Eslier

I believe that the increased taxation will be in the form of a sharp increase in the  registration fee payable  for the carte grise each time the car changes hands.  It shouldn't affect existing owners but will make 4WDs harder to sell and the second hand values are likely to drop substantially. For the benefit of those readers who don't yet live in France . . . Unlike in the UK, owning a 4WD car isn't any sort of status symbol. The French are generally very practical about their cars and would only choose to own one if they needed the 4WD facility. There is no car snobbery, thankfully, over here - people drive what suits their needs. They would sooner spend their money on food and drink than car finance !!

The "French way" with plasterboard seems to be to simply tape and fill the joints. A good artisan will achieve a very smooth finish and the wall will be ready to paint - first with "sous couche plaque de platre" and then vinyl emulsion. The end result will look excellent. Strangely,the filling of the joins seems to take about three times longer than a UK plasterer would take to simply skim the wall. The reason for doing it this way, so I was told by my builder, is that UK style plaster is difficult to obtain in France (despite most of being made by a French company!) and there aren't so many skilled plasterers as a result (not sue if this is true but it is the reason I was given). If you decide to keep exposed stone walls then this will be great providing you intend to heat your house 24hrs a day through the winter months.  Stone will retain the heat well but will cool down quickly if there is no heating on. Once a room has cooled down it can take several days to get back up to temperature again once you turn the heating back on. We have exposed granit walls downstairs which look great (and keep the house cool in teh summer) but platerboard insulated walls in the upstairs bedrooms which certainly doesn't detract from the character of our house which dates back at least 700 years. This works well for us but I guess everyone's views will be diferent so I would say do whatever you feel happy with.  

I'm sorry Chris but I think you might be misinforming people here.  In Brittany, as in most of NW France, a 40cm minidish is perfectly good enough to pick up  the  signals from Astra-2D. Equally, there is no reason why you should lose any signal in bad weather, except thunderstorms or when snow settles on the dish. The important thing is to make sure the dish is properly alligned and installed in a good place. To get the fine adjustment, which makes all the diference, you will need a meter, preferably a switchable hi/lo band meter. So instead of rushing out and buying a bigger dish to try and solve a problem, it might be better to spend that money on a meter instead. In "Sky" terms, being in Brittany is no different from being in the south of England.

I too have had excellent results with Astral Monocouche (just how many shades of white do they have ?). I can't say that I found it particularly expensive either - I'm sure I would have paid just as much for something of similar quality in England.  I saw last week that Astral now has a pink which turns white too.  Not sure I'm brave enough to try it though!! I suspect that the reputation for poor quality comes from Brits being seduced by those big white plastic tubs of unknown brand cheap white paint that always seemto be on special offer in the brico sheds. Unfortunately I guess you get what you pay for.

You'll probably find that there is snow on your dish and LNB. If you don't want to wait for it to melt you might have to climb up and clear it off. Take care though - ladders and snow/ice aren't a good combination.

The box will work fine in France and if the card is your ex-contract card it should enable you to get ch4 & 5 as well as all the FTA BBC & ITV channels. You won't get Sky1 without a subscriptionbut you should get Sky3 and Sky News. If you've got a dish at home then take that with you too. A minidish will work fine in most areas of France providing it is set up carefully. Tryng your card in your father's digibox shouldn't cause any problems but change the cards over whilst the box is switched off and unplugged. When you swap back again all your dad's sbscription channels will be restored. To get an idea of the cost of second hand digiboxestake a lok on ebay uk. The Panasonic ones are the best and consequently usually go for a little more but in my opinion are worth paying a little extra for. 

Having had a go at offering Painting Holidays ourselves, I would say you need to look at some better targeted advertising which will reach firstly, the people who are specifically interested in painting and secondly, are likely to have the money to spend on such a holiday which is unlikely to be the main family holiday. I'm afraid I can't remember the name of it now, but there is a magazine for amateur artists which is sold in UK newsagents. When I last looked at a copy there were a number of people advertising Painting Holidays in France, Italy and other countries. A one off add is not going to be much use, you'll need, at least, to go for alternate month insertions which, if you book six  insertions at a time is likely to cost at least around £1000. Other publications that might be worth trying are things like The Lady or Country Life but none will be cheap. I don't think your prices are unreasonable, knowing how much work is involved with what you are offering. I'm not sure that making it cheaper will help much. One point worth mentioning is that I see you are offering "full board". We were advised by our accountant that we were unable to offer more than half board under our B&B inclusive Table d'Hote license otherwise we would legally be considered a hotel and have to apply for all sorts of additional licensing requirements and be subject to unspeakable regulation. Why not consider reducing your "board" to "half board" but give guests the choice of lunch or dinner ?  This would release more of your budget to spend on advertising. We've actually given up on the Painting Holidays for now as we can make more money for much less work just renting the house out !   We might give it a go again in the future though. Good luck with your venture.

