bazzer70

When I took ownership of my Coux house a few months ago I engaged a neighbour to continue cutting the grass while I was away - as the previous owner did and suggested I might want to keep going with the arrangement. Kate - the previous owner said the rate was €10 an hour which seemed incredibly good value…… However when the neighbour came round to discuss continuing she said “like Kate you pay €20 an hour”
that rate too is pretty good - so why am I posting you are wondering….
I’ve got cctv installed and they seem to be cutting the grass rather often and today for the last hour there have been 2 chaps in my garden cutting the hedge (which grows on the other neighbours side of the fence).
I was just wondering (I know I could ask grass cutting neighbour if she too is responsible for the hedge cutting but we don’t speak each other’s language well enough) what the protocol is for trees etc that grow on other side of fence but also have lots f foliage etc getting into my side of the fence.
I hate to be a suspicious person but I hope I haven’t been seen as a cash cow. Or are people generally honest in purpose in France? I really hate to say it but where I live now in North London you have to be incredibly wary because it’s a case of you’re far likelier than not to be ripped off at every opportunity. Sad. I used to be so naive.
Having paid €4.50 for a 100ml of orange juice at a crummy hotel in Le Bugue I was left wondering if a French speaker would’ve paid so much!

EuroTrash

To be honest 10€ an hour sounds too good to be true, maybe Kate got it wrong. Or maybe it was a mates rate.
But certainly I think it would be a good idea to agree a schedule with them.
Yes there is a tendency to think that Brits who buy holiday homes have more money than they know what to do with. And your neighbours will be finding their cost of living high, like everybody else.
I had an artisan in to do a quite big job shortly after I moved here, we got quite chatty and one time he started on about English holiday home owners he had worked for, with much rolling of the eyes and shrugging of the shoulders. I said Hang on, I'm a Brit that bought a house in France too, you shouldn't be saying that to me. He said Yes but you're different because you live in your house. These people buy a house and they spend money on it and spend money on it and spend money on it and they never live in it, where's the sense in that, are they crazy or what?
I believe your intention is to live in your house in the near future but if your neighbours don't know that, they may have you down as one of the crazy ones.

Re trees, I believe the rule is that you're responsible for foliage your side of the fence, even if the tree itself is on the neighbour's side, but ideally neighbours come to an amicable agreement about this that suits both of them.

bazzer70

Thanks ET
yes I’d probably better let Cathy the garden lady know I intend to be full time resident soon.
what probabydidnt help my cause is she will have seen my immaculate condition BMW convertible but wouldn’t have known it was 11/ years old!

Tweedpipe

20€/hr seems a reasonable rate.
Recently we contacted another gardener, as good, reliable ones are very difficult to find, and last week 2 arrived for the task in hand. I keep the grass cut regularly with the John Deere, and I wanted the gardeners to do a lot of tidying up with their strimmers etc. For 3hrs work (man/hrs=6) we paid 250€ which I thought was acceptable, especially as Mme TP then claims back 50% of that on our fiche d'impots. Which if my calculations are correct comes out at approx 20€/hr.
I've often been tempted to find someone and pay less in cash, but the little lady won't have it, saying that if they are undeclared and have an accident we are responsible. Also she reminds me that any undeclared worker gets nil for his pension pot.
Our neighbour's hedge at this time of year always pokes it's way all through our border wire netting. Strangely enough it doesn't worry me too much, I've become quite attached to the privacy it provides. When it gets too bad I've always requested our gardener to cut it back flush, which he does. (Pic 1 below).
As for the neighbour on the other side, I've often asked her to try and cut back the heavy, unsightly growth between the hedge on her side and the border wire netting, (Pic 2&3 below - and it's hardly started gowing yet!). The problem being, I see it but she doesn't. This seems to peeve me more than the other neighbour's hedge. Last time we spoke she said her strimmer had a problem, she couldn't get it started. I said if she wished I'd take a look and do a general overhaul on it if necessary. She thanked me, and 2 days later after spark plug, air and fuel filter cleaning etc plus a general tune-up I handed it back after testing to ensure it started on first attempt. She thanked me, but I'm sure it's never been used since, especialy on the unsightly undergrowth that I'm witness to on my side. Mme TP asked me if I requested anything for the work done on the strimmer, and I said of course not and she replied, "That's just like you, "Plus brave, plus con!" Although I wouldn't have refused the offer of a bottle of red wine as I know that neighbour has an important position at one of the local vineyards.

