FORTY TOWERS

Accommodation update April 2007

Our original plan was to have had the holiday accommodation partially ready in 2002 and completed in 2003 but like most plans for projects of this scale, priorities change and these have now had to be set back. It was realised soon after we started sorting ourselfs out following our move from England that unless we could get the sheep away from the old farm buildings it would be impossible to make much progress with our project as the sheep were taking up most of our time and the time that we had for renovations etc. were partly spent cleaning up the mess left by sheep. We therefore decided to concentrate our efforts on building a new Bergerie (sheep house).
We were told that we could get EEC grants for this construction and spent the next nine months processing the numourous forms, visiting numourous officials and when we were all but there we were told that it would probably take two years to get it through and that we would then be to old for the grant requirements. So much for French administration and aid to improve farming.
As we were unwilling to be delayed any further we decided to continue the project without these grants and today (2003) we have all but completed the new 850 square metre Bergerie. You can see some of the contruction of this in another section (Link to Bergerie construction). We have completed the Bergerie and moved the sheep and farm implements etc. into the new facility in late 2004 and this should then give as much more time to spend on out renovation works.
The first job after this was the house which will be Mike & Margaret's house. We have now completed this first house (2005) and have partially completed the work on the second house destined to be my house. The project to this point was slow not least due to the fact that we had to install a completely new sewage system before we could use the first house and this had to be sized to cater for both houses and the eventual Gites so it is quite a large system and required a great deal of ground work over ground that proved difficult to trench etc.
The next section of our project is the second house which will be my house (Ken Saunders) and this should have only take about 6 months but like most projects it has taken much longer.
We will have to spend some of our time landscaping the area around the houses and old farm buildings to provide sensible access to the buildings and then we will start work on renovation of the cottage and conversion of the large barn into three gites. I expect by this time we will be thinking about installing the swimming pool and finishing off the garage and garage workshop although with our great interest in cars we are quite likely to change our schedule around a little so as to finish these items earlier.
All this means that we hope to be able to offer the gites around the end of 2008/9 when we hope most of the works we have planned will be completed. Today we are at April 2007 and have finally accepted that we can't renovate the numourous building etc and farm so we have now rented out the land for farming and have sold off the sheep and progress is starting to happen at long last. The land is still looking exactly the same as it is still used for sheep farming but we no longer have to tend it or maintain the livestock. Our schedule is well behind due to many factors not least of which was the bureaucracy that we encountered and the fact that the first house took much longer to finish than I had anticipated. We look forward to being able to offer our facilities to all of you who have followed our project and wish to spend some time with us in this very attractive and relaxing part of France.