Renovating a Gite in Brittany

Hugh and I went camping at Le Mans for the 24hr sports car race. We had a great time and were lucky enough to know a friend whose son worked for the Aston Martin race team. We managed to get some pit passes for a few hours and have a poke around the pit garages. The surprising thing for me was how much plumbing and ‘ancillary’ stuff was hidden under the bodywork. The engine seemed incidental to the rest of the car. It was also pointed out that the cars also have air-conditioning fitted to keep the drivers cool in the cockpit.

I started going to Le Mans in 1986 watching every race until ‘93, from the dominance of the Porsche 962 through the Jaguar and Mercedes victories to the Mazda and Peugeot. Before the new pit complex was built I remember being able to sit on the roof of the old pits and look down into the pit-lane. Watching the cars at night hit 240mph on the Mulsanne straight from the Armco before the chicanes were added was pretty special.

Surprisingly not a lot has changed. The atmosphere is still great, the campsite toilets still terrible and some extra viewing at the Porsche Curves. The most notable change was the catering. In ‘the old days’ the catering behind the pit grandstands was a motley collection of ‘mom and pop’ burger/sausage and fries grill stands. Often the chef was surly, unshaven, dressed in a very grubby ‘white’ apron with a roll-up cigarette hanging out of his mouth whilst cooking.

Now the catering has gone all a bit corporate, with standard fare, standard prices and no soul. I kind of missed the unhygienic stands of the past.

In the past starting a small business in France was an administrative nightmare and financially often not viable. I have been offered small bits of work in the past but had to turn them down. The old system meant that payment of social charges was based on a set amount for the first two years (3000€ in year one). A bill of 3000€ in the first year of a small startup is a definite turn off.

The new system, Auto Entrepreneur, (lautoentrepreneur.fr in French) is more like a self-employed system where you pay charges based on turnover. More information in English is available at startbusinessinfrance.com.

One article that caught my eye was 120,000 registered so far which I think highlights the fact that people want to work for themselves but couldn’t in the past. In the top five professions using AE are computer programmers - which suits me fine.

In Brief, from startbusinessinfrance.com

The Auto Entrepeneur system is a pay-as-you earn system that offers an easy registration process and the ability to pay your social charges and income tax based on a fixed rate of your turnover. The purpose of the auto-entrepreneur scheme is to make starting a small business simpler and less financially demanding in the early years. It is also a low risk option to testing your market because if you do not sell anything, you do not pay any social charges.

Auto-entrepreneurs are not allowed to be VAT registered and have a yearly turnover limit of 32,000€ for services and 80,000€ for trade. Social charges represent 18.3% of turnover for professions libérales, 21.3% of the turnover for services and 12% for trade. Income tax will add an extra 2.2%, 1.7% and 1% respectively.

The garage planning permission came through a month or so after my application, but as yet I have not even started it. Come to that I haven’t done anything on the next door property. It’s a bit embarrassing thinking back to what I’ve been up to (or not!) in the last 7 months. I certainly haven’t been doing any building work !

We now have three chickens, and more eggs than it’s possible to eat. The chicken hut was built from scrap floorboards and building materials at no cost. Basic but the chickens seem happy and are laying eggs.

The garden has had a bit of work done. Some fencing around the boundary and Debs planted loads of hedge cuttings from an old bush in the garden. I would say about 80% have taken so once the hedge sprouts a bit more the garden won’t look so barren.

I treated myself to a new desktop computer. It was built from bits I got mail-order and, like to old PC, is running Linux. The old Linux box has been moved to the lounge and using MythTV has morphed into a home entertainment system. I’m glad I put all the ethernet cabling in when I renovated as I can now stream satellite TV from the DVB-S card in the new office PC to the box in the lounge connected to the TV. Several Terrabytes of storage means I can record TV ‘just in case’ on several channels at once.

Finished a few very minor bits of work around the house, but the lounge is still raw plasterboard ! I think I got so tired after moving in I relaxed and never quite got out of the habit!

Hopefully, I’ll try a make a few more updates in future, but I guess a bit less focused on renovation.

Garage planning application

Before starting the second house to renovate into a gite it seemed necessary to build a garage. At the moment the second building is functioning as a garage storing all my tools, equipment and materials, but as it starts to be renovated I’ll definitely need more space and somewhere to store everything once it’s finished.

I don’t want anything too fancy, just a big wooden shed, but if it’s over 2 square meters and permanent then planning permission is needed. Things have changed recently and various types of planning permission are required. For more information see French Planning Permission.

I chose to use the Déclaration préalable for a garage less than 20 square meters. The forms are available online, but I got a copy from the local Mairie because they need multiple copies and the offline version uses NCR paper to make all the copies. The form is about 15 pages but most of it I left blank, really all they needed on the form was Name, Address, Cadastral Plan references and the size of the building. I also supplied copies of the drawings above (done using Google Sketch Up) with ‘artistic impressions’ of the garage and the position on the land. The overhang on the side of the garage is for log storage and some dry cover. Yes, I know the perspective on my images plonked on the photo is out a bit, but it’s only to give the planners and idea.

When I handed in the form they checked everything and did point out that they wanted a site plan with the position of the garage. Helpfully they printed out a large scale cadastral plan for me and I marked in fluo it’s position. They also checked through the form whilst I was there and checked up on a few regulations. They did point out that the garage had to either touching the boundary of my land and in-line with the edge of the house OR at least 5 meters in from the boundary. I’d planned on putting the garage a meter or so in from the boundary but on their advice moved it to the edge. They also verified that the land was in a constructible zone. Nearly all my land is zoned as agricultural A and therefore can not be built upon, fortunately there is a 10m wide strip in-front of the house that is zone Nh and is OK.

