Thoughts on how to run a business Part 3





Yesterday somebody contacted me to say “but your articles are all about small businesses!”   It is true that I have geared the discussion towards people who are just starting, or who started before but are struggling, or the one-man band.  I have rather assumed that people with larger businesses have already learnt (usually the hard way!) all the dos and don’ts.
However, I will address some if the issues here, though it is still really for small businesses.
Staff.
-  The worst day of the week for a small business is invariably a Friday, when the owner of the business has to frantically run around hoping and praying that there will be enough money on the account to pay the staff.  S/he probably spent the Wednesday and the Thursday phoning and e-mailing to remind his clients to pay up, and to pay up quickly. Very few staff will accept that there is no money on the account till next week, and the few that do are really worth your hanging on to at all costs.  Not because they are willing to be paid late, but because they have demonstrated and understanding of what you have to go through.  Most haven’t a clue (nor should they) and couldn’t care less.

Years ago we had a team of men work for us for no pay at all for 6 months – yes, six months!  Their loyalty to my husband and their understanding and appreciation of our predicament was a real testament to my husband’s ability to instill pride and confidence in his team.  They all knew they would be paid as soon as the money came in – which it eventually did. (I wrote about this situation in my book “A Call From France”).  But on the whole you MUST pay the staff – any which way you can.  They too have rents to pay and need to eat and it is not reasonable to ask them to work only to find you cannot pay on time.
- rules and regulations about employees are now so heavy on the business-owner’s shoulders that if we can manage without employees, we will.  Here in France a huge % of workers (including government workers!) do so on the black, simply because the onus on the employer is so great that it is a nightmare to employ anybody.  It is a shame.  I have only once (20-odd years ago) interviewed a woman who was pregnant – she told me herself and it was clear that she didn’t want to work but that the ANPE (benefits people) had sent her along. I was grateful to her because no way did I want to get involved in maternity leave with the tiny income my business produced.  Legally speaking we cannot refuse to employ a woman because she is pregnant, or even less because she is likely to become pregnant.  I can see the employee’s point of view, but I can see the employer’s point of view too – boy oh boy I can!  It is a shame because a lot more people would be in work (men, women, young and old) if the rules and regulations were not so impossible to adhere to.

- dealing with difficult staff.  Frankly, if they are doing their job and doing it properly, and not jeopordizing your business in any way, let them be difficult.  A lot of people miss out on a good deal because they cannot operate with so-and-so.  On the other hand, if you can easily get rid of them (if they are working on the black, for example) then you might as well.  Obviously, sit down and talk with them and try to outline what you do and do not expect, and outline what their problem is.  I have one of my cleaning team who bitches constantly about the other cleaners and I told her “we must work as a team otherwise we cannot operate; if you don’t get on with the others, so be it, but keep quiet about it ” … so she soon piped down.  Looking back on it I think she wanted me to see her as “better” than the others, ie give her a pay rise.  Most disgruntled employees have an ulterior motive!

- interviewing people.  Gut feeling!  I think women are good at having a gut feeling about people, better than men.  Qualifications only mean so much.  Their personaility and their va-va-voom is vastly more important.  Experience of life & work in general is very valuable, even if it not experience in your line of business.  The University of Life and all that.  If your gut feeling tells you that you won’t get along – then no. I had this situation myself not long ago when I found a man to translate my book “French Sand” – but there was no way I could work with him.  Too noisy.  Too bumptious.  Both his French and his English, spoken and written, were perfect.  But I knew very quickly that I would be unable to work with him.
Before I go, a few quick words about HEALTH.  It does so annoy me when people don’t look after their health – this amazing gift that most of us are born with and we don’t take care of it. Ridiculous.  You cannot expect to ever have much success if your days are spent fighting a hangover or wheezing as you go up the staircase.  Energy creates more energy and a happy, wholesome and hard-working person has lots of energy.  S/he eats the right things and takes regular exercise.  And people who wail “but Ihaven’t got time” are even more annoying – we always have time for the things we really want to do.
tomorrow more – on the subject of bad reviews and dealing with them

Thoughts on how to run a business Part 2

- In my previous post I mentioned that it is essential to look the part – if you are meeting your clients, that is.  It made me remember a young couple, back in the Uk, who came round to our house to offer their services.  The house we had bought (just) was one of the very last derelict renovation jobs available in Sussex and, despite two babies, we took it on.  The young man in question was a builder, and with him was his wife.  Both wore very smart suits (they may well have been cheap suits, but they were smart), and the woman carried a briefcase.  We didn’t need them but we were pleasant and polite and after a few pleasanteries they went away.  Now, the builder was dressed in a suit which somehow made him look out-of-kilter with the job he was hoping to tender for.  Clean jeans and an open-necked shirt would have been better, perhaps a jacket.  The woman’s garb was more suitable for the secretary of a businessman, not a builder.  She’d have been better off also in clean jeans, a pretty top and a jacket.  We didn’t need them anyway, so it was not their clothes that lost them the tender, but it didn’t help.
- Another mistake this couple made was that they came round in the evening.  Well, the poor things had been at work all day, and only had evenings available.  But I had also been at work all day (teaching), I was a young mum of little kiddies, I was trying to get them off to bed, to make supper and bring the laundry in, and the last thing I needed was this pair turning up.  It is far better to make an appointment if you possibly can.
- Do not be in awe of your client.  S/he is not a god!  If there is something about him that makes you feel “small”, just picture him sitting on the loo!  It all depends on what your line of work is, but a man-to-man attitude to your client is usually better.  Without being familiar, which many older people consider rude, treat your client as near-as-damn-it your equal.

