In my last blog, 2 weeks ago, I said that I hoped the interior of the pool house would be complete by last Sunday, but I didn’t write a blog then.
I expect most people would have made the assumption that no blog meant the pool house had not been finished. On the contrary, I made my deadline but, as we were so pleased we had finally got to the position that it is complete, and we are so happy with how it has turned out, we decided to ask a few friends over to mark the milestone which meant I didn’t get a chance to blog!
Finishing the interior didn’t take the entire week I thought it may have done, and I did manage to do the grouting on the Monday as hoped. Once grouted, it was a case of building the kitchen ‘island’ and cupboards we had bought for the far end of the space and had sat on a pallet on the ground since they were delivered some weeks ago.
This end won’t actually be a ‘kitchen’, principally as we haven’t plumbed in water for a sink, we felt that it needed something there to give it some sort of purpose rather than just being dead space and, with the plastic crockery and baskets we have for each gîte, we hope guests may picnic by the pool.
We have bought a bar fridge so the intention is to have an honesty bar in the pool house for guests but we can’t find our favourite local drink in anything other than glass bottles so, sadly, we may need to use something else.
Last Sunday was the first time we lit the bio-ethanol fire and we are really pleased that we decided not to install an actual wood burner (which was our original intention), but to use this instead. It gives off quite a bit of heat but, more importantly, it looks great.
With the various different lights in the pool house, you can create different sort of atmospheres, which is what we’d hoped, and we think it looks really relaxing and cosy, especially at night when the lighting is reflected off the pool.
While all the building work is done, there are a couple of deco items we want to buy just to finish it off perfectly, but we are waiting until we find the most suitable things.
Having completed the pool house, my work in the last week has been much less project focussed and much more online as we update all of the agencies we advertise on ensuring the information is up to date and accurate.
It might sound daft, but we have received a couple of enquiries for summer 2027 already so we thought it best to update our details for next year for those early birds looking. This always takes far longer than it really should as, doing it so infrequently, means I have to re-learn the systems every time, which have invariably changed in the 6 months, or more, since I last used them and they aren’t all terribly intuitive!
I think we’ve got planning now out to the start of 2028 but we will need to go in and update a few photos too shortly.
David has also been busy with online work. As our own webmaster he has been updating lots of pages on the website including our ‘Things to Do’ page. On top of making sure the information is accurate, relevant and (mostly) spelt correctly, one of the biggest challenges is deciding what to include and what we can leave out – there really is so much you can do around here and we hope this will provide some guidance and useful suggestions.
Due to the weather forecast, yesterday we had a weekend walk instead of our usual Sunday stroll, and went up to Sainte-Marguerite on the north coast to walk around a peninsular we hadn’t visited before.
We often feel, when the sun shines, that the white sand and clear turquoise water, parts of the Finistère coast could be mistaken for somewhere in the tropical Far East or Caribbean and, while the photos maybe don’t do it justice, this was just such a part.
It was certainly a part of the coast with lots of fortifications old, such as Fort Cézon seen here with the lighthouses of the IÎe Wrac’h in the background, and more recent WWII history with many old German defences.
On our walk we saw a small flotilla of SNSM (Société Nationale de sauvetage en Mer), France’s equivalent of the RNLI, boats sail into the estuary which we later saw berthed in the Port of Aber Wrac’h where the crews and friends were having a large social. Let’s hope there was no one who needed saving at sea yesterday!!
Next week’s work will mostly be determined by the weather but, while the interior of the pool house is now complete, there is still the outside to be done as well as many other tasks to keep us occupied!!
Kenavo.