I can't believe that I haven't updated since last July. Where does time go ?

Daffodils in our garden

We had a good summer with the lettings and our last guests left at the beginning of October.  Bryan was busy trying to get the staircase finished and I had a quick tidy round the the gardens and the empty villas and closed them up for the winter. A hospital visit for a scan for me at the end of October and then we were on our way back to the UK via the Loire for a few days rest. We managed to have 1 day - then we got a phone call from a friend to say Monsieur Macron had made an announcement and borders were being closed at midnight.  So we set off for Calais pretty quickly - We managed to get to Dover by the skin of our teeth.

Fast forward 3 months and we arrived back here just 24 hours before the borders were closed again !  I am now banned by our family for trying to arrange anymore trips for a while - they say we are jinxed and I'm beginning to believe them. 

The up side of being back in the UK for all that time was we managed to acquire a few things to bring back with us.......

Home again and after a weekend of rest we are back to work. The pile of boulders we had delivered in October are still in the middle of our garden and need to be made into a rockery on the side of the drive. We brought a greenhouse back with us and the concrete base is now done and we are hoping to erect the frame this weekend. Vegetable & flower seeds have been sown and are waiting to go into it. 

In between pool cleaning, lots of weeding and general maintenance we have started work on the pool house interior - wiring is in and the ceiling is very nearly ready for the plasterboard. We hope to have it all finished by the time our first guests arrive - Covid permitting. 

The staircase for the house is well on the way to being finished. We brought some panels for the balustrade back from England so that is the next indoor job.  We are saving that for a rainy day.

Our unfinished staircase

There has been a few sunny days since we have been home and its very nice to sit in the sun with our afternoon coffee. The daffodils are out and the Mimosa tree in Villa Picholine's garden is in full bloom.  It was such a welcome sight when we drove through the gates.   Its good to be home.

Mimosa in the garden of Villa Picholine

Summer Arrives

Last time I wrote things were a little uncertain. We weren't sure if the facadiers were going to be able to finish the walls and we were in doubt that the lettings would be able to go ahead for the holiday season due to Covid-19.  The villas were both almost fully booked for the summer but by May we started to get a lot of cancellations. Thankfully in early June when the borders opened we got an influx of new bookings and now we have just 1 week in Villa Picholine in late August to sell. ( big sigh of relief....)

We have been continually working since we arrived back from Australia in January. The Pizza oven has been finished & tested, a new pathway to the front door has been laid. Bryan has also been busy in our garden - getting rid of the piles of sand, ballast and gravel. He has also started on a rockery at the front of our house. Moving the stones with the tractor was a bigger job than we thought (poor tractor). We  need to dig out under the stones to place them properly but the ground is now like concrete so that will be a  job for our JCB man in October. For now work has stopped.  Both villas and their gardens are all spick and span, the first guests arrived last Saturday and all is well. 

The veg garden has been suppling us with a good amount of spinach, beans, onions, lettuce and oh did I mention courgettes   -  we have eaten them in everything and the freezer is stocked with copious amounts of courgette soup and lots of green beans.  ( note to self:- only plant 1 courgette plant next year !) We picked the first tomatoes of the season at the weekend. There are a few more ready today so it's looking like lunch will be a tomato, mozzarella and basil salad. Bryan's favourite.

The stone merchants opened at the end of May and they rang to say our stair treads would be ready at the end of June.  We then had an updated time of first week in July.  So all being well we are off to Narbonne tomorrow to collect them.....  Guess what Bryan will be doing for the next few weeks. 

The pool area is looking really good now. The garden has matured really well and it is lovely and colourful.  It is a really calm place to sit after a swim and contemplate what the next job is going to be. 

We are trying to slow life down a little now the heat has kicked in and guests are here but it is a little difficult for us to implement. Sitting around is not our idea of fun. We will just have to keep on trying.....

We had a fab time catching up with family over Christmas and arrived back here a week late, at the end of January, (I'll save that story for later).  We had 7 weeks to prepare for the facadiers - a bit of a tight schedule but we were ready for a challenge.  Mid march arrived in a flash. Then Covid- 19 struck !