- Christian names/first names.  What a conundrum!   I have to say that I don’t like being addressed by my Christian name willy-nilly.  Talking to the bank on the phone yesterday the young man said “is it all right if I call you Catherine?”   And that was fine.  But face to face would not have been right.  I am probably 30 years older and, although I may have said to him “just call me Catherine”, it would not have been his place to assume it was OK.  I think the golden rule is that, if the other person is considerably older than you, you need to address them formally and only use their first name if they invite you to.
- be organized!  Honestly, I cannot work if things are untidy.  I work from home, being a novelist, and it is essential to me that the office is clean and tidy, that things are in their proper place where I can pick them up easily.  I used to know a man who ran his own business, and his office was a total tip; he admitted that he spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for things and that the week before the arrival of the VAT inspector was always a nightmare of trying to find invoices which could be in his car, in any number of pockets, wallet, desk …..  Truly, do your best to find some little system that keeps you organized.
- again, this depends on what your product is, but in most cases your product should shout BUY ME! or perhaps COME ON IN ! ( That is why it is important to dress the part because it says I AM THE ONE YOU NEED!)  There is a small hotel-restaurant in the village here which looks closed even when it is open.  When I once commented on this to the owner she replied “oh, people only have to glance in the window!”  Needless to say she is invariably empty.  To boot she is frequently closed because there are so few customers.  She needs parasols outside, some potted plants, a little music and the place would shout COME IN!  COME IN!

- Christian names/first names.  What a conundrum!   I have to say that I don’t like being addressed by my Christian name willy-nilly.  Talking to the bank on the phone yesterday the young man said “is it all right if I call you Catherine?”   And that was fine.  But face to face would not have been right.  I am probably 30 years older and, although I may have said to him “just call me Catherine”, it would not have been his place to assume it was OK.  I think the golden rule is that, if the other person is considerably older than you, you need to address them formally and only use their first name if they invite you to.
- be organized!  Honestly, I cannot work if things are untidy.  I work from home, being a novelist, and it is essential to me that the office is clean and tidy, that things are in their proper place where I can pick them up easily.  I used to know a man who ran his own business, and his office was a total tip; he admitted that he spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for things and that the week before the arrival of the VAT inspector was always a nightmare of trying to find invoices which could be in his car, in any number of pockets, wallet, desk …..  Truly, do your best to find some little system that keeps you organized.
- again, this depends on what your product is, but in most cases your product should shout BUY ME! or perhaps COME ON IN ! ( That is why it is important to dress the part because it says I AM THE ONE YOU NEED!)  There is a small hotel-restaurant in the village here which looks closed even when it is open.  When I once commented on this to the owner she replied “oh, people only have to glance in the window!”  Needless to say she is invariably empty.  To boot she is frequently closed because there are so few customers.  She needs parasols outside, some potted plants, a little music and the place would shout COME IN!  COME IN!

Thoughts on how to run a business Part 1



-          You need to produce the best possible of your product, given your abilities, your finances and your general situation
-          Bear in mind that, generally speaking, your client is not interested in you. Clients can frequently be stunningly selfish and will even unwittingly walk all over you. But your role is to sell your product, not to make friends.  I remember many an occasion, when I used to have an estate agency, when the client could be so selfish with no regard at all for me or my needs, totally oblivious to the fact that I was paying a childminder when they had no intention of buying; I saw time-wasters and out-and-out liars, really boring people, even smelly people, noisy, rude, cheeky people, dishonest people, stupid people (I once had a client who had got some kind of qualification in child-care and she wanted to open up a nursery in the French countryside. She spoke no French and France has one of the best pre-school  systems in the world … but voila. It was not my place to tell her she was stupid). Likewise it was not my clients’ role to bear in mind my needs or my childminder. And – mercifully – most of them were really nice!
-          Having said that, it is very helpful if your client likes you.  But too much grinning and joking, too much chummy chatter is a mistake.  You need a smiling yet serious stance, a polite but friendly approach.
-          They say looks don’t matter, but they do. You have to look the part.  I know a man, Pierre,  who owns a restaurant.  One of his waitresses was a tenant of ours for a year or so. Poor kid, she was revolting.  She had nasty yellow teeth, big rubbery lips, hairy legs, acne and she was filthy. I know because of what she left behind when she vacated my cottage!  Nothing would possess me to eat in Pierre’s restaurant, nor would I ever recommend it to anybody.  Because although the unfortunate physical attributes of the waitress were not her fault, and she may well have been battling to rectify them, it was nonetheless extremely off-putting to know she’d be serving our food. Looking the part, as far as you sensibly can, is essential.

-          Know your stuff !   Make sure you know what you are talking about and, if you don’t, say you’ll look it up – and for goodness’ sake do so and learn it.  Whatever you do never pretend to know and then look stupid afterwards – that is unless you are good at ad-libbing and laughing at yourself.
-          Learn to read your client.  Most people are poor at reading other people. It is a knack, and women seem to be better at it than men. There is a lot on Google you can learn about body language.  To boot, your client is often afraid of putting his foot down and will say something like “er … not sure about that ….” when in fact s/he means “no”.
-          Be thick-skinned. That is one of the hardest lessons I learnt and it took me many years to learn the “water off a duck’s back” attitude.  It is easy to get hurt by a thoughtless remark from a client, or by a client pulling out of a deal that you thought was all stitched up.  Learn as quickly as you can to say “oh well, that’s that” – and move on.
-          Never do “freebies” unless it is an essential element to what you are selling.  Doing a freebie will often make you look desperate, or sloppy or even downright daft.  And freebies often work out to cost you far more than you imagined.  For example, I used to know a builder who would systematically give a freebie to each client – paint a wall at no charge, install the washing machine at no charge, supply some gravel for the pot hole in the drive for free …. do not do it!  He got no respect for it, it never made the client more happy with the building work and, worse, if there were grouches and groans to be had from the client the freebie made no difference at all.  So he might just as well have charged for it.  Furthermore the freebie wall painting he volunteered would invariably turn out to be on the very day he was desperate to get started on something else for a different client, the new client would get cross … and so on.
-          Which leads me on to: know where your profit is!   Your profit is often tied up in all those little extras.  Think about it: if you say to your client “do please just have that, no charge” is that client then going to run off to his friends and say “oh you MUST use XXX because he gave me this for no charge!”   No, of course not.  So why do it ?   For example, Fiona runs (and owns) holiday cottages. She used to put a bottle of wine and a jar of paté out for each guest as they arrived.  There are eight cottages x £5 per bottle = £45 + pate @ £3 per jar = £15 = £60.  Every week x 10 weeks – £600.  Plus her time running back and forth (or paying her cleaner to run back and forth) to 8 different cottages.  Now, she did not expect her guests to fall to their knees and thank her for the produce, but she certainly didn’t expect complaints about the produce.  More importantly leaving these items for the pleasure of her guests did not create re-bookings let alone new bookings.  The properties are always full regardless.  So why do it ?  As I write I am staying in a dear little cottage in Sussex because we had to come here for a funeral.  The owner has put tea bags and bread etc. for us, which is very kind, but I would not come back because of it and nor would I recommend the place to a friend because of it.   I will come back here, I am sure, but not because of the tea bags.
-Remember your AIM.  What is your AIM ?   To that question, if you have mentally replied “to give a good service” or “to make people happy” then I’m afraid your business will fail.  Your AIM is to make money.  Giving a good service and making people happy should be an integral part of it, but not your AIM.

