Our Story

Initially, whilst I focused on making the place liveable, Rob started on the demolition. The first big job was to take down a chimney and remove a massive fireplace from the room we now use as a bedroom. Not easy when you are dealing with massive granite blocks and a beam 4m long and 0.5m thick. The granite blocks made it to just outside the front door, where they have become seating, and with the tow rope breaking around the beam, that is now resting under a tree next to the driveway!

But over time we started to see some progress and in 2019 we made the decision to take early retirement and move out here permanently. Over the next three years, walls and ceilings came down, new walls went up, extensive insulation was added, the electrics and plumbing updated, velux windows put in, an external wall was knocked out for bi-fold doors (6 weeks of living with a hole in the house!) and a terrace was built. Summers were hot. Winters very cold. At times the inside of the fridge was warmer than the rooms we were working in and I got used to being told on a regular basis not to stand in certain places in case the roof came down! The lockdowns for Covid meant that we were unable to source materials and so plans were constantly changing.

And three years later it was finished. The underfloor heating was switched on and we celebrated that, with the exception of the roof, we had completed all of the work ourselves.

Over the next year we took some much needed time out and turned our focus to other parts of the property. It seemed that almost every week we made some discovery, from the Turkish toilet in the cellar, to the old pink granite sink behind an outbuilding, hidden by overgrown bushes and a well, hidden under ivy on the front lawn. We learned more about the history of the buildings and how the property came to be called ‘Blanchiments’. We discovered that the outbuilding had been a factory producing linen, which explained why there were still Christmas decorations up. We learned that the female workers had lived in the two houses, which was why we had seen marked cubicle areas in the bathroom underneath the carpet. We were gifted some of the old rails used to transport the cloth in to the fields, where it was wetted and left to bleach (hence the name Blanchiments). And we learned that the father of the man we had bought the property from was the head of the local resistance during the war, and when the Gestapo had come knocking, his wife had hidden all of the ammunitions in the canal (I stopped swimming in it after that!). We bought some hens, we discovered 4 abandoned mallard ducks just hatching in a chimney and Rob became a duck mum for a few months, with them following him everywhere and crying when they couldn’t see him. We were ‘gifted’ an injured Muscovy duck, Peggy, who together with her mate, Jenny, demand constant feeding of dried meal worms and we delighted in all the birds and wild life around the property. We also started keeping bees and have been enjoying their honey ever since.

But then it was time to dust off the overalls and tools and start on the second house. It was much harder second time around, in part because we weren’t doing the project for our sole benefit and because we were 4 years older. But we had also learned a lot from doing the renovations of our own home and so some things we found a lot easier and we were no longer having to spend hours at an end in the DIY stores, trying to figure out what we needed. Whereas with our house we had focused on a room at a time, with the gite we were able to start by gutting the building completely and then starting to rebuild. For someone afraid of heights, I became quite used to getting to the top floor using only ladders, although I still feel queasy when I remember that at times there were only beams to stand on. And as for clearing out the loft area……

The original layout had a central staircase from the ground floor to the first floor and then a second one from inside one of the bedrooms. On the first floor there were four bedrooms and a bathroom, although no toilet. There were many sleepless nights trying to work out the best configuration given the constraints of the supporting walls. Putting in new plumbing was also pretty challenging, particularly as we wanted each room to have its own ensuite. Trying to find a staircase proved impossible and so Rob decided to make one. For someone who had worked at an airport for all of his life, he is remarkably resourceful!

Another three years later and we are finished and ready to share our labour of love with you. As you are cooking your meal in the kitchen, relaxing or sleeping in one of the modern bedrooms or taking a warm shower, please spare a small thought for how it came about. I’d like to say that for us it is now about relaxing and enjoying our surroundings, but somehow I can’t see us sitting still for long and there is always another project to be found….