It’s now officially spring and we’re back in Blois for another couple of weeks. We couldn’t get over the difference in how many leaves have appeared on the trees in such a short time. The tulips are out as well so a visit to Château de Cheverny is scheduled for this week to see the 60,000 tulips planted every year. In the meantime, here are my favourites at Closerie Falaiseau and the view from upstairs.
It’s been the strangest winter. I don’t think the temperature has gone below zero more than a couple of times and there has been absolutely no sign of snow. As a result, spring seems to have come a couple of weeks early.
We are in Blois for a month this time, the longest period yet so it feels more permanent. Things are starting to get more organised but I’m still finding it hard to reconcile my translation work and doing more interesting things such as gardening.
Also, having one person working and the other free to do what he wants with his time is not easy. Not that Jean Michel is lazing around – quite the opposite. Among other things, he has chopped firewood, completed the electricity in our upstairs kitchen, made two roof ladders and cleaned the moss off one of the roofs.
But we are having to adjust to a different pattern. In Paris, Jean Michel gets up earlier than me during the week – often around 7, and has his breakfast alone. I get up around 8.30, get dressed, have a quick breakfast and am in my office by 9.
Here, if we get up at 8.30, I’m not sitting in front of my computer until closer to 10 because Jean Michel needs to take his time in the morning. I’ve been making an effort to get up at 8 but I only gain a half an hour and I’m tired! On intermittent fast days, it’s much easier as we skip breakfast. We’ve talked about it together and Jean Michel is also frustrated because he is a morning person and has the impression that he’s wasting his whole day if he doesn’t get up until eight (but he hasn’t suggested getting up earlier).
So I’m trying to schedule our two fast days for Monday and Friday and maybe I won’t eat on Wednesday mornings either. Then on the other two days, as soon as I’ve finished my breakfast I’ll leave him to it instead of taking time over tea together. The weekend’s not a problem of course.
Jean Michel also has a short nap after lunch and goes to sleep before I do at night, so all in all, I’m not getting enough sleep, and am exhausted! I hope we’ll have solved the problem soon. At least having a whole month in Blois means that we can get into better sync before the final move in October.
The fact that it rained most days last week didn’t help either. We were nice and wet by the time we finished the market on Saturday morning then spent the afternoon chasing after things like bottle racks and mats to scrape the mud off our shoes. By that evening we were feeling a little jaded.
However, Sunday dawned fine and sunny and after a leisurely breakfast, we drove to Vendome which is really pretty. Clouds came over around midday, to our disappointment. But by the time we had finished a very good lunch at Le Rond de Serviette, the sky was blue again and we walked up the hill to see the stunning panorama.
We arrived back home just in time for a late tea and macarons in front of the fire. It felt as though we were on holidays because it’s exactly the way we used to spend the day when we stayed in a gîte with a fireplace in winter before we bought Closerie Falaiseau.
Oh, and I nearly forgot – the annoying neighbours with the poultry yard have packed up, lock, stock, barrel and chickens. We couldn’t believe our luck! We expect that someone else will move in soon, perhaps at the end of the month. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
We went to visit Mr and Mrs Previous Owner recently and I wanted to know what they did to get rid of the moss on the front stairs. “Sur le perron“, replied Mr Previous Owner. “No, the front steps”. “Oui, le perron“, he insisted.
And here I had been labouring under the misconception all these years that the perron was something quite different. According to my Larousse dictionary, it is an outside staircase with a small number of steps ending in a platform leading to a front door, as can be seen in the following photo.
I check my Dicobat building dictionary and it doesn’t mention anything about the number of steps, so I can now talk about “notre perron”. As far as I know, we have nothing in English to describe this concept.
On another but slightly related subject, we’ve been looking for a solution for some time to stop treading mud into the house when it rains, particularly in winter. The area in front of the house is a combination of grass and gravel with no clear delineation.
We recently went to Truffaut to see what we could find. There was a large selection of pas japonais (pas meaning step in this context). For some reason, I thought that pas japonais were slightly staggered to the left and right to naturally follow your steps.
