Opening for business

I previously mentioned two important milestones on our B&B project plan: open for bookings and open for business.

To be open for bookings we needed to be very confident we would be ready for guests by May, we also needed enough of the guest bedrooms and guest areas ready for photographs, and we needed to be online with our website and the booking platforms.

We had, of course, good weeks and bad weeks during the restoration, upgrading, painting and decorating, but overall we were doing really well and our confidence was increasing, so during February we went live for bookings. Tom did a fantastic job on getting all that set up, especially with our website – I had tried to get something good up and running a few times over the winter but failed. By this time, through word of mouth in the village we already had a few bookings for the summer which made it feel very real!

To help ensure we were ready for paying guests in May, we invited Tom’s side of the family over (there are quite a lot of them…) to fill the house for a week during early April. In my previous life I’d have called it a ‘Field Trial’ or ‘Operational Readiness Testing’. It was great to see all the guest rooms full, people making full use of the guest facilities in the house, the pool & garden, to try out our breakfasts and the other services we wanted to offer our guests. At times it got a bit stressy of course, but it was also a lot of fun, very helpful, and lovely to have the house full of family.

Having lived briefly in each of the guest rooms ourselves, we were pretty confident that we were ready with comfortable beds etc. but it was great to know, for example, that everyone could take a shower at the same time with no problems and there was plenty of hot water left for the rest of the day.

After everyone had left, we made the step change from ‘getting ready to open for business’ to being ‘open for business’. No more major projects (apart from getting the decking around the pool finished!) Just fine tuning and getting ready to welcome our first customers.

Reservations were starting to come in quite quickly by this time and before we knew it, we were welcoming our first guests. I have to say, I was feeling anxious about it all as we were waiting for them to arrive, but they were a lovely couple who have since been back to stay with us again and have now booked to come and stay for a 3rd time later this month.

We certainly didn’t get everything right first time, and 3 months in we are still learning, but it was great to be up and running with some very positive feedback coming in…as well as some € 🙂

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Running

Like much of western Europe, we had a heatwave last week with temperatures up in the high thirties for much of the week, peaking at ~41 at the end of the weekend. With a house full of guests for a long weekend and a couple of mid-week stop overs, I was worried about people having an uncomfortable stay but we’ve got the hang of using the shutters to help keep the house as cool as possible and the guests seemed very happy. Once again, the pool was very popular!

I do quite a lot of running which is getting challenging with the heat. I’m never going to break any records, but it is something I really enjoy for so many reasons. When I’m busy or stressed it relaxes me, when I’m fed up or sad it lifts my mood, running alone is great ‘me-time’ and running with a group is great social time, I sleep better when I run, I listen to audiobooks, I keep fit…I could go on, but I know us runners are a boring lot once we get started.

Before we moved, I found a local running group here on Facebook which meets nearby on a Sat or Sun morning for a run. This meant that on my first proper Sunday morning here, I met a friendly group of like-minded people in Eymet village square at 8:30am and I spent a delightful hour running with them through the countryside followed by a coffee together at a local café. Tom joined us a couple of weeks later and since then we’ve only missed a couple of weekend-runs up until we opened the B&B in May this year. The group has been brilliant for us, so welcoming and friendly, we’ve met and become friends with people through it and I am very grateful for that.

I now regularly run with a friend who lives ~20 mins drive from here. There are a lot more trails around her house through woodlands and vineyards with some stunning scenery which seems to change week by week through the seasons. Tom and I try get a local run in together once a week, I try and get out on a long run on my own once a week and we run with the group whenever we can.

I realise now how spoilt I was with Ordinance Survey in the U.K. There is a good network of trails here, it’s nowhere near as easy to find or to follow them without my OS iPhone App but I’m learning.

During the winter months, it was so lovely to get out into the countryside in the sunshine. The fields and vineyards were bare, the tracks were muddy, and we had to be very careful off-road and be sure to wear bright clothing to avoid getting shot by la chasse.

During the summer months, it is often well into the 20s by 10am and still high 20s by dusk, so getting out early is almost essential. Breakfast service at the B&B means I can’t get out early, and on the rare mornings that we don’t have guests, I just want a lie-in until it is too hot to go out running…so I am feeling a bit deprived at the moment and need to find a routine that will allow me to get more miles in somehow…

There are a lot of organised trail races in the region, but with so much else going on, I’ve not signed up for any of them. I like to do run a marathon once a year, so I have signed up for the Cognac marathon in November this year and Paris next spring. I’m going to need to start increasing my mileage soon!