France was put on lockdown on the Tuesday at noon and everything ground very quickly to a halt. The facadiers rang on Wednesday evening to say they were ready to come the next day but couldn't get any product for the walls. We had worked so hard to be ready for them - it was so disheartening.

After a day of mooching about miserably we gave ourselves a good talking to, picked ourselves up and carried on with the work we did have products for.  Bryan has finished the portico above the swimming pool gate and he is now building our Bbq & pizza oven round the rear of our house.  The block paving has been laid around the back of the house and the gardens in the villas are looking very colourful and spring like.

Villa Picholine Terrace

The vegetable garden has been rotovated and we have sown beans, carrots, courgettes, spring onions, radish and lettuce. The tomatoes are potted up and waiting for the soil to warm up a little more before being planted out and I am waging a daily war with the vast amount of weeds that pop up and unfortunately for me the weeds are winning at the moment.

Les Oliviers Pool Area

The pool when we came back was a lovely shade of green and it has taken me weeks to get it back to a beautiful blue colour. It now looks so inviting and is warming up with all the sunshine we have had this last couple of weeks. I will be checking the temperature daily - I can't wait for our first swim of the year

Fast forward a couple of weeks and the facadiers rang to say the local builders merchants were opening to professionals and he had managed to find some base coat for the walls and that the next week he could get the top coat.  Things were looking up - finally after starting this project 10 years ago - we were going to see the outside finished.  We can't wait.  Inside is going to take a little longer - the stone merchants is closed so the travertine for our staircase could be a long time in the making.

Spring Vines

We are still on lockdown, but that doesn't change our days here at Les Oliviers. We are mostly self contained. I just venture out once a week for groceries as normal. Espace Vin in St Chinian is doing free deliveries and we can go out for our daily walk as long as we don't venture further than 1 km and have our authorisation paper with us. The fine, if not, is 130 euros each .





There is lots to keep us occupied in the garden and preparing the villas for this years guests.  Hopefully things will improve as the weeks go by and things will return to something more like normal.

In the blink of an eye, (or so it seems), the letting season is nearly over. It has been a long hot summer and we have even found time to relax and enjoy a little bit of it. Sitting outside for our meal each evening and watching the sun setting has been fabulous. We even managed to get a few late night swims in.  This last few weeks, early morning the swallows have been gathering ready for their long trip south for the winter. It has been amazing to watch them all dipping in the pool for a drink on their way.

Over the summer we have been busy working inside trying to get a few things finished off.  We now have an office, I have a sewing room and we finished the upstairs bathroom just a couple of hours before our daughter & family arrived to test it.

All our guests have given us great reviews on HomeAway and everyone loved the villas with their private gardens and of course the pool area. The last guests are settled in for their holiday and we are back to building.

The job at the top of our 'Autumn List' is to get the outside of our house ready for when the facadiers arrive to do the rendering. They are booked for March, which seems ages away I know, but my list is a long one..... Poor Bryan !!!!   The day can't come too quickly when we won't have to look at the horrible red blocks. Yesterday we ordered 50 square meters of block paving for the path along the back of our house -which we hope to start to  lay early next week - weather permitting. At 30 degrees it is still too hot to work out in the sunshine, but it is good for an afternoon swim in the pool. My weather app says its going to be a little cooler towards the end of this week so hopefully we can do the preparation work then.

Bryan has had a few early morning jaunts on his moto with his new toy. He now has a drone.  The scenery around us is stunning and the vendanges (grape picking) is currently happening. The area is a fantastic place for walking and cycling. Watch this space for more of his photo's and video.

The windmill at Saint Chinian

Our plans for winter/spring are to finish the pool house and tile around the pool. Budget permitting there is going to be a small bar area and a pizza oven. There are also all the hedges to cut and the Olives to pick. I have plans for a rockery on the entrance drive but I'm not sure we will have time to do that this year. I also need to dig over the vegetable garden. The summer was too hot for the tomatoes and they had all been eaten or made into sauces by the end of July. The courgettes and peppers are still going strong and we have leeks & lettuce growing too.

This mornings pickings

We also have a UK and Australian trip to catch up with family to fit in and a holiday.  We missed our Ozzie trip last year due to my operation, (we did manage a short UK trip though), but all is booked for both this year and we can't wait.

Flaming June

The sun is shining, the pool is sparkling and summer lettings are in full swing.