After buying the last 10 pas we liked, we laid them in light rain and I posted a photo on Facebook. “I would call them stepping stones”, said a friend. She’s right of course. I was so disappointed. We’ve ordered some more for the rest of the garden but I can see we’ll have to lay the other ones again. It’s so annoying trying to remember whether you should be starting with your left leg or your right leg. Sigh.
This year we ARE sitting in front of a roaring fire in the renovated upstairs fireplace, unlike last year when we decided not to herald in the New Year until the renovation was finished. We finally lit our first fire on February 28 only to the discover it smoked. The problem was eventually solved in March when the roofer opened up the top of the chimney. By then it seemed a little late to welcome in the New Year.
Having just reread my resolutions, plans and expectations for 2012, I see that I have failed miserably with the first, which was NO MORE RENOVATION until we move here permantly. Yes, well, I haven’t mentioned it because it isn’t finished (ha! ha!) but Jean Michel is making an upstairs kitchen because once we got the fire going in October, we decided it would be cool – or should I say warm – to have breakfast and apéritifs dinatoires in the upstairs living room.
I’ve done better with the second resolution to travel more in Europe. We loved Barcelona and our cycling trip along the Danube in the summer which included Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and Switzerland, was undoubtedly my best holiday ever. We also unexpectedly went to Sofia and Plovdiv (which reminds me I still have a post to write …).
My third resolution was to go back to fitter occupations and lose the 3 or 4 kilos I’d gained. No problem about that one – our 1,100 kilometers of cycling along the Danube plus all the other shorter cycling holidays have certainly made me fitter. Discovering the 5:2 fast diet is now a way of life. I lost the extra kilos and am now able to enjoy foods I thought I had banished forever.
I’m not sure about my fourth resolution of getting out and about in Paris more. I certainly did during the summer months particularly on the banks of the Seine, but as the days get shorter, so does my resolve. I do have the excuse of being in Blois a lot during the winter!
The last resolution was to make the most of my iPhone camera particularly at night. I did learn to do fashion shoots when Black Cat was setting up her sewing blog and I created a second photo blog, Blois Daily Photo, in July but I haven’t made any progress with night photography so I can put that back on the list!
My first resolution for 2014 is to have a maximum number of holiday bookings for Closerie Falaiseau between 1st April and 30th September. We rented for a total of 19 weeks in 2013 so are not far off our goal. All our guests were lovely and gave us wonderful reviews. One extremely nice American couple came back again and have already booked for 2014.
The second resolution is a bit tougher. I’d like to diversify into some sort of tourist-related activity in Blois but it still needs a lot of defining and requires more energy than I seem to have at the moment. Maybe along the lines of the THATlou treasure hunt, walking tours, visits to châteaux, mushroom picking, organisation of short stays in the Loire Valley …
Another long cycling holiday is my third resolution so we’ve started looking at the map. Perhaps in the northern part of Germany along the Rhine. In the meantime, we have organised a home exchange in Venice at the end of April!
My fourth resolution is to discover the secret of getting enough sleep. Maybe if I set it as a goal, I might actually be able to do something about it! Who knows?
And the 5th is improving my night photography skills.
How about you? What are your new year’s resolutions for 2014?
As one of my friends so cleverly put it: may 2014 bring what 2013 forgot!
We’ve been having lovely weather in Blois – very cold, with minus temperatures at night and sometimes throughout the morning followed by bright sun and blue skies. The view from my office window is unfortunately marred by those horrible cables. They’re supposed to go underground in a couple of years’ time.
For more photos of Blois, you can visit my photo site Blois Daily Photo.
At 20, I lived in Townsville on the north-east coast of Australia and dreamed of living in France. When I arrived here for good at 22, I spent a week in Paris then went to an assistant teaching post in a town called Pau in the south-west of France which has a population of 100,000, very similiar to that of Townsville, because I wanted to be close to Spain to improve my Spanish.
