match people who have a bit of free time and skills that others might want, with people that need tasks doing. So if you need someone to assemble some furniture, to do some dog sitting, to deliver leaflets, to paint a shed, or simply give you a hand with something around the home, then taskpandas can help.

Since you generally need most of the requesters and taskpandas (those that offer their services) to be local to each other the service launch has started off in major UK cities (London, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh & Glasgow), although is spreading quickly.

Simply post what you want done, when you want it done by, how much you are prepared to pay, and then wait for panda's to offer (bid) their services to you. You can review prior feedback star ratings and comments (ebay style) from the pandas that bid for your task, and then accept and pay for whoever you like. Payment is taken by paypal and once completed the panda is paid into their paypal account (minus a 15% commission that the website takes for acting as intermediary). According to taskpandas.com there are 1,500 registered users and some £50,000 of work has been offered since the site was launched earlier this year, so its growing quickly.

So I thought I would give it a go. Taskpandas offers CRB checks for their more active pandas as a measure of trust, but for what I needed help with this wasn't a deciding factor.

On Monday evening last week I posted my task on taskpandas, asking for a virtual task (i.e. didn't need someone local), with a 'due by' date of mid January as I'm in no immediate hurry:

Translate some web pages from English to French
I would like a fluent French speaker/writer to translate a small number (circa 6) pages from a website from English to French

Tuesday afternoon I received my first bid, the second came in on Wednesday afternoon, and then on Thursday morning I assigned the task to one of my two bidding pandas.

My winning panda has taught French for over 25 years and is a senior A level examiner for two examination boards so I am very very happy with finding the kind of skilled person that I don't think I could have found easily otherwise - and in less than 60 hours from raising the task to agreeing who to do it.

I'll let you know how I get on with the actual translation.

Cheap dogs, cheap holiday ?

Very much on my "to do" list is to add a page to our Gite website about taking your dog to our Gite, and in the past I've written about how much easier it now is to take your pet to France.

We try to take our own dog Dexter to the Gite when we go, and now he's been accompanied by Whitey who joined our family last year. I've taken loads of photos of the two of them lazing around the Gite (it's a dog's life !), and here they are chillaxing (as our kids would say) in the shade of a parasol by the barn.

We don't charge extra for pets in the Gite, only ask that the owners clean up after them and keep them off the furniture. The ferry companies normally charge a nominal amount of £15 or so to take your dog on the ferry, but I picked up news from DFDS recently that pets will travel free on for all DFDS sailings in the remainder of 2012 and all of 2013, as long as the booking is made between September 10th and the 23rd.

And to tempt you a little more, we've recently cut the price of the remaining September dates in our Brittany Gite so you'll save on both your crossing and on your Gite holiday as well.

Not a ruff deal at all !!

New swimming pool

Having found a leak on our swimming pool that turned out to be caused by the bottom of the pool degrading, going hard, and then splitting, it was time to go and buy a new pool.

Ideally would have just bought a new pool liner as that was the failing part, but there was no time for that as we wanted to get the pool up and running as soon as we could do, especially with guests arriving a week later immediately after our own Gite holiday.

So it was off in the car to Ploermel where I knew there were several large supermarkets that were sure to sell suitable swimming pools. It was a bit of a race against time as we decided at 5pm on Saturday that the pool was dead, Ploermel is 30 minute drive away, and the supermarkets shut between 7 and 8pm.

Although several supermarkets did have pools in stock they were either of the "inflatable supporting ring" type, or they were absolutely tiny and were little more than a glorified paddling pool. Our (now dead) frame pool is 15 foot in diameter and 36 inches in depth and we really wanted something similar.

After driving round E Leclerc, Weldom, Super U, Intermarche, Bricomarche, Centakor and Max Plus all in Ploermel with limited success, we sped down to the autoroute to Super U in Josselin and was able to find the kind of frame pool we were looking for. €400 lighter and a lot of straining to carry the massive box out of the supermarket to the car, we set off for home with a new 15 foot Intex frame pool in the car boot.

Our swimming pool is on the gravel driveway in front of the patio; obviously with all the pipework for the sand filter now being in place we needed to put the new pool in the same place, but we wanted to try to get it more level than its predecessor so we spent ages with long pieces of wood and a spirit level trying to rake the gravel up to level the pool base off.

We then laid 3 tarpaulins down over the gravel to protect the pool base and started assembling the topmost ring of the pool. This is quite difficult as carries a lot of weight and the metal ring segments are a a very tight fit:

Next the legs slot into the top-ring it was then that we started to realise that the new pool wasn't the same size as the old pool. Although the top ring was the same 15 feet diameter, the new pool legs were considerably bigger than the old one.

It was also starting to get quite dark ...

Toby then assembled the ladder for the new pool and we started the slow job of filling the pool up. The ladder has a safety feature, for small children you can remove the ladder steps so that they can't so easily climb into the pool.

Our two dogs (Dexter and Whitey) are not interested at all !

With just a 15mm supply pipe to the Gite it took most of the next day to fill the pool up, but it didn't prevent our two boys jumping in pretty quickly ...

It turns out that the Intex frame pool is 48 inches in depth so our kids loved that they could splash around and dive around even more than its predecessor.
Despite our best efforts to level the gravel out and put flat stones under the legs of the pool so that it didn't shift to one side, the pool did settle and shift slightly so leans a little downhill by probably about the same amount as the old one was. At least with the extra depth this makes it less noticeable.