- To be successful in business you need to know how to think sideways.  Out of the box. You need to know how to look past it (whatever it is), under it, through it.   You need to be able to take something that is clearly not working and use it for something else. To re-locate your thoughts, your product, your itinerary …. whatever, when you need to.  And to recognize when you need to.
- be your own man.  Although I said earlier about how you have to just put up with it when clients are being unpleasant, there does come a point when you have to walk away.  A family wanted to book one of Fiona’s cottages for a fortnight, but on the phone when they were asking about the property they were already being difficult: we don’t want to pay a breakages deposit, why should we pay for utilities? we need pure cotton sheets, how high are the skirting boards? (not really) – they hadn’t even booked yet but were already being a nuisance. So she told them no – they were flabbergasted, and she told them why, when she said she wouldn’t take them.  It is great – wonderful – when you have got to the stage in your business when you can turn people away.  Politely, professionally, but turn them away.
- be available.   There is a young man nearby who set up an internet business.  He told me he had lots of enquiries but that they never seemed to come to anything.  So the next day I phoned him on the pretext of being a customer. I said I needed a computer repair. “Phone me back later,” he said, “I haven’t got my diary with me”.  Deary me.  Be available. Sound interested in your client’s problem. Have some system (good old fashioned pencil & paper will do) whereby you can quickly note the customer’s name and number.  Don’t make promises you can’t keep but never ever tell your client to phone you back!
- what’s in a name ?  Well, there is a lot in a name.  It never ceases to amaze me how people will agonize for ages over what to call their business.  The name becomes totally irrelevant if it is not clear which service you are providing.  I often used to drive past a big well-lit sign, here in France, that said “QUICHENOTTE”.  I often wondered what it is (a quichenotte is a local hat) and long after the place in question had closed down, I discovered it was a restaurant.  The sign should have said “RESTAURANT – La Quichenotte”.  Samuel Dupont, a neighbour, had a van beautifully signed “Ent.Dupont”.  Good.  But what is it ?  A hairdresser? A cobbler ?  A supplier of quichenottes ?  He was a plasterer and once he had added that fact to his van he got a lot more trade.

Dubrovnik

Dubrovnik.  Travels with a Biro.

Bruce met with an accident at the campsite about 40 kms outside Dubrovnik.  I mean, one has to have a bit of excitement !

We had been packing things away in the back of the car ready for an early start in the morning.  He hooked a bungie over one end of something, pulled hard, really hard, to stretch it out over the camping chairs …. and it released and caught him in the eye.

Bruce is a big strong man.  At first I couldn’t make out what the noise he was making was – was he trying not to laugh about something ? – and I stepped out of the caravan to find him on his knees on the grass, one hand over his eye and blood running down his face.

The German people in the caravan next to us rushed over.  We had already had our supper, and so had they, and we had all had several glasses of wine.  They rushed up to the reception to see if there was somebody there who could drive us to the hospital … it seemed to take ages … and eventually the campsite owner located a nephew who had no alcohol in him.  It was a long drive in the dark.  Bruce told me afterwards that the pain was dreadful.

The eye surgeon arrived about an hour later, hauled out of bed no doubt.  You could see she had once been beautiful, but pain and suffering was etched in to her face and, although she couldn’t have been more than forty or so, you could see hundreds of years of trauma in the set of her lips.  At that time the war had been over about ten years.

She told me that Bruce had suffered a detached retina and that she probably had no choice but to remove the eye.  No !  This was not acceptable.  Already Bruce was deaf in one ear …. an eye !  Goodness – I’d need a new husband!  All the bother of a wedding, a new dress …..!  I tried to joke to myself.  Frantically I searched around in my mind what to do.  He couldn’t get on a plane back to France or the UK – where I was sure they would save the eye – and we were not close to the border of anywhere that might …..

After some discussion the surgeon agreed that she would leave the eye for now.  She explained that, although the bleeding might stop, it was more likely that it wouldn’t and the latest she could leave the operation was the Tuesday.  This was a Sunday night.

Oddly enough I was not afraid.  Somehow I knew it would be fine.  Gut feeling.  I got a taxi back to the campsite, arriving at almost 4.00 in the morning.  I slept like a log for three hours, walked George along the cliff, got him in to the car and set off for the hospital.  (George was not the sort of dog you could leave).

