Our French Village House (Episode 2)

Week 22 in France 12/30-1/4/2026. We are officially into our sixth month of full time living in France.

Welcome to the 50th weekly post of our Baby Boomers Move to France blog. HAPPY NEW YEAR from our place in Chabanais, France.

Things on the agenda this week:

A nice quiet week this week:

• Visit Rochechouart and the Chateau there
• Follow up wood stove contractor
• Follow up French tax consultant and preparation
• Visit the Marie and introduce ourselves
• Follow up French lesson info
• More little projects around the house

Weather for the week in Chabanais, France is forecast to be COLD. Highs in the low 40^o F and lows as far down as 21^oF overnight. Partly cloudy and some frozen rain mixed in and a potential for snow. We will report how it goes. We will need to get some supplies before the snow comes.

More about our house

Along with our regular weekly update, this week we will share more about our home prep progress and a little more detail about this 120-year-old stone village house and its location relative to the village. See below in the “French Lifestyle and Culture” section. This will take a couple of posts so stay tuned. LOTS OF PICTURES.

Why this Blog?

Long story short, we are “Baby Boomers” that have moved from beautiful Venice, Florida to the beautiful French countryside as retirees. After a little over a year of planning and fretting we sold everything in Venice and made the move on 1 August 2025.

We publish a brief update of our adventures every Sunday to share our experiences, tips and mistakes.

For starters, we have decided that the French countryside is where we will call home. Although we enjoyed our visit to Paris, our life is not in Paris. We like the peace and calm of village life that includes amenities of course. We will explain over the course of our blog posts.

If you are thinking about a move to France? We are happy to share our thoughts and answer questions. Just drop a question in the comment section below and we will get back to you.

If you are wondering what got into our head and inspired us to make the move, check out some of our earlier posts. Again, if you have questions about our adventure, drop your questions in the comment section below.

We are learning a lot about the French culture and lifestyle as we make our life here and each week, we include in the blog some thoughts on what we learn. If you have a specific question about France, let us know and we are happy to answer. Other folks probably have the same question. If we don’t know the answer, we will share resource information.

This Week in General

I did get some banjo practice in this week, and EB made progress on her latest crochet project.

Nothing much happening on Monday

We got our laundry done and stayed warm. Our new LG clothes dryer is working well. The set-up guy set the dryer up so that the condensate and water from the clothes is directed to the mains drain so we do not have to worry about emptying a reservoir every time that we do a load. This is good because we don’t have a utility sink in the washing room. EB is very happy with the dryer, and she will specify the LG brand if we ever need to replace the washing machine.

We got a couple of little projects done that deserve a pat on the back.

Tuesday was another day of sunshine and cold.

We spent more money on household items on Tuesday. We went to St Junien for the shopping so we decided to see how Rosie would do on her own at the house. We stopped at 4 different stores and found some needed items. We found some frames that we thought would be good for some of our pictures. When we got home EB matched frames to pictures. It is a bit of a challenge as frames here are based on metric standards where many of our pictures don’t match that standard.

On the way home we stopped at our sports bar just down the street from the house and had a beer and listened to a couple of old guys from the UK who were sitting at the bar talking loudly about I don’t know what. Truth is I couldn’t understand one of the guys. Anyway, we like this place and have it on our list to take Don and Cindy when they visit in February.

Rosie is a gem. She did great on her own.

Wednesday was New Years eve. We drove to a very pretty village called Rochechouart. It is in the Haute Vienne department and has a population of about 3600. The town is about 10 miles from Chabanais and the castle there is now an art museum. I should have taken some pictures. No worries, I will take some when we bring Cindy and Don for a visit.

Rosie took the drive with us and was a perfect angel. We went to bed about 11:30 forgetting the fact that it was New Year’s Eve.

The Mexican Train game that EB ordered arrived. We are set for our Mexican Train playing friends to visit. John, Denise, Marshall, Pam, Jennifer, Cory, Debbie?? Also ready for Cindy and Don.

Thursday, HAPPY NEW YEAR

After scraping the ice off of the car windows, we took a drive to St. Junien. I have been having trouble with my BNP Paribas bank card so, as suggested by the online app we went to the branch ATM to try one more time to use the card. No joy. I’ll have to go into the branch and fumble with my French language to get the card sorted out. Unfortunately, the branch was closed.

That done we decided to drive to Angouleme to see the town. Relative to Chabanais it is big city about 45 miles from Chabanais. The drive from Chabanais to Angouleme was a bit surreal as we started out in sunshine and green fields and halfway there it turned into cloudy, frost covered trees with a bit of snow on the side of the roads. The city center is on a plateau overlooking the Charente River and has a population of about 42000 people (over a 100,000 people in the metro area.) and is huge in the animation industry including 40 animation and video game studios that produce half of Frances animated productions.

The city is connected to Paris and Bordeaux by the high-speed TGV rail system and the local TER rail system. (about 40 minutes to Bordeaux and roughly 2 hours to Paris). The Angouleme-Cognac International Airport is nearby too.

We did not stop to explore the city this time so I can’t give a fair assessment of the town. My initial reaction was not positive. I would like to go back and explore the city center and old town some time. All 3 of us were getting hungry and wanted to get home for a good lunch.

Friday

A quiet day.

We introduced ourselves to the mayor (Mairie) and got information on trash pick-up and French lessons. The mayor is friendly and helpful and speaks excellent English. EB did well speaking French too.

We did some grocery shopping and went to the hardware store. I purchased some more screws with the intention of rehanging some decorative hooks on a wall in the guest room. That little project went south as I couldn’t find a good spot to put the screws into. I have a lot to learn about the construction of this old house. The stone walls are not nice cinder blocks. It is a whole different construction. Time to reconsider this project.

