Chateau de Firbeix

One of the major jobs in the future back gite Les Oiseau , which as a reminder will be for disabled (PMR) guests, is to lower the floor level where the back bedroom and bathroom will be. This was previously a storage room for the lawn mower and trailer, which they unfortunately took with them. Original floor level Once they had moved out and we had cleared the room of all the rubbish, we could see that we needed to lower the floor by 20-30cm if we were to end up with a ceiling of 220cm (the regulation minimum). The old stone wall on the outer side was also in a poor shape and we needed to underpin the wall and provide solid foundations. This and lowering the floor was the first jobs in here. Lowering the floor we had to do by hand as we could not get a digger into the room through the double gates, there was not enough clearance even for the smallest machine. Our method was to dig down but keeping 30cm or so away from the stone wall. We then underpinned sectio...

The area around the barn up towards the chicken shed and to the right up the path has loads of trees blocking out sunlight, are totally overgrown and don't look nice so we're going to clear this space. This also needs to be cleared for our future plans for the barn. This is an old pic from May 2019, before we bought it, showing the bank down to the barn. Back to current day...t his pic is at the back looking towards the back gîte. To enable the tractor to get around the back to repair the landslide, they had to cut back some of the trees, we continued this by cutting back all low level branches. This is pretty much how it looked before we started although we had already cut back some large green bushes. All the tree at the top of the pic will be cut down. We started and managed to avoid any trees hitting the barn or the main power line!   The last three trees were big ones and...