Back at the hospital – which resembled hospitals from my childhood – Bruce was asleep.  He had a patch over his injured eye.  When he woke he said he was terribly hungry.  Food hunt.  A few stale sandwiches later he was asleep again.  I drove down to a nearby campsite and explored it till I spotted a caravan about the same size as ours.

“Excuse me,” I said to the man, who turned out to be Austrian, “I need you to come with me and tow our caravan back to here ….” And I explained why.  He spoke very little English.  He was wonderful.  He very nearly tipped both car and caravan over the edge in to the sea, and he kept saying “hot chair” to me as he drove us back to the new campsite.  Pre-occupied with other things it was only days later I realized the poor man was boiling because the car seat heater had been accidently switched on.  If he had patted the seat I’d have understood, but as it was he kept saying “hot chair” … and I just smiled and wondered what he was going on about.  Hot chair, hot chair.

He helped me rig up the electricity and water and then I gave him a hug and said:

“Thank you, thank you, you are a good man.”

“Yes,” he replied.

I was able to walk to the hospital from the new camp site, which was vastly better because George was fine if you left him in the back of the car (hatch-back) with the boot open.  I tied him by his lead, told him to stay, and he was perfectly happy like that.  Nobody would approach him – he looked terrifying, though he was very soppy.

All day Monday hospital-shops-campsite-hospital-shops-campsite.  Bruce was in a lot of pain but slept a lot. Perhaps they had given him something to make him drowsy.  Tuesday came around and the doctor said the bleeding had stopped – phew ! – and that he needed to lie still for several days.  He couldn’t see anything out of that eye.  Being blind in that eye would be no joke either, but it would match his ear.  So to speak.  Better than having it removed.

A week later he was released from the hospital, still with an eye patch. We spent two days at the camp site and then, leaving the caravan where it was, we set off by car for Mostar.  I drove. I felt very brave because in fact I am a bit of a wimp in that way.  The roads were rough and there had been huge forest fires.  Blackened trees and tree stumps stretched for miles and miles.  In Mostar we found an hotel – one of the best I have ever stayed in. We were able to park the car by the balcony and chat to George from there.

Mostar is a different story.

Why you do not lose weight

I have only just worked it out – it is because of that myth that if you feel hungry your body instantly starts storing fat!   So what do we do ? – we quickly eat a biscuit rather than allow our bodies to start storing.
But the biscuit contains more calories than fat the body would have stored.  So it is a nonsense.  Even an apple contains (depending on the size of the apple) 80 calories, and it would take your body a full hour to even begin to start storing 80 calories’ worth of fat.  If you absolutely must swallow something, make it black tea or coffee, a glass of water or of skimmed milk
If you want to lose weight it is very simple:-
- go on line and find a calorie counter, and a chart for what your intake should be, given your age and your build
- if that chart tells you that for your age and build you should not consume more than (for example) 1200 calories a day, then that it what it is.  If you go over that YOU PUT ON WEIGHT.  If you stay under that YOU LOSE WEIGHT.
- count any extra exercise you take as a bonus; do not try to enter that in to the equation because there are so many variants – your version of walking fast may be very different from mine, for example.  But know that if you take exercise too, you will lose weight a bit faster
- keep your tummy tucked in !  Just holding your tummy in all day every day is equivalent to doing twenty sit-ups a day
- move with alacrity!   Every little helps (but keep under your calorie max. too) – take the steps two at a time, walk that bit faster, hoover a bit more vigourously
- know in advance that you will not see results for several weeks, so don’t be disappointed.  Just keep at it.
- if you fall by the wayside, never mind, just start again urgently
- all those little things make all the difference in the world – a salad dressing does not have to have oil in it (I use parsley and balsamic vinegar), porridge is fine without sugar, tea is fine without milk, drain the oil off those sardines first, cook your meat slowly without oil (it contains enough fat to cook in), spread butter and jam very thinly …. and so on.
- know in advance that you will need to keep up this new way of eating and moving FOREVER
PS    Wine ? Oh no, wine contains no calories whatsoever.  ’Course not.

'Saying Nothing'- A novel

“Saying Nothing” has now overtaken “The Man With Green Fingers” in sales !

How would you cope if you were kidnapped ?  You are not rich, you are not famous, you are not influential and, furthermore, you know nobody who is.  ”Saying Nothing” is the story of a young English woman on holiday in Spain.  Mistaken for somebody else, she finds herself in a life-or-death situation while her husband launches a traumatic search for her.

Available on Amazon and on Kindle. Can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries.

Other books by Catherine Broughton:

French Sand – a novel

The Man with Green Fingers – a novel

A Call from France a true story

The lovely and Very Nice Stories of Baby Black Rabbit, books 1-5. Age group 2-6

We restored a huge old house in France Part 9

The ceiling of this first bedroom, which became our own bedroom, was utterly black.  Most of it was soot, which was odd because the fireplace surround had been moved from the wall where the chimney is, over to the other side of the room where there is no chimney, and left there simply as a decoration – which in itself was odd in an era where ancient features like this were usually not considered of any value.

The ceilings are very high and we had to erect scaffolding in the room in order to sweep off the soot.  I did this with one other man to help.  I did have a photo of me with my face all black, but I cannot find it now.  Luckily under the soot was a clean white ceiling, which although a bit cracked in a few places, was fine.   The little twin room next door was for many years our dressing room, and through that we installed a shower room.

The master bedroom at the other side of the landing was left for many years and various members of the family slept in there with sheets pinned up over the windows at night and bare floor boards through which you could see the lights in the kitchen at night – and hear everything that was said, I learnt to my consternation!

We put carpet on the upper staircase, which is a shame because the old stone is wonderful. But we felt that if somebody slipped – the staircase is very steep – it would be a pretty hard landing on the stone.  In fact nobody has ever slipped there, so we were worrying about nothing, as one does when the children are little.