You'll also be needing house insurance so you can organise it all at the sme time, along with any other insurance you might want. Just call into one of the insurance offices  in your local town (there will almost certainly be several to choose from) and sort it all out at once. One of the pelasure of France is being able to do this sort of thing face to face and get a personal service. NO MORE CALL CENTRES HOORAY !!!!

Now, I'm no expert in this matter but my initial reaction would be . . . As you created the gites, I asume that you bought the whole property as a residential habitation in one puchase transaction. The key here seems to be how you go about the sale. If you are selling the property (as far as the Notaire is concerned) as a single transaction private residence then I can't see that there would be any CGT to pay. If you are selling the property as "fonds et commerce" business then that's a different matter and I can see why CGT becomes payable but I would have thought that this might over complicate the matter for a simple gite business. This might be quite naiive of me to think that it's as easy as all that to avoid paying CGT so I would be intrigued to hear the views of anyone who really does undrstand the ins and outs of it all.

My experience is similar to Gail. I admit that I find their customer service quite poor and I believe they still haven't upgraded their website to the new site that they promised was about to be launched last November. BUT, their brochure and website does generate a large number of enquiries and bookings for me. I too was displeased when, over a year ago, I discovered they had decided no longer to make their brochures available through WH Smith in the UK but again, I have to admit that it doesn't seem to have affected enquiries. The good thing is that they direct mail the brochure to everyone who has booked travel for a holiday through them in the last two years. This is a huge database and targets people that they know are likely to want to take a holiday of the type they offer. This year, they made a big thing of saying that their advertising rates hadn't increased which, if you take the basic cost, was true. On the other hand, by the time you pay for all the new "extras" (like web search options that use to be included) then the cost has increased. Despite their shortcomings, I have to admit that Cheznous do a really good job for me, and  although expensive, represent good value for money. Like Gail, we are more or less  full now for July and August and it won't be long before May and June are fully booked up too. If you have any problems then I have found the best thing is to contact their Marketing Manager, Peter Hunt, direct who usually manages to come up with a sensible answer when all around him are making things up as they go along ! . His e-mail address is: [email protected]

Try http://www.cheznous.com

This thread is becoming very confused. It might be better not to try and make comparisons with the UK as the system is very different there. WillC has already given a simple and clear explanation (and he wasn't the one who mentioned anything about £12 per hour). As he stated, if you employ a registered tradesman (whether categorised as an "artisan" or not) He or she will be likely to see not more than around a third of the amount charged go into his or her own pocket  and possibly much less. Unlike in the UK, high minimum social charges are payable even if you have a very low income. Let's take an  example of someone, maybe a gardener or similar, who charges his time out at  25€ per hour  and manages to work for 1000 chargeable hours per year. This means he will have revenue of 25000€ per year. Of this amount, around 8000€ will be paid out in social charges, tax and health top up insurance etc. Another 1000€ will go on insurance (much more for an artisan) Vehicle running costs for the business will be around 4000€ Equipment renewals, repairs and running costs will probably be around  2000€ Misc; business costs such as satationery, computer, internet connection, telephone,mobile etc. another 1000€ Accountancy costs, bank charges etc. another 1000€ That all means that, after all these costs are taken into account, our man has earnt around 8000€ for himself. Now, although he has worked for 1000 chargeable hours, if we take into account admin time, time visiting prospective customers and preparing quotes, time spent travelling etc. this is likely to account for another 500 hours in the year. So, if he works for 1500 hours in a year for a total of 8000€ that works out at just over 5,30€ per hour take home pay. I hope that this example will help many of you understand that when you are quoted 25€ per hour by a tradesman, far from being ripped off, you are actually getting a very good deal ! Incidentally, how many of you have ever taken your car to a main dealer in the UK for a service ?  If so, have you ever asked what hourly rate their customer friendly fixed price servicing costs are based upon?  If you had, and you were told the truth, you would find that the hourly chargeable rate for a qualified mechanic is somewhere around £150 per hour.  In practice, few people ever realise this fact and happily pay the going fixed rate for a service and are none the wiser. The charge can, of course, be justified when taking overheads into account but it makes you realise what good value many other services are.     

Ian, I would be grateful if ou would post details of the 0844 provider you have referred to so that I can look into it further. If, as you say, someone in the UK will provide me (a resident of France), a local call rate number at absolutely no cost then I will sign up straight away !  I am sure there will be many others who would like to avail themselves of this service too.

