Winter Sunrise in the Pyrenees

December sunrise on the Pic de Montaigu

Oeil d'Arros - Our Local Rainforest

One of the things we were most looking forward to when we jumped ship and moved to the Pyrenees, was taking advantage of not being tied to a nine to five existence and being able to go and do stuff whenever we wanted.  Or the weather was up to it.  Or we had the funds to do it.

In the first eighteen months or so we ran around like fools making the house habitable and the garden productive.  In between we gave ourselves time off for good behaviour, roaming around the local countryside on foot, pushbikes or motorbikes. 

Then the house was finished, well habitable anyway, and the garden no longer took up every waking moment, once the spring sowing frenzy was out of the way, at least, and we suddenly had buckets of free time.  And somehow, because we can nearly always go out tomorrow, we seem to do less and less. Far less than when we had to make the most of a weekend.  Let that be a warning to you if you are planning early retirement or a change in lifestyle.  It can be really difficult to get going when you have all the time in the World.

Fortunately we have friends and family who visit and need to be entertained and others who drag us out for our own good when they are staying over here.

And what a gem they took us to last week.

Self-Building in France: Tiny Budget & Even Less Electricity

Welcome to another blog from a British expat in France.  Cue pictures of beautiful villages, bustling markets, fields of sunflowers or lavender and our very own elegant recently restored country house on several floors with mature orchards and a hen or three competing for space with the ducks, goats and cats.  Isn't that what we all dream of?

Well, we looked at the idyllic, looked at our bank account, jiggled the budget, flexed the bank account, lowered our expectations, looked at tiny houses rather than grand, then at barns, then at derelict barns.  And finally bought a field.  We designed what we needed: main house with four beds, workshops, gite/annexe.  Gulped at the cost.  Jiggled the budget, flexed the bank account and then predictably (it's 2008) failed to sell our house in the UK and had just the outer shell of a single story two bed, two study house built in 2009. Literally a shell. Open the front door, step down onto the sub floor and enjoy the vista of the entire space from wall to wall to roof tile, with just the odd pipe poking out of the floor for the plumbing.  The rest would be down to us.  And the budget.

We finally arrived for good in January 2010.  It was cold.  Well, it would be.  There was no insulation and only external walls, albeit built from efficient thermic blocks.  And we are in the foothills of the mountains. Two years after moving in we finally achieved an electricity grid connection.  Thank goodness for solar panels (bought) and the salvaged inverters and batteries that gave us light, TV and power tools over those two years.  And two generators bought for peanuts because they didn't work.  Hardly surprising as they are both older than us.