The landing on the middle floor became the library – it is a large room big enough for plenty of furniture.  I have always been a book-worm!  Off there is a balcony facing south, far too hot in the summer, but in the winter it was a wonderful sun spot on sunny days.   I wrote about this, and other aspects of the property, in my book “A Call from France”.

We restored a huge old house in France Part 8

The property had originally owned all the surrounding land for many miles in each direction, but the previous incumbents had sold off most of it, leaving just 3 or 4 hectares immediately around the house and in the woods behind.

There is a 12’ wall around the entire perimeter (though not in the woods), much of which had crumbled away.  This was a very major task not just because of the man hours involved in re-building the broken parts, nor the expense of buying the appropriate tools, but because getting hold of clean uncut stone was not easy.  There were several old farms in the area selling off piles of stone all right, but they were invariably attached (the stones that is, not the farms) to cement and concrete, layers of very hard mud and stones.  Cleaning them off and making them useable doubled – if not tripled – the man hours needed.

The interior of the house was vastly more urgent, or so we thought till we were burgled. Both our elder son and our daughter, completely accustomed to hard work on their home, joined a couple of men and worked steadily, hour after hour, wheeling piles of stone back and forth, and buckets of cement.  It took several weeks.  The back gate, which had completely fallen off its hinges, was reinstated, and the front gate repaired.  Both gates date to the original property, huge iron things that I painted royal blue.

A road runs along the front of the property, in the summer quite a busy road because it leads to the island of Oleron.  We were well protected from this by big fine old trees, mostly pine, that lined the wall.  Then, at the end of the millennium, came the Big Storm in which 36 local people were killed, 762 seaside businesses destroyed, almost all roofs lost – and almost all trees.

That was devastating.  Not only did we then have the massive task of re-building the house we had spent the previous five years working on, but all our lovely trees were gone too.  Once again, the interior of the house was more important – the storm had been so bad that windows had been blown in, carpets ruined, pictures unhinged from the walls, ornaments smashed to smithereens.  Cry ?  No, I didn’t cry.  We were far too busy for that.

When we finally got to the wall we really had no choice but to build it higher using boards.  We couldn’t afford more stone, let alone the labour.  It is not ideal to this day, but it works.  Every year we plant two or three more trees.

One very interesting old feature outside is the dove cote.  It dates to the 1600s and is far older than the Chateau.  This part of France tends to not have cellars in old houses, but this ancient dove cote did have a cellar.  It is quite likely that ice was kept down there, brought by horse and cart from the mountains at the other side of France.  It makes one realize how tough  life must have been in the days before fridges!

At some stage, however, the cellar had been used as a septic tank-stroke-garbage dump.  There was only the one outdoor WC when we bought the place, but in the dove cote we could see traces of what may well have once been a Wc, quite possibly a double WC.  In this area I have on more than one occasion seen planks with two, or even three holes cut in to them so that loo-attendees could sit and do their doings in unison, Roman-style.  Indeed, this was a Roman area, so may well have been influenced by precisely that.

Children being children, of course, felt that the best possible place to play was down in this stinking cellar and they thought I was really very unreasonable to tell them not to.  Down there, however, they did find two most attractive candlesticks, dating from 1880 or so, which I cleaned up and which are now on display.  Please don’t touch !

We restored a huge old house in France Part 7

The top floor of Rochebonne had clearly been intended for residential use because fireplaces had been installed.  Unlike the fireplaces on the first floor, which are marble, these ones are in cut stone.   However, that was all that had been done.  The huge space had not been divided in to rooms and there was no electricity.

It is a bit of a mystery because the fireplaces and the balcony seem to indicate that it was intended for family use, yet the staircase is very steep, ie more suitable (or so it was thought at the time) for servants.  We’ll never know now, but there was some evidence of it being used to sleep in, judging by the dusty feather pillows and a hard old straw mattress.

The story goes that the staircase, being so steep, was once part of a tower.  The original chateau had been burnt to the ground during the French Revolution and was apparently much bigger.  So it is possible, even likely, that there was a tower at some stage.  My husband, however, tells me that this is not architecturally possible unless the staircase, which is stone, was dragged from somewhere else and somehow hoisted up to second floor level.  This is rural France, not ancient Egypt, or even Versailles, so that seems equally unlikely.

The first thing to be done was to clean the place out.  We set up a kind of watch-out system whereby one of us would stand outside guarding the area and the other would hoist the old mattress or whatever to the balcony and haul it over  in to the skip.  It took three skips and two days to clear the old rubbish out.  Nowadays I wish I had paid rather more attention to what we were throwing, though we did keep a great deal – old farm implements, old scent (?) & medicine bottles, several old photos whose sitters we were later able to identify from the church records and old housekeeping books – but that was much much later, long after the children had grown up and I was no longer so busy.

We split the area in to three huge bedrooms, two shower rooms with WC, one small bedroom and a big play/chill area for the children.  For a long time, having also installed central heating and electricity, we couldn’t afford to do anything else, so the children just lived in it as it was with bare plasterboard walls and chip board floors (lain over the rotting floor boards already in situ). Two or three years went by before they even got curtains, never mind carpets, but they didn’t mind – children don’t – and they loved being able to decorate the walls with hideous monster drawings and picturtes cut out of magazines.

Another thing we did was to install a bell system. I can never understand parents who shout out at their children but in this house it seemed seriously the only option.  So then I had an electric bell I could ring.  Upon hearing it one of the children would appear on the top landing, look down through the stairwell, and I would be able to say “show me your homework” or “supper is ready” or whatever.  My book “A Call from France” was originally called “The Calling Bell” with this bell in mind.

A ceiling had gone in to one half of the space covering the top floor, and boasted a ladder which led to the attic above.  It was a shame to put ceiling under the marvellous old beams which covered the remaining space, but we had neither time, energy nor money to do otherwise.  On a practical side I felt the children might feel their bedrooms were perhaps slightly spooky if there were huge old beams and high spaces.

