The end of our first season

October marked the start of our (nearly*) closed season for the winter. Our last weekend of guests included people visiting Eymet for a wedding, for a funeral and to meet a new grandchild for the first time which I felt had a reassuring sense of balance to it and made the chatter over breakfast interesting. We finished our first year with a Booking rating of 9.8 which I’m very pleased with. I’d have loved a 9.9 overall but taking a step back now I think we should be very proud of our 9.8. We have now closed the pool for the winter, had the boiler serviced, ordered a delivery of logs for the log burner and joined the rest of France hunting for some reasonably priced wood pellets for our pellet burners. Throughout last week, afternoon temperatures were still up in the mid / high 20s but a few more weeks and the nights and mornings will be getting very cold as we found out last year.

With a ‘last day of term’ spring in our step, we gave the house a good clean then headed to Tenerife for a week of much needed R&R before starting this winter’s projects. These are mostly in our non-guest areas / rooms that we didn’t have time to decorate etc. before we opened in May. Whilst our guests have enjoyed our fabulous newly decorated rooms, we have been living in our shabby accommodation, so it’ll be great to change that!

A quick update on learning our way around the French administration (which I think will be an ongoing project for years to come…) I now have a ‘numero fiscal’ following my first tax return here in September which is very helpful, however, I can now see that I misunderstood the tax agreement between the UK and France which (long story short) means I’m currently paying tax in both countries. This I obviously need to fix ASAP! I have found the appropriate forms which are currently with the Bergerac Impots team.

* nearly-closed season – in a late development, we were approached by Maquizart, who arrange jazz concerts at the chateau in Eymet through the winter, asking if we could host the musicians on the nights of these concerts, so we’ll be full for several Saturday nights during our ‘nearly-closed’ season… I’ll be back with an update in the new year as we start to think about getting the 2023 season underway.