As you will have seen from last week’s Facebook post, in place of a full blog, the choice for the name of the garage will be ‘Grange’ – thank you to those who joined in the selection – all bar 1 vote was for that choice (and we are delighted as it was also our favourite!)
I didn’t post a blog last week as we had taken the opportunity to pop back to Blighty and meet up with some friends in the Lake District for a week’s walking in and around Coniston. It actually turned out to be a mix of walking and, unsurprisingly for February, dodging the rain. Thankfully however, while it was predicted that storm Doris would cause significant problems to the Lakes, on the day it passed through its track had shifted further south so we enjoyed a decent day and saw a light dusting of snow on top of the higher peaks which made our climb up Wetherlam very beautiful the day after.
Being in the Lakes allowed us to order and collect our new Grange sign from Honister slate mine. Knowing what we wanted to call our gîtes before we completed the sale we had used a slate mine we were familiar with to create the signs and we thought it best to use the same for the new one. It was rather lovely when we visited their shop to see that they had kept a ‘Hayloft’ sign and put it on display with other examples of their work – pity is wasn’t a Kergudon one as that would be great publicity for us!
Being in the UK also allowed us to pick a few other things up that we can’t always get in France – in my case this turned out to be a stinking cold!!
Our sailing back to Roscoff was the bumpiest we have experienced in our time here (we have been pretty blessed up to now) and it was a foretaste of the wet and windy weather we have endured much of this week which has disappointingly prevented any progress on Grange and limited much of what we could outside so it was back to woodwork for me.
Having replaced the fence in front of Granary before we went back to the UK, last week I managed to build the gate to complete the barrier. This is the first gate I have ever made and I am quite pleased with the result – it has certainly been good practice as there are at least 4 others of varying sizes that we plan to build during the spring.
One of the other outside jobs was to place our new Boîte aux Lettres at the front of the property and bin the old one. This has 2 advantages – not only do we now have dry mail but the postie (who will only get out of his van if he really has to) can now post our mail without driving over the grass and churning it into mud in the winter!
Otherwise our jobs were inside and included having a representative from CleVacances visit as we want to use them to advertise Kergudon to the French market. While not exactly like Sawdays, who inspect properties and decide if they want to take them onto their books, CleVacances will advertise any property but they always visit and assign a ‘Key’ rating depending on standard. We have been awarded 3 Keys which we are very happy with. Their rating levels go up to 5 but of the 658 properties listed in Brittany there are none of 5 keys and only 25 with 4 – most of whom have a pool or spa facilities or are immediately adjacent to the beach. However, it does give us something to work towards (other than moving the properties nearer the sea!) and, when our site is up and running in the next week we hope, more visibility to French holiday makers.
Next week’s tasks will be dictated by the weather which is looking very mixed, and we hope to be able to continue on Grange, but should also include a lot of wood clearing. Since we had the trees cut down behind where we are building Grange in December 2015, our neighbours have been very kind to allow the wood to remain in the field next to us but we need to get it moved and stored so we can use it as fire wood for winter 2018 – another purpose for Grange when it is finally finished.
Salut.