The chill/play area became, just a few years later, the unofficial youth club where out elder son hung out with all his mates.  The noise and the mess was unbelievable, but I preferred them being there where I knew what they were up to (or so I thought) than out somewhere dubious.

We restored a huge old house in France Part 6

Rochebonne means “good rock”.  The property is built on solid rock.  Gardening is a non-event.  We have lots of potted plants, flowers in tubs … and lots of small trees and shrubs whose roots struggle down through barely 6″ of soil, through the rocks, to more soil and water beneath.  Not a lot will grow.  Worse, it takes just a bit of a high wind and the trees, their roots shallowly spread out over what little soil there is, soon uproot and come tumbling down.

My lovely old daddy, who that year would have been 82, pointed out the one and only place where the pool could go.   Oddly enough, on both the Chateau side and the cottage side, the only deep soil is in the north-east sector of the grounds. So that is where the pools went, both sides.  Annoyingly, just the other side of the wall, in the woods belonging to the neighbour, there are tall trees which, in turn, means deep soil.

We did a lot of the work on the first pool ourselves.  Needs must and all that.

It was back-breaking and tedious work.  Mercifully it didn’t rain and it didn’t get too hot.  When we did the cottage pool, over double the size, we got contractors in.

There are so many rules and regulations associated with pools and the public that it many ways it is tempting to not have a pool at all.  The British in particular (and the French will soon follow, as they do) have copied the Americans in their love affair with sueing for anything and everything.  Keeping on the right side of the law while providing a lovely place for guests to swim and sunbathe is a feat in itself.  I had to dive in after a child on one occasion and on another I mentioned to the dad of a young brood that he needed to remember to shut the gate properly.  He said:

“Well, you should get a better shutting mechanism!”

“The best shutting mechanism in the world,” I replied, “is called GROWN UPS!”

We restored a huge old house in France Part 5

We’ve got people coming for dinner tonight so I haven’t got time to write anything much.  I have, however, dug out a few “before” photos of the front facade and the living room.   The cover photo shows the living room as work started.

Things chop and change of course, and things also get improved a little more each year.  Here is the front facade of the house when we bought it.  My husband treated the stone work, which was dark grey with dirt and age, with industrial bleach.  It burns !   It really burns and he had to wear rubber gloves and long sleeves despite the heat.

I can’t remember how long it took him to work his way around the entire outside of the house, moving the scaffolding as he went.  Perhaps a month ?  You can see the dribbles of bleach at the top of the photo.  It was a grey and dreary old building. I don’t know what possessed us to buy it actually!

Just those shutters took an eternity.  We removed the shutters from the two balcony windows because they were so broken, it really wasn’t worth repairing them.  After the first year of letting the property to holiday-makers, some four or five years later, we fixed the shutters permanently in the open position because guests would leave them banging around in the wind and then they’d have to be repaired all over again.

We restored a huge old house in France Part 4

The kitchen and the back-kitchen are about the same size – more-or-less the same as most people’s living rooms ie 30 sq metres.  There are red quarry tiles throughout, though in the back kitchen some were so perished that we were forced to replace them with modern ones.

Outside the kitchen window was a decorative tree of some sort – not a leylandi, but that kind of thing, which had grown so massive that the room was dark and gloomy, even slightly spooky.  We had it cut down, along with one other outside the living room windows.

A huge and very heavy curtain split the kitchen in to two, with the fireplace and an old range on one side.  The old range had rats nesting in it and was too broken to repair (though I now wish we had tried) and for those first few weeks we cooked over the open fire – just pork chops, and that kind of thing, in a big old pan.  My hair was in a long plait down my back and one day it fell over one shoulder and almost caught on fire as I bent over the chops! Happy days!

On the other side of the curtain was a narrow iron bed with real old feather mattress, duvet and pillow – you know, one of those sausage-shaped pillows the French have.and a few small bits of furniture.

None of the furniture was worth saving, riddled with woodworm and in poor condition, apart from an old butler’s chair which some clever person had painted in orange gloss (deary me!) and a lovely little table which we later had dated to around 1600.  Hanging from the beams and from various hooks were a variety of pots, some of which were copper, some so dirty that it was difficult to make out what they were made of.  Most of these we cleaned up and kept.

Between the two rooms is a corridor, or back lobby, with what was at the time of purchase a huge walk-in coat cupboard.  In here we found Nazi jack boots and a few other items of Nazi paraphernalia, including maps.  We donated it all to a WWII museum which, unhappily, closed down a few years later.  This little room was then converted in to a downstairs WC with basin.

The kitchen beams are amazing. You can see the adze marks quite clearly.  Each beam is an entire tree and the craftsman would straddle the tree trunk, once the tree was down, and hack away at it with an adze.  This gave it the square shape needed for the beams.  It makes you realize the massive quantity of work that went in to these p0laces, years before cranes and electric drills and saws. You can see it in some of the stone work too – on the step in to the kitchen from the hall are very clear marks where the stonemason chiselled away.

The basin was in the back-kitchen, or scullery as it would have been called.  Flung out in to the grounds was a massive stone sink, hundreds of years old, which we rescued and put on display.  Old stone sinks like this were very shallow and they were used as much for keeping meat and fish cool as for washing up.  We had no money, so for many years both the kitchen and the back-kitchen were a haphazard mix of a small fridge and a cheap gas cooker, crockery stashed on to temporary shelves and an old sink in the wrong room.  All mothers need a washing machine too – in fact a washing machine is a must for me, regardless of anything.

Some time later we had some kitchen cupboards made by a carpenter by the name of Rene Jean-des-Champs (Rene John-of-the-woods – lovely!). Barely a month after he had finished this job he fell off a roof (elsewhere) and broke his back.  When he finally recovered, months later, he had permanant damage to something in the nerve centre, so that he could either walk or he could move his arms, but he couldn’t do both.  The stair gate at the top of the first flight of stairs was made by him, and with this handicap it took him weeks and weeks and weeks. But he needed the work and, although it is not a good job done, we have kept the gate as a sort-of hommage to him.

