French Living: First Four Years In The Pyrenees

January 22nd is a day of celebration for us.  This is the date that we arrived in our new house, in a new country and really began living our lives.

During a brief flying visit in the summer of 2009 we had taken possession of our shell of a house - outer walls, sub-floor, windows, doors and a roof - and tried to make a habitable space for what we had imagined would be a short skiing and working holiday that December.  We put in a ceiling across the whole span of the house, and then erected a few single skin internal walls, just enough to give us a bathroom and a bedsit. Water was connected to the house on the last day, and then promptly turned off again as we abandoned the place in 40 degree heat.

If we had known that we were going to buck the trend of the big recession and actually sell our UK house, the final barrier preventing us from upping sticks and heading for the hills when the house shell in France was finished, we may have planned things differently.  Or just planned  ...

So, over the last four years, the house has been pretty much completed with just the need for some skirting board here and there and some patching between walls and ceilings where the settling of the house has opened up some gaps.  The garden has proved more resistant to change.  The vegetable garden does indeed mostly feed us, although I've given up on onions and main crop potatoes.  Interestingly the harvest for the very first year, planted straight into unimproved clay subsoil does seem to have been amongst the best. Perhaps I just got complacent after that early success.

Early summer 2013.  A rare sunny day in a very wet summer.

Flashback to January 2010.

  The house plonked in a sea of mud ...

... in every direction ...

... although down near the road that patch of green is all that remains of the original land surface.

But by the summer of 2013 we were planting those random trees and shrubs, and had even bought a bigger ride-on lawn (weed) mower!

The 'drive' was a nightmare, the big outdoors project.  Despite having a hardcore and weed matting base, the many visits by removal lorries, delivery lorries and tractors helping us with trees took their toll.

I'd long since given up riding my motorbike down and dreamt of being able to come and go with ease.  

So concrete it was.  Hardly pretty, but very practical.  And we even have electric gates between the posts now!

2014 is going to be the year for the garden.  We have saved our pennies and can invest in some proper big landscaping as at the moment we still seem to be very much living in a house plonked in a field, with a potager at the front, a sickly fruit garden at the back and a few random shrubs and trees elsewhere.  Time to break up the plot and start creating those garden rooms.  

If it ever stops raining ...