The sand filter is continuing to keep the water extra sparkly clean, and if my schoolboy maths still holds true I calculated there's some 16 cubic metres, or 16 metric tons of water in the new pool.

Tried in vain to fix the swimming pool leak, it's kaput

As I discovered last week, our Gite swimming pool has sprung a leak, not a major leak, but still I didn't want to keep on having to fill it up with very expensive French water.

After a couple of days of the kids playing in the pool and stiring up the water I found that I now couldn't see the hole that Toby had found in the bottom of the pool and as the water level had dropped down with the kids splashing around and the water leaking out, the water level was now below the pool pump inlet.

Nothing for it but to have to fill the pool up again so I could then turn the pump on and clear the water to find the hole again.

A few cubic metres of water later and having left the pump on overnight, the water was all sparkly and clear again and the hole was soon found on the bottom again.

We'd bought some patches that were supposed to work underwater so Toby donned his swimming goggles and dived down to try to apply the patch which of course didn't stick properly.

Neither did the second, third or fourth patches so there was nothing for it but to drain the pool, dry the bottom of the pool, and then try again.

I laid a hosepipe in the pool and ran it out to the drainage ditch opposite to siphon the water out of the pool and left it draining out overnight. It wasn't until the next afternoon that the pool was emptied, we could lift the pool up and find the little hole.

Or rather I should say, find the holes:

Our swimming pool was bought (second hand) in February 2007 and installed when we were over at half-term in June 2007 so it's been sitting outside the Gite come rain and shine for the past 5 years. Over time the plastic on the bottom of the pool has suffered from damage from ultra-violet radiation and has now gone wrinkled, hard and brittle.

Basically it's worn out and it was some of these wrinkles on the bottom of the pool that have now cracked. There was no way I could stick a patch on the bottom over the (multiple) holes, and even if I could, and it did seal the leak, I think it'd only be a temporary fix as the plastic would be sure to break again pretty soon.

Nothing for it but to buy a new pool so next stop the French supermarkets to see what they have in stock ...

Septic sorted

I'm pleased to say that after my prior adventures with the electric pump and the wrong plumbing joints that resulted in a face full of "stuff" and then a very dodgy body afterwards, I've now fixed the septic tank properly.

Mind you it wasn't without a little more excitement during the way as I'd noticed that there appeared to be a leak in the pipe that went up to the filter bed, resulting in a flow back of effluent when the pump switched on.

I'd suspected that the pipe had cracked, maybe because of settlement of the ground, but I firstly had to expose the pipe joint to find the problem. This required digging a hole nearly 2 feet in depth down beside the sump chamber to get down to where the pipe went through the wall of the concrete sump chamber, which is where I had seen the leak emanating from.

Quite a bit of digging later through some rather soggy and probably polluted soil and I'd got the joint where the non-return valve in the sump chamber was connected to the 40mm pipe up to the filter bed.

Only the pipe wasn't connected at all. 

The pipe joint hadn't failed, the pipe hadn't cracked as I thought it might have done, but in fact the joint in the pipe that was supposed to have been glued with solvent weld glue had in fact never been glued together at all - there was absolutely no sign of any solvent weld glue on the joint at all.
I can only surmise that the joint had been dry assembled and then forgotten to be glued. Over time with the electric pump running the joint had slowly vibrated out until there was quite a deluge of liquid coming out of the joint - and I suspect that this may have contributed to the demise of the pump as well.

So, dried everything off, cleaned all the joints and glued it properly back together.  Waited for the glue to dry and checked for leaks - all perfectly dry.

Filled the hole in next to the sump chamber, put the lid on the sump and I can now happily ignore the septic system again!

Next job though is the swimming pool.

Learnt a new French word today - unfortunately

After yesterday's posting where I wrote about using the new electric pump to empty out the sump chamber on our fosse septique (septic tank), finding that the pipework fitting were a different size, and getting a face full of liquid sewerage whilst trying to hold the joints together, I got up this morning and had to reach for the English/French dictionary to learn a new word.

Diarrhée

(You can look it up yourself as to what this means in English, but it's not all that difficult a translation)

3 trips to the bathroom before breakfast was over so I quickly got in the car to buy something for the Diarrhée and a screw fit joint adaptor for the pump so I could install the pump properly.

The pharmacy in nearby Brehan was very helpful and one packet of Imodium tablets later I was sorted out; the plumbing joint took much longer to solve and took more than one shop before I managed to find a joint that would fit the pump.

Back at the septic tank we connected up the pump to the existing pipework, turned it on and watched the liquid all get pumped out to the filter bed.

And then 5 seconds later I started seeing waste liquid draining back through a hole in the side wall of the concrete sump, partially filling the sump up again. Hang on, this isn't supposed to happen, the pipework is all sealed and although I've not glued the joints together yet I shouldn't have had as much leakage as we were getting.

Nothing for it but I'm going to have to dig down to expose the 40mm waste pipe from the sump to the filter bed. with the volume of liquid draining back into the sump I guessed that the pipe must have cracked so I need to find and fix the problem.

Only challenge is that the waste pipe is buried about 18 inches underground so it's a fair bit of digging required to find where the broken pipe is. Spade and trowel in hand I started digging ...