                                                                               

Dave

                                                                                                                                                                  We have a new team member here at Les Oliviers - Dave - Our new pool robot.  What a difference he makes to my morning. Instead of having to spend an hour manually cleaning the pool we just pop him in and off he goes to work.  We should have bought him a lot sooner. No doubt Bryan will find me more things to do with my new found time !

Sunday was a day of rest, the first one for a long time when we didn't do any DiY. 

We went for a stroll around the market at St Chinian to pick up some lettuce plants for the garden and bumped into a friend who said we should go for a walk around his vineyard and help ourselves to the cherries from his tree there. So after lunch armed with ladders and a receptacle we went on a cherry picking session.  They always taste nicer when they are free.

The vegetable garden is all planted and we are already eating courgettes, lettuce and spring onions from it. The tomatoes are not ready yet, hopefully by next week they will be ripe. The strawberries were very tasty but they have all gone now.  Nothing beats going out into the garden to pick fresh fruit and vegetables that you have grown yourselves.  

The plan for the next few weeks is to have a working upstairs bathroom for when family arrive in August. We have a lot of landscaping to do in the garden but it is too hot to be working outside at the moment.  In between digging, weeding, building, gardening and all the other daily work Bryan has been busy creating a video for promoting Les Oliviers and I may be biased but I think he has done a magnificent job.

The 2019 Season is underway

Yesterday the first of this year's guests arrived for their holiday.
As usual we were still working on the final touches until 5 minutes before their arrival. Some things never change.

The pool area is as finished as it is going to be for this year. The roof was finished on Friday afternoon, and Saturday was the day for tidying up all the building rubbish. We need to finish the interior of the pool house but having run out of time we have decided to leave it until the autumn. The team arrived to render the pool house & pool walls on the first of March and we were not quite ready for them so the whole month of March was spent trying to keep one step ahead. It is now finished and we are really pleased with it,

We managed to finish the garden at the end of the pool area. It now just needs some sunshine for it to grow ( and covering with gravel, but after moving 10 tonnes of topsoil by hand we are waiting to recover before attacking this little job).

The weather in March was every bit as good as February but April has been cool and showery.  The vegetable garden has been dug over and lettuce and spring onions are growing away quite happily but we are waiting for the warmer weather, which has been promised for next week, before planting the tomatoes, courgettes and peppers. All the summer flowering seeds I sowed have been potted on and are ready to be planted out too.  The shrubs and trees have been full of blossom and the Wisteria around Villa Lucques has been stunning.


We now have electricity connected fully in our house as well as the solar panels. It's quite a novelty to have the kettle and the toaster on at the same time. The underfloor heating has also been connected and tested and all works well. Hopefully we won't need it until at least December.

I have been banned from making new lists until the end of the summer - we are supposed to be taking things a little easier over the summer months - I do have a mental list though and it's getting longer every day.

February 2019

The marathon 33 sessions of radiology was completed yesterday and now we can go back to normal life. I must say it felt strange not to have to get up at 6am to get ready for the taxi to take me to the clinic.


Over the last week or so we have been putting the roof on the pool house and by the end of this week it will be ready to tile.  The pool area walls are finished and ready for the render and hopefully this will be done when the team arrive in March.

The weather has been fabulous so I have also been busy in the gardens. Weeding, cutting back and replacing the plants we lost in the long, hot summer last year. Our tomato seeds have been planted but I haven't managed to sow the peppers, courgettes and spring onions yet, ( it's on my list). We still need to rotovate the vegetable garden and add more compost before we are ready for planting anything out.


Bookings are coming in for both Villas.  Villa Lucques is nearly full and there are just a few weeks left to fill for Villa Picholine. Because we are working outdoors all day nothing has happened in our house so on my list for March is - finish the electrics, finish plumbing in the underfloor heating (not that we need it at the moment) and if there is any time left, finish the office on the mezzanine.  There are a few other things on my list also but I won't push my luck by mentioning them at this moment.

The Almond Blossom has been stunning this year. Bryan managed to sneak out on his bike last week with his trusty camera to capture it.  Spring is just around the corner now and the days are lengthening. We have even been able to eat lunch outdoors a few times which is a lovely bonus at this time of year.