We restored a huge old house in France Part 3

The living room at Rochebonne had been split in to four rooms at some point between the two World Wars.   It had been designed as two large rooms, one a dining area and the other a living area, but we know from old papers that the dining area was never finished, presumably for lack of funds.

It was quite common during the 1930s and 1940s to split rooms up because it meant less space to have to heat in an era when domestic staff were no longer quite so readily available to carry wood and coal and clean-out hearths.  Having said that, this part of France remained remarkably backwards for a very long time; indeed, till the 1980s was called “Charente Inférieur” which kept it very much considered a back-water.  The word inférieur here does not mean it was inferior in our sense of the word (though it was) but that it was over-there-in-the-back-of-beyond. To this day domestic staff are easily available and despite the entire area having leapt forwards in to the present day, there does still remain a kind of old-fashioned element to village life and attitudes.  Re-naming the area Charente Maritime brought the place smartly in to the tourist books, which in turn brought in much-needed jobs and money.

This part of the house, ie the living area,  had been abandoned during WWII (see History of Rochebonne on a separate page), and the four dark rooms were thick with cobwebs, smelling of damp and in one half the floor had rotted away completely.

There was a lovely 1920s table left in one of the rooms, which we cleaned up and kept, also a piano which was beyond salvation.  A card table was revealed under a pile of old curtains, several earthenware jars and an exquisite blue glass goblet in perfect condition, dated at 1700.  Further clearing out of the two large built-in cupboards produced a variety of bowls and pictures, lots of rotted papers and some interesting house-keeping books.

So, the first thing we did was to demolish the walls.  They were made of that thin brick-like stuff that you cannot nail in to if you want to hang a picture.  Brittle and easy to smash up, it created a red caking over everything. I draped the old curtains over our various boxes of belongings, but what with things being moved out of the way, the curtains being used as tents by the children, and the general overall havoc, not one of our possessions escaped the red dust.

At some stage a false ceiling had been put up, with some rather attractive cornice work, but it was damp and rotten, and had even started to fall away in places, so we ripped this down, eager so reveal the huge old beams that were sure to be hidden above.

Our disappointment was immense. Some bright spark had painted them all blue.  Perhaps it had looked nice once upon a time, but it was dreadful now.  We had neither the time, the energy nor the will to try to strip them, so our only solution was to paint them white.  We considered black, which would have been more beamy, so to speak, but the ceiling there is surprisingly low and really white (off-white to be precise) was the only option.  In an ideal world we would have put a new ceiling in place, but that wasn’t possible.

Actually, a lot of people make this very mistake: an old manor-house like this would have had an elegant ceiling in the living area, not beams, and certainly not dark beams.  Beams are for kitchens and sculleries after, say, 1750 or so.   A couple of years ago we visited a nice old hunting lodge we used to own, over by Tonnay Boutonne.  The present owners showed us with considerable pride that they had hacked away the plaster to “reveal the original stones” in a bedroom.  The French call it “pierre apparente” – visible stone.  But this is a big mistake.  Visible stones would have been in the scullery, in out-buildings, certainly not in the main house, let alone the bedrooms. Yet lots of people do a huge amount of dusty and expensive work to reveal them.  It is a nonsense.  Furthermore, no matter how much you treat the stones with stabilizing products, they do remain dusty.  There are constant little bits falling off and patches of salt peter growing.  I don’t recommend pierre apparentefor anywhere other than, perhaps, a kitchen or a holiday house

We restored a huge old house in France- Part 2

The ground floor of the property, measuring 200 sq metres, has these ancient quarry tiles over two thirds of the floors.  Of course, because there was such a huge amount of restoration work, we ignored the floor for quite a long time, and I used to just mop it and mop it and then mop it again in attempts (invariably futile) to keep the dust at bay.  It always looked great when it was wet !

The previous owners, two brothers who didn’t get along, had split the house in to two, which meant that in the middle of the hall there was a wall and a staircase where a wall and a staircase shouldn’t be. Jake, who was then aged five or six, was excellent at generally bashing things, and the older two children (then aged …. I’m trying to think …. about 12 and 14, I’d say) were even better.  Between us we demolished the wall and removed the staircase.  This is what caused such huge quantities of dust.

Dust and neglect was ingrained in the entire building, of course, but once the demolition of the wall and removal of the staircase was done, the dust was a zillion inches thick.  The children carted, using wheelbarrows, all the rubble out in to a skip.  Back and forth, back and forth.  I had to wash my hair every day and even then it took on a delightful greyish matted look, gorgeously embedded with grit.  Had I had any sense I’d have had it cut short, for in those days it was very long.  (I had it cut short one Christmas in Cyprus, but that is a different story).

A big mistake we made was that we removed some of the floor tiles so that we could run the central heating pipes along under them.  On the face of it that seems a reasonable thing to do, otherwise the pipes would have to go around the walls ( a long way) which in turn meant a lot more pipe, which led to a lot more work. The pipes would then also be visible unless we boxed them in – which represented even more work.

So we laid the pipes under the floor tiles.  We had a young Englishman by the name of Mat staying with us at the time.  He was an assistant teacher at the children’s school and, a bit lonely, came to us at week-ends. We loved him to bits. Anyway, Mat did most of the laying of the pipes, wrapping them carefully first so that they wouldn’t freeze in the winter.

What we didn’t realize was that the heat of the pipes, once the central heating was up and running, would crack up the floor tiles.  It seems obvious enough now, but at the time, working hell-bent-for-leather and with winter already upon us, it wasn’t obvious at all. So for several years there was a patch of floor tile that was pale and crumbly; we eventually laid red cement over them and, although they certainly don’t look good, it all blends in and is fine.