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Moving in – highs and lows

December 2021 saw a(nother) lifestyle step change. We were now the proud owners of a house with 6 ensuite double bedrooms upstairs, 4 large reception rooms, a big kitchen and utility room downstairs plus various other toilets etc. There was a lot of furniture and ‘stuff’ left by the previous owner, some of which we had agreed to stay, and quite a lot that we had to get rid of. There was also a lot of cleaning to do before we could move in properly.

My project plan had two big milestones for the B&B: open up reservations in February and open for customers from May, but before we could even start thinking about the B&B, we had to make our own accommodation clean and comfortable, so we threw ourselves into that all day, every day.

It was hard and dirty work, but we made good progress. The week before Christmas, Tom had to rush back to the UK unexpectedly, so I found myself on my own, in a freezing cold house with no central heating, still surrounded by packing cases and piles of stuff to sell / giveaway / recycle / dump etc. It wasn’t the happiest week of my life. But Tom made it back before Christmas by which time we (Clark) had the heating working and the house was starting to feel warm, clean and tidy. We gave ourselves a week off to celebrate Christmas and New Year in our new house and life felt good again.

The village was quieter by this time. The pre-christmas celebrations in the bars and restaurants resulted in a lot of the staff and customers catching COVID and most places closed for a month or so. With the winter weather upon us and little else to distract us we threw ourselves into decorating the guest bedrooms.

There were some lovely warm sunny days during the winter months and some VERY cold nights. I found it so strange that it could be minus 7 during the night and plus 17 during the afternoon. We did have a couple of weeks late Jan / early Feb where the fog rolled in, and the temperature barely got above freezing during the day. Up to our eyes in paint and plaster, most of the house was freezing cold, no sunshine, no social life…we were both getting fed up and questioning our decisions. But as February turned to March, the sun came out, temperatures went up, the village opened up, we were able to get out with our running group and sit in the sun with a drink after working on the house… we were feeling good again.

It was during those cold weeks that we booked ourselves a winter sunshine holiday for the following winter.  This coming weekend we’ll have been in France for a year. I’m sure the highs and lows will continue but one year in and I’m convinced it was one of the best decisions we have made.

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Renting, Selling and Buying Houses

During the autumn of 2021, in anticipation of the colder months ahead, we moved rentals from the beautiful old Pigeonnier in the countryside to ‘La Grange’, a recently converted apartment within easy walking distance of Eymet centre-ville . Two car journeys and we were done – we were still living a very simple life. Once again, the owners who lived next door were really helpful and very flexible as we moved towards completion dates on both the sale in the UK and the purchase in France. Ironically it was the sale of our 4-year-old town house on a new development in Framlingham that caused us the most stress, but it completed early in November giving us time to get the funds cleared and transferred across to our notaire in France ready to complete our purchase here about 4 weeks later.

We benefited from a better exchange rate than we were planning for which was a real bonus. I looked at several currency-exchange companies and, after a little negotiation, agreed a good deal with Smart Currency Exchange who were very helpful and easy to deal with. Nat West bank allowed me to remotely authorise (by fax of all things) the whole transfer in one transaction, and I kept a ‘paper-trail’ from the sale of the house to the arrival of the funds in my HSBC France bank account so that I could demonstrate to our notaire that everything was above board as a move of our principal residence.

I used a very helpful insurance broker in town here to sort out our house insurance ahead of the completion date, and after some incredibly painful (because my French was so limited and I had no confidence) phone calls, I managed to line up internetelectricitygaswater/drainagehousehold waste disposal and a truck load of firewood ready for when we moved in. As luck would have it, I was also able to arrange to have all our stuff shipped from the UK to arrive on completion day – the last delivery slot they had before Christmas / New Year.

On completion day, just under 6 months after first arriving in France, we met the estate agent and the representative for the vendor at the notaire’s office where we spent an hour or so walking through the contract step by step before signing the final Acte de Vente, and the house was ours. As we left the meeting, I notice I had a missed call from the removal company who, it turns out, were now only 15 minutes away from arriving at the house having driven down through France. Sure enough, within half an hour of getting the keys, our furniture and packing cases were being unloaded into the new house!