Tweedpipe

@tBazzer70,
If I was a gardener I'd triple my rates for any BMW owner, and x10 for a convertible......
With maybe 90% discounts for 2CV/ deux-chevaux owners.

bazzer70

Ha ha
I did think of getting a Peugeot 2008 when I move next year but I love my convertible! My Dad and I spent many days doing up a MGB roadster when him and me were both working on the mines in Zambia - it had a broken leaf spring and had been sitting rotting in previous owners garage for years - my Dad used to race MGBs when he was a lad apparently. There weren’t many options for obtaining spares in Zambia in early 80s so we rummaged about in junk yards and fettled a new spring - previous owner was happy to sell to me because his daughter’s horse had just died and he was therefore able to get another just before her return from boarding school! He had previously resisted parting with the car and no I didn’t have anything to the demise of the horse.
My hand luggage on my annual leave to UK was always full of MG spares!
Mabe it’s still OK to own a SUV in France but our “superior intellectual” climate fanatics are going around sabotaging SUVs in UK! So far my BMW is untouched.

Listen Very Carefully

Are you paying this cash in hand or doing it properly through the CESU system?

EuroTrash

Loved reading that story
I'm basically retired now but one of the little jobs I have retained, because I enjoy it, is proofreading the MG Car Club's monthly magazine. You're not a Club member by any chance are you? I bet the editor would love you to send him some of your reminiscences, if you are.

In case you're not familiar with the CESU that LVC mentioned, it may be of interest you after you move because it's a scheme for employing people to do little jobs for you, like gardening, and you pay their wages plus full social security cotisations but then at the end of the year you get a partial refund from the taxman. But until you're resident, obviously you can't benefit from the scheme.

bazzer70

Thanks again - my French is pretty limited and my garden lady has zero English so we didn’t discuss that aspect - I assume they’re legit as apparently they do most of the garden maintenance in the village and this include the Mairie - who lives opposite and was actually the owner of the land my house is on - he built it (not personally of course)
As for the MG - can’t remember what they’re called but the front damper shock absorbers were shot so I took them off and hand luggaged them to Goldhawk Road in London and exchanged them for a pair of refurbished ones - along with a new vinyl roof plus plus plus - car was pretty immaculate by the time we’d finished. I was very sad to part with it when I became baseless for a period. I drove her through Zimbabwe to South Africa where I planned to ship back to UK but plans changed. Scary hour was when I got a puncture on the Zimbabwean escarpment and had to unpack all my worldly goods to access spare tyre - all the while panicking I’d be ambushed as there was still much unrest in that country with lots of AK47s brandished everywhere.
No - I’m not a club member.
I’ll contact the previous owners re CESU - don’t fancy doing anything illegal.
thanks

EuroTrash

I don't think you need raise it, if they do their work openly and also for the mayor.
Basically there are two parallel systems for this kind of work. One is that the person has their own registered business structure (sole trader or whatever) so you are the client and they are the service provider, and as such responsible for their own social security payments. The other is that the person is not registered as a business, and that is where CESU comes in: you register yourself as the employer and them as your employee, and as the employer you are responsible for your share of the social security contributions. It is one or the other, and presumably these people are registered as a business.
Or at least, I don't think you couldn't be blamed for making that assumption.
If they're not registered as a business and they wanted to be paid through CESU they would have told you.
If they're not registered as a business and they don't want to be paid through CESU, ie they want to work on the black, neither they nor the previous owner will thank you for raising the issue and it could lead to awkwardness.

There is also the issue that when you employ a person through CESU, there are all kinds of strings attached. I don't know all the rules but basically workers' rights apply and you have to have a proper legal employment contract in place, so for instance you may not be able to simply tell them that you don't need them any more, you would need to have an acceptable reason for terminating the contract. Not a thing to rush into without being clear about what obligations you are signing up for.

bazzer70

Very sensible and helpful - thanks ET

Listen Very Carefully

If they are a proper business no problem I got the impression it was a neighbour just doing it cash in hand but I may have misread

EuroTrash

PS bazzer you don't happen to remember the MG's reg no, do you? Did it go back to the UK eventually, is it still alive?

bazzer70

I can send you a pic if you want - it had a Zambian reg - I haven’t a clue where it is now - I left it with a dealer in Johannesburg who sold it and didn’t give me much!
I’ll have to scan photo - might take a while to find it!

EuroTrash

That might be fun. Some of the guys in the club just love tracing MGs from old pictures, and they always get really excited when it turns out to be a car that's currently owned by a member who didn't know its full history