French Life-expat France

A week ago we had a big wood delivery - eight stères (cubic metres) of oak - to burn in our wood-burning stove. Given the price of oil for the central heating this is a good thing.
Woodburning stove heating works very well for us, especially because the converted barn where we live is more or [...]

Imagine a lovely English style garden border, about 60 metres long and 4 metres wide. It is full to overflowing with trees, shrubs, rose and bulbs, and there is usually something in flower for nine months of the year. It takes Mrs B a lot of work to maintain it, but it runs up the [...]

I have just added ‘audio guides to France’ to the site, and have been too busy listening to them to write the blog - they are kind of addictive!
Usually I am a mercenary kind of person, only adding things if someone offers to cross my palm with Dairy Milk chocolate first, but this time I [...]

Quite a few expats struggle a bit during the first few months, years, decades….the language, the culture, lack of money, missing family and friends can all make the process of settling in a new country a bit difficult.
Help is at hand! I have received a request from a group making a television series for Channel [...]

France, like much of the world, has experienced a boom in property prices over the last few years - overall house prices have roughly doubled in the last ten years.
A visitor to the site yesterday asked if I knew what was happening at the moment with house prices in France. Based on living here and [...]

Planning a romantic marriage proposal? A declaration of amour, French style? A super-duper romantic wedding anniversary? I’ve found just the thing for you!
How about an exclusive romantic dinner and fireworks in a French chateau? Or perhaps you would like your marriage proposal projected onto the Eiffel Tower? Maybe a horse drawn carriage through a romantic [...]

Well, I thought about a month ago that our Europiscine swimming pool liner problem had been more or less resolved - Europiscine, as installers of our swimming pool liner, were going to argue with the manufacturer about who was to blame, but we would eventually get a replacement liner.
This of course was before they all [...]

I have failed miserably to keep my New Years resolution to write more regularly, oops. This is partly because one of my winter time duties each year is to return the gites to their former glory in readiness for the next season - replace dripping washers, mend toilet seats and shower heads, repaint where necessary [...]

There has been a lot of discussion in recent months about whether expats are entitled to join the French health system, now largely resolved. But the question remained, is the French health system still as good as its reputation?
The Commonwealth Fund has released the results of a survey of health care in the leading industrialised [...]

Today, the 6th of January, is the day of epiphany. The epiphany celebrates various events from the life of the young Christ, notably the day when the Three Kings presented their gifts, and his baptism by John the Baptist.
The main reason the French look forward to epiphany is, of course, because it is the day [...]

Before I tell you where to find free gite advertising I’ll mention some of the problems that gite owners face when trying to get customers in their properties, and holiday rental listing sites in general.
One of the big challenges of owning gites and rental properties is knowing where to advertise a property. A lot of [...]