We stopped in at the furniture store to follow up on our delivery. Not horrible news, but delivery will be a little later than we expected. I hope it doesn’t get stretched out too much further. We are now expecting delivery at the end of January and first part of February. FINGERS CROSSED

Saturday: laundry and clean up

Laundry, house cleaning and more picture hanging was the game plan for Saturday.

Walked over to the boulangerie for a baguette. It was closed until 15:30 (3:30 PM) so we went next door into the sports bar and had a beer while we waited for the boulangerie to open. At the boulangerie, I bought a couple of baguettes and a couple of chocolatines for our Sunday morning treat.

Elizabeth followed up with the French language teacher and set us up for group lessons next week at the Mairie de Pressignac office in Chabrac. That’s just a couple of miles out of Chabanais heading north.

That is the week. Not much different from our activities in Florida. It just happens to be in France. Of course we miss our friends, but super happy to be in Chabanais. We never thought we would be living in Europe when we were kids.

French Lifestyle and Culture

More About Our House (installment 2)

This week we will describe the entry, dining room, kitchen and the living room (salon).

You walk in from the street, into the dining room. I shared a picture of this last week. If you look straight ahead you see the door leading to the steps up to the landing in front of the living room, some big windows and the heating radiator and there is EB. She just finished cleaning the floor. She likes that flannel shirt for keeping warm.

I’m thinking that we might be able to push that wall out about 6 feet to give us a little more room in the landing. Maybe next year.

When entering the front door, if you immediately look to the left, you see a stair way that leads upstairs to the master bedroom. More on that in another post after we get our bed delivered.

Just to the right of the stair way you enter the kitchen. It is a galley style kitchen with a pass through to the dining room. It is a small kitchen but pretty well appointed with modern appliances. The stove is a natural gas unit while the oven is electric. As you walk into the kitchen on the wall in front of you is a window over the sink that opens out onto a small walkway with the outbuildings just across the walkway. More on the outbuildings in another post. EB is not happy with the wallpaper or the ceramic tile in the kitchen. This will be an upgrade project for maybe this spring. On your left is the refrigerator, then you turn right and ahead of you is the stove and on your right is counter space with the oven below. The counters are made of wood, so we need to learn how to care for them. If you have experience with wood kitchen counters any advice for care will be appreciated. The pass through is on your right over the counter. Flooring in the kitchen is made of 42cm square tiles. The same tile carries through to the dining room. The lighting in the kitchen is pretty good. That angled section above the refrigerator that you see is the underside of the stairs going up to the master bedroom.

Back in the dining room, as you enter through the front door if you look right, you see the wall where our pellet stove will be located. (It might me a wood stove, I haven’t made up my mind yet.) There is a storage cabinet immediately to the right as you come in on the wall where the front door is. There is a nice window just past the storage cabinet that lets in a lot of sun light when the shutters are open. The floor is the same tile as in the kitchen. If you look at the floor tile near the wall you can tell the wall is not square with the tile because the wall is not square to the front wall. That black tube hanging from the ceiling is where the pellet/wood stove will hook to the chimney.

This window lets a lot of light into the dining room when the shutters are open. Notice the thick walls and heating radiator.

Up the steps to the landing in front of the living room you see a heating radiator, turn right and you come to the living room door. You might be able to see that there are actually two doors into the living room. There is a set of shutters that close over the opening as well as a regular door. These doors can be locked with those skeleton keys mentioned before. This makes me think that at one time this led to a separate apartment. Oh, there’s Rosie. The couch that Rosie is on will eventually go up to the summer kitchen after our couch and chairs are delivered. More on the summer kitchen in a latter post.

If you turn left, you see the back door. This leads out onto the tiled path between the house and outbuildings and eventually to our back gate. More on this in a later post.

Once through the living room doors you enter the living room (salon). I haven’t opened the window shutters in here, but there is a skylight that brings in some light and a horrible fluorescent light that has gotta go once we figure out how we will replace it.

Computer central on the left and the below picture says it is time for a break. Notice the fireplace. We haven’t decided if we will use it yet. The flooring in this room is some kind of laminate floor planks. The wall panels are somewhat insulated. We are not sure what will do in this room, but this will get some renovations. That striped fabric above EB’s head is a shade that covers the opening to the large skylight. We may be able to open that up and to give the room a little more volume and expose some beams. We will need to beef up the insulation up there too.

After entering the living room, if you turn right, you see the entry to the guest room and the ensuite bathroom. More on this next week.

The doors to this section of the house can be closed to conserve heat if needed.

That’s the brief tour of the kitchen, dining room and living room of our little village house. more to come next week.

Next Week (la Semaine Prochaine)

This coming week includes our first French lessons

• Contact our US tax guy
• Follow up wood stove contractor
• This week is regular trash week as opposed to recycling trash. that is the following week.
• Start our “in person” French lessons
• Follow up issues with my BNP Paribas bank card

Weather forecast for next week

Weather for the week is forecast to be COLD. We do get up to the high of 48^o F on Thursday and lows as far down as 23^oF overnight. That is slightly warmer than this past week. Partly cloudy and some frozen rain mixed in and as last week, slight potential for snow.

Signing off for the week

As always, we sign off wishing you all a good week and remind you to take care of yourselves and your family.

This first week of the new year was pretty quiet for us as we settle in.

I guess America bombed Venezuela and kidnapped their president. What the fxxx? Seems crazy to me. Just saying.

Keep in touch and leave questions, suggestions and comments below. We really enjoy hearing from you. Your kind and encouraging words remind us that we can do this.

Wishing you a good week (Bonne Semaine) Stay warm.

Mark and Elizabeth Beiley

Babyboomersmovetofrance.com