This weekend brings with it our first wedding guests of the year and signals the start of our ‘silly season’. Looking at the calendar, there are just 2 nights in June when we don’t have guests booked in. It is time to put the house ‘to do’ list firmly on hold and focus on the B&B as well as enjoying the summer activities.
Tom and I were chatting the other day about how nice it was to have the house to ourselves for a few days. With reservations for just about every week / weekend between now and the end of August, that is going to be a rare occurrence until the end of the summer.
When we are busy here, it is easy to have a bit of a moan about the early mornings, the never-ending laundry and cleaning, having guests in the house and garden all the time etc. Besides, who doesn’t like a good moan sometimes? To keep things in perspective, we remind ourselves that 3 or 4 ‘full-on’ months per year is SO much more preferable to the daily grind (‘metro, boulot, dodo’ as the French expression goes) we had before we moved to France.
I was thinking about what our hourly rate of pay is running the B&B. It is hard to say when the business merges so closely with our daily lives and varies so much day by day, week by week and month by month, but on balance, I’ll take our current mode de vie over our previous one which had a much higher income from our salaries.
During the winter months we have a lot of free time to get work done around the house and garden, but also to take some proper holidays away from everything and to take some time to just ‘do nothing’ at home, which I’ve never been that good at, but I am learning…
I know from experience now that the summer months are going to fly by with so much going on and we are already planning our holidays for when things quieten down again.
I have to say, the weather during May has been pretty rubbish with the heavy rain and chilly nights from April continuing for much of the month. Temperatures are on the way up now and the long-term forecast looks much more settled which is very welcome and is going to make getting my B&B laundry dry much easier! I’m looking forward to finally being able to start serving breakfast on the terrasse again, oh yeah and having a good moan about how hot it is all the time 😊
