Thumper

Just a quick contribution to this lengthening debate, and with reference to a few mentions in earlier posts about selling brochures on eBay. It is against eBay rules to auction a current sales brochure on the site, and could lead to the suspension of your account . . . assuming anyone notices, of course.[;)]

Sanglier, I'm not sure where that places you with regard to insurance? In our case, because the house has never had electricity before, we have to use a registered French electrician, and we will not be issued with the necessary certificate without. If a house already has electricicty, then my understanding is that you may do additional work yourself, but that it must be inspected. Can anyone else shed more light on this?

The general rule of thumb is that nothing should be flushed down the toilet unless you've eaten it first. The exception is loo paper, of course, but resist the temptation to take thick, strong and very, very long rolls out with you from the UK. French toilet paper is feeble, thin and confidence-sapping for a reason - it's designed to break down rapidly in the fosse. Ladies, delicate or otherwise, should certainly make other arangements, and the worst sin of all is to flush disposable nappies down the loo. It's mind-boggling to think that some people in the UK attempt this with mains sewerage, let alone septic tanks. Going back to the earlier post, I've since discovered that the correct spelling is Septifos. Sorry about that.

Hi Rob G. I've checked, and I'm pretty sure it is Septifosse. I tried a search on Google.fr, and a handful of links came up. One was to the AngloInfo website, where there was a lengthy page of info on the Fosse Septique. One element of that page came as something of a revelation, in as much as the regulations relating to maintainence and emptying of the system have changed as of this month, January 2006. It is now required by French law (apparently) that only registered pumping companies may be contracted to empty your fosse, and the use of anyone not registered is an offence liable to hefty fines. What's more, as owners of a fosse septique, we are now required to keep an accurate record of all maintenace carried out on the fosse, including every pump-out. The authorised pumping company is now supposed to issue a certificate each time it empties the fosse. If asked to do so by an inspector, you should be able to present this record and associated certificates and it must be up-to-date and accurate. Finally, under the new regulation, the fosse septique must be emptied (by one of these registered companies) every four years, on average. This was all news to me, and may be to others as well. I've no idea when ours was last emptied, but I bet it was more than four years ago.

There is a whole range of products produced by one manufacturer that's specifically designed for use with the fosse system. I think it's called Septifosse, and they all have a bright orange label/bottle or whatever to make them stand out on the shelf. I haven't got anything to hand at the moment to check (wrong house) but I know my wife insists we use it. Not sure how effective the stuff is compared to traditional UK-type brands - perhaps someone else has more experience? - but the range includes toilet cleaners, Cif-type products, washing-up liquid etc.

Like me, you may have been confused by the fact there are (at least) three identical threads on the forum at the moment. Check the others to see if your post is on one of those! [*-)]

Just realised, having read another post, that Screwfix is part of the Kingfisher group . . . which also owns Brico Dépôt and (part-owns) Castorama, as well as Darty and But. "Screwfix France", set up by the group in 2000, appears to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Anyone know if they just gave up on the idea?

[quote user="Ssc"] If yoiu right click the link it should bring up a box with option. Choose the 'open linkl in new window' Viola. Tony [/quote] Yes, but it's so much easier when you don't have to think about these things![:)]

Off topic a little, but can I also say that www.bes.co.uk is similarly excellent (on price and delivery) for a wider range of plumbing parts, including larger sizes than those usually stocked by Screwfix.

I was contacted not long ago by Screwfix because I'd enquired about deliveries to France, and the implication was that they were considering establishing a French connection. Not sure if that's progressed any further (this was two or three months ago) but as a faithful Screwfix customer I'd welcome not only deliveries direct to addresses in France, but also access to French specification items (electrical and plumbing mainly) at sensible prices. I might contact them again.

I wasn't recommending that anyone tries selling their holidays on eBay - far from it. I'd consider that a very risky undertaking and highly unlikely to prove worthwhile unless, perhaps, you have a very full calendar of bookings and just one or two weeks left to fill, in which case, it might be worth the chance. My suggestion about eBay was merely to illustrate that the high volume of traffic it can generate via a hyperlink (from a popular auction, of course) can raise a site's 'link popularity' with the search engines very quickly.

This is still happening. Clicking a link within a post takes you away from the forum, rather than opening the link in a new window. Can this not be changed?