The next year I was posted to Nantes, on the tip of Brittany and the Loire Valley, which had a population of 400,000. My next move, a year later, was to Fontenay sous Bois in the eastern suburbs of Paris. I stayed there for nearly twenty years, after which I moved into the very centre of Paris 8 years ago, just near the Louvre.
This time next year, I’ll be living full time in Blois because Jean Michel is retiring on 10th October and we will have to vacate our apartment in the Palais Royal because it is part of his job. There is no way we can afford to buy or rent similar accommodation. While I was still teaching part-time at university (ESIT), we thought we’d find something in the Yvelines to the west of Paris so I could commute once a week.
Then I decided to stop teaching after fifteen years and go back to freelance translation full time which changed our options entirely. After friends bought a house in Amboise we started looking at possibilities in the Loire Valley and fell in love with Closerie Falaiseau in Blois, a full three years before retirement – it was the very first house we visited.
The house itself is much bigger than we intended to buy and has several other buildings – two barns, an old pigsty, a workshop, a wood shelter and a smaller house which we originally thought we’d turn into a gîte for holiday rental. For various reasons, one of the barns will now become the gîte.
In the meantime, we have turned the bottom part into a gîte for two people so that the house won’t be left empty for long periods and we can finance conversion of the barn which is currently only four walls and a roof. The gîte has been doing well and we’ve had excellent reviews. We’ve also met some wonderful people.
So for the past two years, we’ve been psychologically making the move from the centre of Paris to a small provincial town of 50,000 people.
Will we be bored ? That is the question. Judging from our time in Blois so far, I don’t think so although the longest we have stayed at a time is two weeks even if I came here by myself very often last winter while our balcony in Paris was being refurbished. This winter, with no one staying in the gîte, we’ll be coming down one or two weeks a month and for the whole of March before the next rental season begins.
As I get older, my interests have changed considerably. I used to go to every exhibition that was on. We often went to the theatre and cinema and out to dinner with friends. Now we focus a lot more on holidays and rarely go to exhibitions. Many of our friends are retiring and moving away from Paris as well.
We’ve already made new friends in Blois and in other parts of the Loire through the Loire Connexion. We spend a lot of time cycling when the weather permits, gardening, mushroom picking, taking photos and visiting châteaux and castles – not to mention renovating of course. This year, we’re able to make the most of our Renaissance fireplace that we spent a long time refurbishing last winter.
And we’ll never be far from Paris – it’s only a couple of hours by car and 1 ½ hours by train.
I was very encouraged by all the sympathetic comments on the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago called War declared by next-door neighbours. Thank you for your support. I have to confess that I have been depressed ever since because it looked like we might have to give up our gîte project altogether. It’s hard enough to change our lifestyle completely – moving from the Palais Royal in the centre of Paris to a 400-year old house in the Loire Valley, where you can’t do anything without a car – without having to rethink our plans for the last two years, even though we really love the house and the area.
However, yesterday, we invited Mr and Mrs Previous Owners for tea and told them all about it. They agreed that we won’t get anywhere by approaching the neighbours – it could just make matters worse.
They suggested that we might be able to get the poultry house (or whatever you call it) taken down since it’s built up against the wall of our barn. But that would just leave us open to all sorts of retaliation, I would imagine, particularly with respect to our future guests.
But later, when we were talking about his new vegetable patch, Mr Previous Owner asked Why don’t you use your vegetable patch for the gîte garden? I had suggested this to Jean Michel originally but he said it wasn’t a good idea because the ground is sloping and we forgot all about it.
We talked about it again later and it might well be the solution. The vegetable patch is on the other side of the barn, as you can see in the photo, which means that even though you can still hear the goose from time to time, there wouldn’t be the problem of the smell in summer. We’d put up a wall to make the gîte completely separate from the neighbours.
There would be a few steps up from the back door of the gîte to the garden, but I don’t think that’s a problem, do you?
It would mean that the little house could still be used to provide a two-car garage and we could even have a vegetable patch next to the poultry yard if we still want one.
