John London is the owner of Bletiere and through this Blog section he’s going to keep a diary of the daily life of a French carp lake owner.
Outside it’s one of the rare days we have had rain in the last few weeks so I decided to sort out all the old photos we have stored away, it’s funny how quickly you forget the things you have done in the past.
I thought I would put a few on the blog and those of our guests that have been here will be able to see the condition of this place before and after we have done a lot of the work.
The first thing we had done was the lake dredged out and the banks cleared,and in the right hand picture you can see all the mud that came out the lake. After manys weeks of hard work and getting the mud flat using a hand rotivator we ended up with this.
We then had the gite built; this was obviously a major task that took a lot longer than we expected, but the results were worth the effort and the extra cost we spent on it & we now have a gite that we are proud to let our guests stay in.
We then had to upgrade all the fosse septic tanks for our house and the gite and this created a huge mess. It was another learning curve for Lesley and me as we helped with all the work to keep costs down. The pictures below show the sand filter being installed – the hole was 8mtrs x 4mtrs x 2mtrs deep and then back filled with pipes, special sand and rocks.
This month it will be 5 years since we arrived here and it’s been a steep learning curve and most certainly hard work, but I know we have both enjoyed the challenge and the opportunity to be able to create a business from scratch. If you go to our site you can see lots of photos of the finished gite and lakes, but as always we are looking at ways to improve and make La Bletiere a better place for people to stay.
We are asked a lot have we regretted coming here and we always say never; it gives us a great lifestyle and a better way of life that we could have had in the uk.
Would I recommend this to anybody else? Of course I would – it’s hard work and very physical at times but the rewards far outweigh the bad times.
Tight lines, John and Lesley
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