Hi Smiley. If you want to learn a bit more about how search engines work, an excellent place to start is this website: http://www.searchengines.com. As I understand it, the site is totally independent and free to use, and within its pages you'll find lots of information on how to optimise your website, submit to search engines, and how to make your site more attractive to the webcrawlers that still do a lot of the donkey work. It will also explain about "link popularity", keywords and metatags. Pay-per-click can work very well if you occupy a niche market. If you don't, you run the risk of getting a lot of visitors who aren't really interested in what you've got to offer, but have been brought to your site by a slender overlap somewhere down the line - and you'll pay for every one of them! So, if you decide to go this route, be very careful about what keywords you use, and if you have a limited budget that you're prepared to spend, set that into the system. You can usually state how many clicks you're prepared to accept over a particular period, and if your site reaches that limit during the course of a month, say, then it will drop out of the listing until the next month. At least that way you can keep control of expenditure. I don't know your situation, Smiley, but if you have just one property available for holiday letting, for instance, I wouldn't have thought pay-per-click was the solution for you. If you had an on-line store selling hundreds of items a day, then I'd give it serious consideration. One trick that I've found to work quite well is to include a link in a sale on eBay. You have to be careful not to infringe eBay's rules, so it has to have some relevance to the item you're selling. By way of example, I auctioned a brochure for a classic car and included a link to the club website, which we'd just finished building. We had 300 hits the first day the auction went up and the club's website topped Google's search within a week . . . and it didn't cost us a penny.

I thought as much. It's no consolation, but I think you should have charged more.

[quote user="Chezshells"] Oops [/quote] [*-)]

[quote user="SaligoBay"]"Being French is about driving in a French car . . .   [/quote] . . . . quite possibly built in Britain.[:)]

There's an almost identical thread on the next page, where you might find some useful posts.

[quote user="Smiley"] Hello Thumper, didn't expect to see you on here, how are you?!! [/quote] Well, you know us rabbits, Smiley . . . we get everywhere! [:)] Going back to websites for a moment, I'd like to pick up on Smiley's last comment. I hesitate to give away too many trade secrets - some of us have to make a living somehow - but there's one thing I feel ought to be mentioned, and that's search engines. If you want to make sure your site pops up somewhere near the top of a search, you have to work very hard to achieve a good ranking. While it's true that you should still try to ensure that every page on your site has a good and relevent set of metatags included in the headline coding, most of the major search engines no longer refer to these when it comes to deciding on a listing, and it will certainly not have any significant effect on the ranking your site achieves. Money talks, and if you want to top the poll, you have to pay for it. Look at this from Google's point of view. They're more likely to promote a purely commercial site if they're getting money from it. For that reason, if you make your website overtly commercial, don't expect a quick listing or a high ranking without parting with some cash. In actual fact, some of their commercial schemes are very fair, and worth considering, but if you want to achieve a high rank without paying for it then you should consider including as much information on your site as you can that is not aimed purely at selling your property to potential punters. Add pages devoted to places of intererest locally - chateaux, theme parks, towns, beaches, whatever. Plan "days trips" for your guests. Describe the region in glowing terms, with lots of pictures, maps, recommended restaurants, golf courses and so on. Give them information on travelling, including ferry/rail/motorway and airline connections etc. In other words, include the kind of material that will be of interest not only to your guests, but also anyone else who might just happen to stumble across your site and have an interest in your area. These are the pages that will appeal to the search engines, because you're freely providing information of wider interest. Secondly, include as many links to other sites as you can, and get them reciprocated by those other sites if at all possible. So called "link popularity" is now one of the main factors in determining a site's ranking in many search engines - the more links to and from your site, the more traffic is generated, the higher up the ranking you'll go. If you mention a chateaux on your site, see if they have a website, and if they do, include the link. They won't mind, and it will be another plus-point for you. That's enough for now, and best of luck!

I have a (small-ish) design agency, and what St Amour says is perfectly true. In every industry, companies these days are cutting back on printed literature. Customers for whom we used to produce fresh brochures at least once a year, sometimes more, are now asking us to create generic brochures that will last for years. Instead we build them websites that can be updated whenever details change, and that can be daily with some of them. So I'd definitely agree that a printed brochure is probably a waste of time unless you're running a while chain of gites. Stepping over now onto the other side of the fence, here are some suggestions for what you might do instead . . and we think will work quite well. Apart from an informative website, we will be offering our guests a generous stock of headed writing paper (and matching envelopes) printed up with a tastefully artistic line-drawing of the house that they are free to use whenever they want to write a letter. That not only helps them, but acts as a bit of subtle advertising for us too. In addition, we're producing a series of colour postcards. Although there is one of the house (it's pretty and/or photogenic) there are also others of popular sites in the local area and artistic views of sunflowers and vinyards. On the back, we're including basic details - address etc, plus the URL for the website. When our guests send these off to their friends . . ."weather is here, wish you were wonderful" . . . they're doing our advertising for us, and to a targeted audience as well. Once you've got your website up and running, make every email you send work for you. Don't be obvious about it, but set up your system so that you have a "signature" that appears automatically at the bottom of every page. Create a simple graphic of your property, based on an attractive photograph perhaps, that can act as a link straight to your website. Don't say "Click here to discover all about our lovely house in France", because that will put some people off, but if a recipient is curious enough to click on the image, your website will open and they'll only have themselves to blame if they didn't want to look! I hope this is helpful.