It’s probably even a better solution than the original one of having the garden in front of the gîte, because guests would have the lovely view of our tower, bread oven and hydrangeas in the summer.
Today, my depression has lifted.
Today I did something I know I am going to regret for the rest of my life.
A little background first. Our house in Blois, Closerie Falaiseau, where we will be moving permanently in October 2014, was built in 1584, just like a similar house on the left (the houses were built by two brothers). Apart from the main house, we have a barn, a former pigsty, an open sheltered area and a workshop on the left, and another barn and a little house, built much more recently in steps and stages, on the right.
For the moment, we have divided the main house into two, upstairs and downstairs, and we are renting out the bottom part as tourist accommodation until we move. After that, Jean Michel is going to demolish the unattractive half of the little house, leaving the other half to form a double garage. He will then convert the barn behind it into a gîte (vacation rental).
On the right of the little house, there are three modern homes, all built along the same lines, on quite large plots of land. Our neighbours are not keen gardeners and the area closest to the little house is rather unkempt. We recently had to ask them to lop part of their weeping willow which is threatening to damage the roof of our barn. There is an old wooden lean-to up against our barn inside their property.
They have a wire fence and a somewhat incongruous, expensive remote-controlled gate that was installed last year.
When we arrived last weekend, we were surprised to see that two panels of wood had been erected along the fence on the side near the stone wall of the little house. We initially thought they were going to continue the panels along the entire fence.
But no, the panels were then continued at right angles to the first, ending at the lean-to. Strange. Then next thing we saw a wire fence WITH A GATE on the other side, forming an enclosure, the sort you keep poultry in.
Great! A chicken yard, just next to the future garden of the gîte. Noise, smells, etc. Not to mention the eyesore created by the wooden panels. How is this going to affect the popularity of our rental accommdation? We tried to find out more but the workers claimed they didn’t know why they were building the enclosure.
This morning, after phoning the local authorities and being told that there are no regulations about keeping poultry unless there are more than 50 birds, I decided to go and have a look. And lo and behold, the enclosure now contained a goose and a few chickens. The neighbour’s three children were standing watching them.
That is when I committed the fatal error. I took a photo of the poultry. For the blog. As I did so, I heard someone shouting, “What are you doing? You can’t take photos. It’s private property.” The mother marched down to the gate, repeating the same thing.
When she arrived, I explained that we were worried about having the poultry yard next to our future gîte. She said everyone else in the street had poultry yards and it was for the children. I said that I perfectly understood but wondered why it was on our side, when they had such a large property.
It seems the lean-to was originally built for that purpose and that they have had poultry cooped up in there for the last month. They’ve already lost two ducks. Well, they might all just die off, I thought.
Then she started on about the photo again, so I proceeded to take it off my camera. The problem was that I couldn’t really tell her I had taken it for my blog ! She told me that she herself was a very calm person but that her husband had a terrible temper and would be furious if he found out I was taking photos.
She also complained that the dormer window in the barn, which unfortunately for us fronts onto their property, prevents her from walking around in her nightie in the yard. Considering there’s only a wire fence, you’d wonder why that would matter! In any case, I apologised and said I hadn’t intended to offend her in any way.
I then went off to tell Jean Michel about the incredibly stupid thing I’d done. He said it was a pity but I shouldn’t worry. I went back to my planting and suddenly heard shouting. The neighbour’s husband was upraiding Jean Michel over the fence at the back of the house and threatening to go to a lawyer to stop me taking photos.
My heart sank. After he stormed off, I suggested I go and apologize but Jean Michel said I had nothing to apologize for. It wasn’t as though I was on his property or taking photos of his children. I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. “Don’t worry. C’est un caractériel“, he said, which roughly means he’s totally unstable.
But when we came home after shopping in the afternoon, the neighbour had parked his car in one of the two parking areas that Jean Michel has cleared in the vacant lot across the road that is non-constructible because it’s next to the Loire. Warfare has been declared!
