With another year about to end, I can say with utter honesty that this one has been the most incredible year of my life! It seems as though we squeezed all of life’s biggest and bonkers things into about 9 months and comparing life now to then couldn’t be more different.
Take the last few days for example. We spent our first Christmas here in France, have multiple guest changovers in the cabin and the barn, attended our first village Lotto and got to grips, quite literally, with duck husbandry!
I don’t often do this but taking time to think back to this time last year, we had just had Christmas in the UK before heading straight over to France with trailer full of stuff to start work on the cabin, meet the builders to agree the work to the barn conversion and host our first New Years Eve party at As Plos for friends! It was a crazy week by anyone’s standards. The post about our work on the cabin is here for those who are interested.
As was starting to become the norm, we had big plans in very short timescales and wanted to make inroads to turn the cabin into a rentable space for the summer. Looking at the pictures of what it was like then to how it is now its funny to remember all the sanding, trying to work out the plumbing and electrics and building the bathroom partition. It was hard work but we loved it.
We hadn’t done anything like that before and, although we didn’t get chance to finish during that visit, we'd made a great start. The boiler was in, the bathroom walls up and there was now a cold water supply.
We stopped work just as our friends flew in from the UK to christen the house and see in the New Year - which put a bit of a halt on things for that visit as we nursed hangovers and turned our attention to the internal partitions in the main house.
With various bits of work here and there over the summer, including man-handling a nordic-style hot tub into position, it is now something I think we are all secretly a bit proud of - especially when you see guests coming and going as they have been over the past few months. As it turns out, we've got guests staying in the cabin this weekend and its a milestone moment to have people enjoying a cosy break exactly one year on since its creation. I think we can all be a little proud of that.