[quote user="Loiseau"] You can also check out the listings for Vendee and other peripheral départements in the Salvo! directory for France http://www.salvoweb.com/france/directory.html Angela [/quote] An excellent and very useful link. Thanks for that one Angela.

If you're heading to Chinon, then go that little bit further west and try some of the Saumur wines - the sparkling, of course, but also the reds are good, so might keep you both happy. Most of the major sparkling producers (Gratien & Meyer comes to mind, as well as Veuve Amiot) are geared up to visitors, and several offer the novelty of being "troglodyte" caves, built into the hillsides along the Loire. I'd guess you'd make Saumur from Tours in about 40 minutes by car, and the road you'll travel follows the river and offers plenty of invitations to deviate towards chateaux and other tempting degustation opportunities. There's also the train to consider if you don't fancy driving? The castle at Chinon is well worth exploring, and there's a vinyard by the entrance. Two birds with one stone!

How often are you going to do the trip? We looked into hiring from the UK and it was going to be about £700 for a ten-day rental. Knowing we had to do about four or five trips, we looked into buying second hand. In the end we picked up a solid old Transit on eBay for £500 (!!), had it serviced and checked (adding another £350, including new cambelt), and have now done four round-trips . . . and still have a van to sell on at the end. Don't buy a white one, though. It definitely does something strange to one's driving mentality - you start pulling out into traffic, forgetting to signal, bomb too fast on the motorway, and develop a generally unhealthy attitude to other road-users. We went for blue.[:)]

That does sound a bit steep, but as dinks suggests, it may vary depending upon how difficult the preparation is going to be. If your house has a hard cement-based mortar, that may take some removing before the new can be applied. If it's soft lime-based stuff, the old mortar can be cleaned out pretty easily. You might consider doing the preparation yourself? It is pretty mind-numbing work, but you can get whizzy gizmos that fit onto an angle grinder or drill that dig the stuff out in a jiffy, although you have to have a very steady hand if you're not going to stray into your stonework. (Mortar should always be softer than the stone, so the rake should follow the mortar, but sometimes you hit something hard and away you go!) You can pick up a cheap angle grinder for about £10 these days, although the mortar rake attachment may cost you as much. It could save you a lot of money in the long run though.

When I plumbed in our central heating last month, I ordered copper pipe via Screwfix (15mm and 22mm) and BES (28mm) in the UK ahead of the journey out - more for convenience sake than anything else, but it was also cheaper. I noticed, when it arrived, that most of it was stamped "Made in France".   I've never had any problem bending 15 or 22mm provided I've used an internal spring. I haven't found a 28mm spring yet but it's tough stuff and I don't reckon my knees could cope!

I assume you refer to the one-lane section just north of Le Mans? That's been open for several years, and even after the mad rush north after the Le Mans 24 Hours rarely seems to cause any problems. The A28 section from Alençon to Rouen opened at the end of October, and those heading north to Caen should be aware that the signage will direct you to the exit just north-east of Sées, where you will then be sent further along the old road towards Rouen before being directed left, via Haras du Pin, to re-link with the familiar Caen-Sées road just north of Argentan. It is far quicker to ignore those signs and either . . . get off at the previous junction (Alençon nord) and use the N138 (mostly dual carriageway) to Sées, or ignore the signs at the new junction and turn left, heading back towards Sées and the N138. Travellers from the north, leaving Caen, will be directed to the older junction at Alençon anyway, so won't encounter this "problem". Just before Christmas the A28 motorway south of Le Mans, which previously ended at Ecommoy, was also opened through to Tours, finally making an unbroken link between the A28 with the A10. That was several months ahead of schedule.  Two further links remain "under construction". The A88 motorway link from Sées to Falaise progresses well, with work currently being concentrated on a new viaduct over the valley just outside Falaise. I believe that is due to open in two stages at the end of this year and then fully in early 2007. The second is the A85 motorway beween Tours and Saumur (A11/Angers), which currently ends abruptly near Bourgueil. A gap of about 20 kilometers remains through the Loire Valley and is due to open next year.