I think that is something of utmost importance when you take on a huge project like this, particularly when you have a tiny budget as we did: do not fuss too much where fuss isn’t really needed.  You cannot be a perfectionist at times like this, otherwise you will never get the job done.  We know a man who spent four years trying to install his central heating; he was so careful about everything, so precise … he never got the job finished and in the end they called a plumber in, which they might as well have done in the beginning.

Had we carefully measured each tile, each pipe, each length or width of this or that, we’d still be at it today.  There are quite a few things that have not got that professional finished touch but it doesn’t matter to us.  The house is nonetheless great, most people love it, and those who don’t – well, that’s fine, they don’t have to.

Anyway, I bought all sorts of different things to treat the tiled floor with.  I tried one thing after another, asked the tile people up the road, and then the tile people down the road. But nothing seemed to help.  I painted a damp-proof product all over the surface, and the only result was back ache.  I mopped cheap polish over it, expensive polish, black soap, linseed oil and Lordy knows what else.  But the tiles remained dull and featureless.

I hit on shoe polish when I was at the cobbler’s one day.  On his shelf I noticed a jar of shoe polish which was more-or-less the exact same reddish-brown hue of the tiles.  I bought it, tried it out on a few tiles – and hey presto!  Shoe polish is slightly damp proof, and it is a waxy product that buffs up to a shine.  Another back-breaking job which took me days and days.  Really, it should be done every three months or so, but I can’t.  Honestly, I just can’t

We restored a huge old house in France Part 1- The history of Rochebonne

The first record of Rochebonne dates to 1658, when the property was owned by one Jean d’Arquesson, lawyer to Louis XIV, the famous “Sun King” who built Versailles.   However, the dove cote and the upper section of the staircase pre-dates this by 30 years or so, so one can safely assume that the original Chateau de Rochebonne was built in around 1628.

Rochebonne changed hands several times till 1738 when it was inherited by the female line of the Saint Collet family, aristrocratic farmers who were based in the Limoges area.

During the French Revolution in 1799 it was burned to the ground, leaving just the staircase and the dove cote, and some of the old red floor tiles, intact.

The owners, by now married in to the Machefert-Herve family, were re-housed in a convent in the village.  Their daughter, Adele Senne, was born in the Chateau and was a small child at the time of the fire.  It was she who, fifty years later in 1848, re-built Rochebonne as we see it today.

The new building is about half the size of the original which stretched as far as the cottage behind the white wall (marked “private”) where the old bread oven and scullery area was.  The remains of the bread oven, dating to around 1700, are still there.  The old stone sink by the palm tree also dates to that period and was taken from that same scullery area. The staircase had been part of a tower, which is why it is so steep.

The land stretched as far as the river Seudre, to the south, and up beyond the village to the north, 386 hectares strong.

Adele Herve moved in along with her daughter and son-in-law, Marie and Christian Roye, and their three children.   They re-named themselves Roye de Rochebonne.  They occupied the middle floor, the top floor never having been finished.  With them they had six or seven servants: a couple of  maids, a scullery maid, a manservant and a few stable boys.   The household servants would have slept at the hearth in the kitchen.   The fields were worked by the villagers; in the village archives are a great number of references, spanning two hundred years, referring to the workers of Rochebonne, sometimes called simply Roche.

Adele died in 1851 and the property passed to her son-in-law, Christian Roye.   The Roye family  remained the owners of the property till the present English owners, the Broughtons, bought it in 1995.  This was at a time when inexpensive property was being snapped up by the British and it has to be recognized that the British did, in many ways, save a lot of our old buildings all over the country.

Country life continued peacefully at Rochebonne, with only the slightest interruption during World War 1, till 1933 when Sebastien Roye, grandson of Christian, died and left the property to his sons, Charles and Ludovic.   The two brothers (the de Rochebonne appendage to their name seems to have been discontinued at around this time) did not get on and they promptly split the house in to a pair of semis.   The garden was divided in to two, and most of the land was sold off.  The existing front door served Ludovic, who owned the eastern half of the house, comprising the front of the hall, (where a 1930 staircase went through what is now the mezzanine), the living room and the rooms over it.

Ludovic died during the war, leaving a heavily pregnant wife and a small son.   Destitute and alone, the young Madame Roye closed up and returned to her family in Angouleme.   Barely a soul entered her part of Rochebonne for very many years.

Charles’ part of the house was briefly occupied by the Germans during WWII.  However, that part of the house was barely used either, serving only as a kind of eccentric holiday house for a few weeks in the summer.  Slowly and inexorably fading and crumbling it remained largely empty till 1979 when, unwilling and unable to pay for its upkeep, the Roye family put it on the market.  It remained for sale for 19 years !!

The Broughtons undertook a massive task in the saving and renovating of the property, and they have undeniably achieved a great feat of which the village is truly proud.  From a long distance passers-by can appreciate the regular structural features of this classic style; the interior is sympathetically arranged to suit the needs of holiday-makers while also retaining its charm.  Apart from the addition of the bathrooms and the pool the house remains largely as the 1848 architect intended.

The renovation of the cottages at the Domaine de Rochebonne started several years later.  Now forming eight cottages, these were mostly derelict old barns, though the caretaker’s cottage has not changed much.   These extensive old buildings help to date the property as vast quantities of easily-dated farm implements and associated items turned up.   The oldest section, the remains of a cottage with mullioned window,  pre-dates Jean d’Arquesson, and goes back to about 1560.   The owners have achieved a remarkable feat in combining practical modern elements with the ancient features.  The cottages of Rochebonne, old as they are, may by some be considered to be a little on the dark side, yet this very enigmatic look is precisely what makes them so ideal.   Now used for holiday lettings they are among the most sought-after in the area.

Written by Emile Didier

Translated by Catherine Broughton