I should get a decision within a month and according to the receipt if I don’t get a decision by the end of the month following my application I can proceed anyway. However my French isn’t that good so I’ll think I will just wait a while first.

I would recommend going to the Mairie and talking to the local planner as they are helpful and can save quite a bit of time and re-applications by avoiding simple errors like my positioning near the boundary.

At last the terrible smell from the septic tank coming into the house has been solved.

To recap - The septic tank system, with pump and sand filter bed was installed almost a year ago but never really used until we moved into the house in August. Within a few days there was quite a strong smell in the laundry room. The laundry room houses the electric meter, water supply and the main drain to the tank. Fortunately shutting the door kept most of the smell in. Talking to friends they suggested that it just needs a little time to settle and get a crust on the surface of the water in the tank.

Anyway after a few weeks the smell was getting stronger and permeating into the rest of the house. There was definitely something wrong with my plumbing. As a temporary measure I even put a small extractor fan on the outlet for the tumble dryer to suck the bad smell out.

Things didn’t really improve and I spent lots head scratching and pondering trying to work out how the smell was getting back into the house. I checked all the obvious things, like all the traps had water in them, the primary and secondary vents were clear, the soil pipe entered the tank below the water line etc. I just couldn’t understand how the gas was getting in. Maybe there was a pressure build up and the gas was forcing it’s way past the trap for the washing machine. I started imagining the nightmare scenario that somehow I must have cracked or broken a soil pipe under the floor. But even that didn’t really make sense as the smell was isolated to the laundry room and the pipes were buried under the concrete floor.

Anyway to buy some thinking time I decided to leave the lid off the pumping chamber that pumps the waste water from the tank up the garden to the sand filter bed. The pumping chamber has a small electric pump with a float that kicks when the water level rises. It is also vented using the same pipework as the vent for the septic tank. It worked as a temporary solution but sitting outside was not very pleasant.

I was on the point of calling out either the installers of the system or a drain company to send cameras down the soil pipes to find the problem when some friends turned up. After a standing over the pumping chamber bathing in the aroma for a few minutes telling them about the problem, one of them pointed to the red conduit in the side of the pumping chamber containing the electric cable for the pump and asked, ‘where does that go?’

Bing - light bulb goes on. The conduit goes to the fuse box in the laundry room and it was open both ends. All the waste gas was travelling up the electrical conduit straight into the house.

Stuffing a plastic bag into the end of the conduit and sealing the end up with silicon solved the problem. Lid back on, no smell anywhere; fantastic

Sometimes you just get so fixed on one thing (e.g. the soil pipes or my incompetence as a plumber) and just can’t see the wood for the trees!

It’s a bit late in the year but we have had our firewood delivery for the winter. Normally you would get the wood in June to give it more time to dry out in the summer, but I’ve been a bit busy with other things. Fortunately we had a little left over from last year from the previous house which came over in the trailer. Each photo shows 1 cord (3 cubic meters) of firewood, stacked and the pile as delivered.

Before delivery I put a tarpaulin down to stop all the sawdust and loose bits covering the gravel.
This year we got two cords or wood and hopefully shouldn’t use all of it, so leaving some of the logs to dry out for next year. In future we should only need 1 cord per year and then use last years’ delivery of mature wood.

I’ve been developing a new Wordpress Theme for this blog and needed some example data just like that at WP Themes but it didn’t seem to exist.

So, here is the export file of the example data that can be imported to a clean installation of Wordpress to check any new theme.

The downside is that the export file did not seem to export any links, so you’ll have to add them by hand.

Phew made it.

The ‘house warming’ party went off with a swing. It was almost exactly 1 year after I bought the house. It’s been a long and hard road, especially the last few months. Time for a rest and a little self-indulgence.

In preparation for the party in a few days and as a bit of a moral boost we got 7 tonnes of gravel delivered to smarten up the front of the house. A few hours with a rake and shovel makes all the difference - it also stops us treading in mud and muck. Most local houses round here have a dark grey granite gravel, but we chose a lighter colour to help bounce some extra light into the house, especially in the winter months. The other consideration was the size of the gravel. Too small and it gets trodden in between the treads of your shoes and too large is awkward to walk on. This size is known as 10/14 - which I believe means pieces between 10mm and 14mm.

The concrete mixer and trailer is tucked away in the long grass at the back. I guess I’m going to have to get the strimmer and blitz the garden; if summer ever arrives.

It’s certainly a huge improvement over this builders yard

Stinky

With the bathrooms operational and having been moved in for nearly a week there has been quite a strong smell coming from the septic tank back up into the house. The septic tank does have a ventilation pipe running from the output side of the tank and before the filter bed that vents up through the roof. However first impressions seem to be that this is not working correctly and the smelly gases are somehow coming back through the input side and the gas escaping through a trap. Fortunately the trap the gas has chosen is the washing machine trap in the laundry cupboard. Keeping the door to the laundry room shut helps, but it’s still seeping into the house.

As a temporary measure we’ve fitted a small fan to the tumble drier pipe to suck out the gas and relegated the tumbler to the garage. Blocking the washing machine trap might well shift the gas escape to a more sensitive part of the house !

Speaking to some friends they said that their new septic system also smelt a bit at first but settled down quickly. It does seem a bit strange to me that the gas isn’t taking the easy route via the vent.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

UPDATE: Problem solved.