Using an 0870 number is not always a bad thing athough I accept that in many cases it can be. I have a UK 0871 number which is used (as well as a UK mobile number) in advertising my gite business.  The number diverts straight to my French land line and the cost of the call  is only 10p per minute.  At this price, it is cheaper, in most cases, for the caller than using the mobile number or calling my 0033 number. I paid a one-off minimal fee for setting up the number and get no pay back on call charges.  As well as business calls, many friends and family also use the number from time to time to take advantage of cheaper calls. I also have a UK fax number which is an 0870 number via efax.com which enables be to send and receive faxes via e-mail. Again, the charges are not exceptional and the service is very useful. Whichever way you look at it it's cheaper than sending a fax to or from a French land line. Like many things in life it isn't so simple that you can brand all things bad. On the other hand, if you want to talk about automatic call routing systems (press 1 if you are a little bit angry, 2 if you are quite angry and 3 if you would like to ram the phone down the throat of the automatic voice) then I could be persuaded otherwise !!

Not a simple answer to this I'm afraid. It will depend on the hotel's connection speed and available bandwidth which will also be affected by how many other hotel users are on-line at the same time. Upload speeds are usually much slower than download speeds (which are what is usually quoted) but I guess you would probably hope to achieve an upload speed of around 100kbs which is about 6Mb per minute. This will still be many times faster (around 10x) than your dial-up connection so I would say go for it.

Give BRITSERV a try. They do low cost light removals between the UK and France and the other direction too - based in Brittany but cover the whole of France - one man and a van so no costly overheads.. It may work out cheaper than hiring a van.

I ordered some from hqhair.com before Christmas as a pesent. They posted them to France for just £3.50 without any problem and they arrived within three days of placing the order.

See HERE for details of what colour day it is today; what colour day it will be tomorrow (available after 4.30pm); what the likely colour days it will be for the next two days. See HERE for the tarifs that apply on each different colour day.

Absolutely FANTASTIC. What a huge improvement. Many thanks to all involved.

Using a registered gite maintenance type company, which should be the most reliable method of employing someone, somewhere between 15€ and 20€ per hour. To employ an individual yourself, from 8€ per hour plus charges (using cheque d'emploi) which will bring it up to 12-13€+ per hour. You would be much better off using a business for several reasons. Firstly because they will simply invoice you for their services which is much easier, secondly if the usual cleaner is ill or otherwise unavailable it is their problem to find someone else, not yours, thirdly, they will be insured against any accidental damage caused by the cleaner and finally, they are more likely to be flexible with times. When looking to take someone or a business on to do changeovers, don't just book them for "x" hours, make a list of all the things you want cleaned and ask them to quote you a fixed rate for the job not for the time. This will mean you will always know how much it will cost to get the right job done. However long you might think the job will take, it is bound to take longer. As a guide, a three bedroom gite will probably take 5-6 hours to clean and prepare properly (not including laundering of linen) - anything less and it will be below standard to many holidaymakers.

As with most things,you get what you pay for. If this place has four en-suite bedrooms, is nicely fuurnished, electricity and heating included, linen included, then that sounds like a reasonable price at this time of year. If the owners are on hand then why can't they arrange for the dishwasher to be fixed ? I must agree that it is strange that TV is not provided as most quality gites provide this facility these days. If your friends are staying for a long period, perhaps they could negotiate the provision of a TV and maybe split the cost with the owners ? Your friends could probably find somewhere with a cheaper basic rental cost but then it might not include electricity or linen and is unlikely to have all en-suite rooms. I would say that if the gite is convenient and comfortable for your friends then they should be content with what they are paying.

Take a look at www.oneandone.co.uk Very simple to use and will do everything you want and probably more. Simple pricing structure. I've been using them for a couple of years and have been very pleased.

According to BBC News this is now a done deal. Dubai Ports is owned by the Dubai govenment. Don't forget that the ferry operation is only a very very small part of P&O.

Signal "quality" is affected by the skew angle of the LNB. Take a look at the front of your dish and see if your LNB is at an angle. It needs to be at about a one-o-clock position. You should find it rotates fairly easily so go out and adjust it whilst someone else looks at the signal quality meter on the TV screen. Hopefully you will see it improve. There should be no need to move the dish unless your "signal strength" is below around 70%.

Tim, I'm sorry, but in todays world of more and more people using alternative browsers to IE, just to stick your head in the sand is madness. It would be a bit like an engine manufacturer refusing to make engines that run on anything other than old four star leaded petrol. If your software can't support other browsers then it should be a priority to replace it. There are plenty of other forums using software which works well with Firefox (and others. Forums can easily be migrated so why why why why why won't you do anything about it ? Seriously, there are a huge number of Firefox users now and the numbers are growing on a daily basis. Surely you can do something to sort this mess out.