The smallest gite here is called Pomme.

A cute little 2-bedroomed house with sloping ceilings and a downstairs bathroom.

The stairs are very straight and upright and open treads. People are often worried about going up and down them. This coupled with the top of the stairs arriving under the sloping ceiling (you have to duck considerably) led me to take the decision to carry out a major renovation of Pomme this winter.

Starting in January, a local carpenter came to fit new doors and windows, here’s the before and after:

Sorry that I have been absent for a while. Contrary to most people’s impression, winter is my busiest period here with the gites. I spent the time bringing up to scratch the gites for the next season.

This teamed with the fact that I have had problems with my computer and also uploading photos, has led to an empty blog for a while.

Before Christmas, I replaced two of the bathrooms in Cerise. Originally, the bathrooms had showers recuperated from two other bathrooms downstairs in Poire, but the shower trays had to be installed raised from the floor in order for the waste pipes to pass. This together with corner opening doors, made it awkward to get in and out.

The main bathroom shower was taken out completely and I put in a bath with a shower over. Baths are more popular for families with small children.

The ensuite shower doors were replaced with a complete side opening door.

All the pipes in both bathrooms were boxed in, to make it easier for cleaning.

This finished I decorated the hall and replaced the polystyrene ceiling with tongue and groove wood cladding.

Pomme’s new shower, tiled and grouted – nearly finished!

The gardens have really taken over this year, we had a dry and sunny April, but then it rained a great deal during May, June and July. I have 1.7 hectaires of land here (approximately 4 acres) and also lots of it is lawned (4.5 hours of mowing each time) I have planted a large flower garden. The gardens were created in 2004 and on a limited budget I planted a few plants that I bought and lots that I took as cuttings from other people gardens, at first they were really sparse.

This year the gardens have been hard work, everything has really grown and needs serious pruning, which I should have carried out in the winter or spring, but will have to wait until the autumn now. I have spent much more time this year, trying to keep things tidy and trying to get the lawns mown. Of course, there is also the constant battle against the moles, I’ll talk about that later!

Here is a picture of the gardens now, I suppose that the most impressive for me is the hedge in the foreground, I took 80 cuttings of a Lonicera nitida about 10cm long, dipped them in potting compost and in three years a fantastic hedge – it does need lots of trimming, but is very easy to manage if you keep on top of it (it does need a trim on top at the moment!).