How do we live?

Once here we thought about how we would earn a living. We had never been self employed before, let alone let loose in a new country! Until our house purchase was finalised in the September of 2002, we helped our freinds in Eymet run their holiday business - hard work but great fun. Whilst cutting the grass (all 20 acres of it) It occured to us that we could make a living by looking after peoples holiday homes, pools, gardens that sort of thing and so D & S PROPERTY SERVICES was born. After getting properly registered and insured, we set about looking for customers. We advertised in the French Property news, local shops etc for years 1 & 2 and lived off our meager savings over the winter of 2002 / 03. Our business began to pick up in the spring (not much grass needs cutting until then!) and grew steadily through the year. Unfortunately, there was not enough honey in the pot to see us through our 2nd winter, so poor Dawn had to return back to the UK to do some contract work.


The year of 2005 was good - the business doubled, and again in 2006. We now have 18 pools, 32 gardens and half a dozen change overs - quite enough thank you!

The down side is I have bought a total of 4 ride on mowers - each one bigger and stronger than the last and have just invested 8k in a new Countax machine that collects the cuttings and gives stripes - very impressive! here is a picture of me during the demonstration of the machine outside our house in October.All I have to do now is work on getting straight lines......

We have several smaller mowers, for various tasks, a couple of strimmers, leaf blowers, rollers etc - everything needed to look after your garden in France.