That was 6 months ago, and we are now into our third month running the B&B in the house. Eymet and the surrounding towns and villages are now back in full swing for the summer season with the return of the night markets and marché gourmands. Last weekend the annual Occitane Félibrée fête was held in Eymet which brought thousands of visitors into the village so there has been a real buzz about the town amplified by the 30+ degrees that we have at moment.

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Parlez-vous Français ?

I have had holidays in France for most of my life so my ‘holiday French’ was OK. Once we started planning the move out here, I started to learn again. By the time we moved, I had a basic grasp of the language, almost a year later my vocabulary, comprehension and confidence in speaking French are better, but I still have a LONG way to go. As this is another topic I am often asked about, here are some of the ‘tools’ I have used and how they worked for me.

Vocab – clearly it is harder to learn a language in my 50s than it was when I was young. C’est la vie. For me, working my way through Duolingo little by little, each day, a couple of times a day has helped with my vocabulary. It can be mind-numbingly boring and frustrating, but the repetition, the combination of hearing, writing, speaking, and translating to and from has definitely improved my vocabulary. Eventually, a new word will stick, and I can start to use it in day to day life.

Another vocab motivation was the admin for living in France such my car (e.g. impôts d’importation, contrôle technique, carte grise, entretein, remplacement de pare-brise etc.) Similarly when registering with a doctor, having a health check and blood tests, applying for carte de séjour and carte vitale, buying a house, getting services connected, applying for planning permission, buying materials, getting repairs done… all required new vocab. Each time one of these came up, I spent time thinking about the words I would need, looking them up and trying to learn them. I’d have practise conversations with myself (yes, I know!) while I was running or cycling or painting walls etc. Of course, it doesn’t always go smoothly, and I end up doing some Franglaise etc but each time some of it sticks and I get less stressed about the next time.

Understanding written French has seemed to come quite easily for me and is improving with my vocab, I can happily read ‘stuff’ now and fill in the gaps of words I don’t know yet. I believe that is quite common.

For understanding spoken French I’d completely oversimplify it with 3 scenarios: (i) French being spoken for people learning the language using slow and simple phrases. (ii) Listening to French being spoken in clear, straightforward, unhurried language without a strong dialect. (iii) Trying to tune-in / join-in to conversations between ‘locals’ talking at a normal pace using very informal language.

For (i) my favourite resource was the InnerFrench podcasts. There are lots of others out there, but for me this hit exactly the right level and I continue to work my way through them. I also bought their ‘Build a Strong Core’course shortly before we moved out which I found very helpful with stuff like pronouns that I still struggle with today. 

For (ii) I like to tune into FranceInter or RFI radio stations when I am driving, cooking, painting etc and I have found, little by little, I understand more as my brain has ‘tuned in’ to the language and as my vocab has improved. At first, I could get the general gist of some of the news stories, now I can get most of it most of the time. The music stations such as RTL2 and our local Radio4 have a good mix of French and English language music and repeating adverts are good for picking up new words etc.

For (iii) it is a much slower process for me. The more time I have spent talking to people, the more I can pick up, but this is difficult for me. I’m much better at answering the phone and asking people to slow down a little than I was, I can chat to our French clients and the locals who help me by slowing down and using simple language. I really need more immersion to improve in this area.

There are other things I have been doing which help me too like always having French subtitles on the TV, writing shopping lists in French, using French recipes when cooking etc but the thing that has made the BIGGEST difference for me has been ‘conversation exchange’. I speak to a lovely lady in the North of France for an hour week. We met via the TANDEM app. She wants to improve her (already excellent) English and I want to improve my French, so we spend an hour on Skype using both languages, catching up on the week’s news, discussing whatever happens to come to mind on the day etc. Very informal, relaxed, and unstructured but it has been so good for improving my confidence. I did the same with a few other people before we moved out here and they’ve been so helpful.

Some of my encounters in French are still very awkward and I know I still have a mountain to climb. I could be doing a lot more, but I also need to get the balance right when we have been so busy in the house and with the B&B.

À Bientôt !

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