Well, it's now September 2008 and more than a year since we had the "Mad Mad Week" painting and decorating Valmar Gite and preparing for our first guests on 16th June 2007. After the "Mad Mad Week" though, I had to make another trip over to France on my own, to put the finishing touches to the house, with just one week to go before our first guests arrived !! There didn't seem to be toooo much that still needed doing........ until I started the task of course ..... and things always take so much longer to accomplish when you're on your 'Todd' (your own) don't they !
But the decorating was almost finished .... look.....
Gulp !! One week to go.
But the decorating was almost finished .... look.....
Gulp !! One week to go.
Not one to be detered, I set about finishing ALL of those fiddly bits. There was still a fair bit to do outside the house as well. We had commissioned a local landscaping company to landscape the grounds and sow grass seed everywhere.
With three days to go the 'enterprise' turned up with their machinery, to begin the work on the rather steep sloping site.
And look
, the pool now has water for the first time !!
But you may just be able to see that the nice clean water is being quickly contaminated by lots of nice dirty soil that is being thrown around the place by the tractor, strimmer, rotovator etc. Oh dear !
Now please bear in mind that it's not really practical to build a house, decorate and furnish it and have everything 'just so' for the arrival of your first guests, when, with the house not quite finished, it is the middle of June and the Summer season for Holiday letting purposes in this part of France, runs only from the end of May, until the end of September, if you're lucky. So you can't think..."Well we'll just wait a few more weeks until the nice new grass is grown and everything is really absolutely finished", because if you do, the summer has come and gone, which means no guests and no income for another 7 or 8 months. So you just have to 'make do'. I was confident that everything would be 'more or less' ready for the arrival of our first guests and with two days remaining the main task left for me to complete was 'the building of the barbecue'. Our website, which was already up and running, stated that guests would have the use of a barbecue, so a barbecue guests would have ! Although it was quite a large Barbecue of rather heavy concrete block construction ( I reckon it weighs the best part of a tonne) I still figured I could 'knock it up' in a day, giving me a final day to spruce up the house before leaving for home. That was until 'The Perfect Storm' arrived. The landscape gardeners were in the middle of rolling the lovely grass seed they'd just sown, when I saw some rather ominous looking black clouds heading our way from the direction of the opposite side of the valley. Sure enough, the storm enveloped us. Rain like I've never seen before, descended upon us, thunder and lightning and gale force winds. Now, I wouldn't have minded the storm quite so much had I not been RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF BUILDING THE BBQ.
, the pool now has water for the first time !!But you may just be able to see that the nice clean water is being quickly contaminated by lots of nice dirty soil that is being thrown around the place by the tractor, strimmer, rotovator etc. Oh dear !
Now please bear in mind that it's not really practical to build a house, decorate and furnish it and have everything 'just so' for the arrival of your first guests, when, with the house not quite finished, it is the middle of June and the Summer season for Holiday letting purposes in this part of France, runs only from the end of May, until the end of September, if you're lucky. So you can't think..."Well we'll just wait a few more weeks until the nice new grass is grown and everything is really absolutely finished", because if you do, the summer has come and gone, which means no guests and no income for another 7 or 8 months. So you just have to 'make do'. I was confident that everything would be 'more or less' ready for the arrival of our first guests and with two days remaining the main task left for me to complete was 'the building of the barbecue'. Our website, which was already up and running, stated that guests would have the use of a barbecue, so a barbecue guests would have ! Although it was quite a large Barbecue of rather heavy concrete block construction ( I reckon it weighs the best part of a tonne) I still figured I could 'knock it up' in a day, giving me a final day to spruce up the house before leaving for home. That was until 'The Perfect Storm' arrived. The landscape gardeners were in the middle of rolling the lovely grass seed they'd just sown, when I saw some rather ominous looking black clouds heading our way from the direction of the opposite side of the valley. Sure enough, the storm enveloped us. Rain like I've never seen before, descended upon us, thunder and lightning and gale force winds. Now, I wouldn't have minded the storm quite so much had I not been RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF BUILDING THE BBQ.
This photo was taken from the Terrace and the BBQ is the thing beneath the tarpaulin. I had just put some nice sticky BBQ cement, cum gluey stuff, on a couple of the concrete sections when the rain hit. So, as I couldn't just leave it (the gluey suff would have gone 'rock hard' and wrecked the BBQ), I had to carry on and actually built the top half of the BBQ whilst standing under the tarpaulin, with the rain hammering down. It was one of those surreal moments when you think to yourself "What on earth am I doing here" Note the mud-bath between the nice tiled floor of the Terrace (Yes, the ones that our first new guests would be walking on in two days time) and the BBQ. That was supposed to be grass !And those blobs of mud to the bottom left corner of the photo WERE actually my nice blue training shoes... WERE. They had to go straight in the bin after that.
But - somehow - two days later the house (at least on the inside) was pretty much ready for our first guests.
The kitchen/dining area looked like this
And the Masterbedroom like this
The outside, although lacking any grass, at least looked presentable and judging by the comments left for us by our 'first season guests', when you have sunsets like this
Grass is not quite so important !
So, now more than a year on, how did we get along after nearly two summers' of letting Valmar to Holiday makers....I'll let you know soon !
