Our First Gîte Tour
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
1M ago
I’ve shared some photos of our French farmhouse, but what I haven’t told you yet is that it came with a gîte. Not familiar with this word? Allow me to explain. In France, if a homeowner has extra space in their home or on their property, they might decide to rent it out to tourists to earn extra money. If you rent out a room and include breakfast, it’s called a chambre d’hôte. It’s basically, what we would call a bed & breakfast in the U.S. If you have a self-contained building or apartment on your property that you can rent out as a vacation home, it’s called a gîte (rhymes with feet). G ..read more
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My Invasive Plant Removal Project
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
1M ago
If dramatic before and after photos are your thing, you’ve come to the right place because I have a major invasive plant removal project on my hands. The French farmhouse that we bought four months ago sits on around two and a half acres, and the hedgerows and garden beds are absolutely overrun with invasive plants. English ivy … blackberry briars … stinging nettle. It’s a haven for invasives! But not for much longer. Let me show you the scope of the problem. Then, I’ll tell you what I plan to do about it. Portions of the garden look like they’ve been professionally landscaped, but the pl ..read more
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Restoring a French Lavoir
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
2M ago
See that water feature in our kitchen garden? It’s called a lavoir. Back in the day, it would have been used to wash clothes. Lavoirs were public wash houses or washing places, so this one would have likely served everyone in our little hamlet. From the 17th to the early 20th century, many lavoirs were built across France in an effort to improve sanitation. There were even grants to encourage municipalities to build lavoirs. Our lavoir is just a simple basin, but many lavoirs had roofs, and some were even walled in. The one located in the center of our village has a roof over it. Happily, you ..read more
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Restoring a Medieval Bakery
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
2M ago
When we bought our French farmhouse, it came with this medieval bakery. It’s around 400 years old, and my husband and I plan to restore it. The area surrounding the bakery is pretty overgrown, but you can still see the remains of the bread oven on the backside of the building. Here’s a closer look. It’s definitely going to take a lot of work to remove all the English Ivy and blackberry brambles from the building, but overall the exterior walls of our little medieval bakery seem to be sound. The previous owners piled up their garden clippings next to the building, which is likely the sourc ..read more
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Final TN Guest Cottage Tour
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
2M ago
Last summer, when we sold our house in Tennessee to move to France, we also sold the guest cottage behind it. When we bought this little 936-square foot cottage six years ago, we set up one of the bedrooms as a guest room, and used the rest of the space as our MFH studio. Since this house sat directly behind our house, it doubled the size of our yard, and allowed us to expand the garden, plus add a patio and firepit area. Before I get busy showing you all the spaces in our new home in Normandy, France. I thought it would be fun to give you one final tour of our TN guest cottage, so you can se ..read more
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Our First French Christmas Home Tour
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
3M ago
Joyeux Noël! After lots of painting and unpacking and a trip to Paris to pick up the kids from the airport, we’re finally ready to celebrate our first Christmas in France. So, I thought it would be fun to put together a little French Christmas home tour for you. Save for a few strands of Christmas lights, these are all decorations that we brought with us from the U.S. It’s been fun finding spots for everything in our new home. My galvanized Noel garland looks great on the fireplace, and it was pretty serendipitous that there were already nails in the right spot to hang it. I’ve had that vint ..read more
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Our Final Tennessee Home Tour
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
4M ago
Back in February, my husband and I decided to sell our home in Tennessee, so we could move to France. Before our house went on the market, we spent several months finishing renovation projects and staging the house for sale. This is a final home tour to show you the result of 20 years of careful restoration and to reflect on the time we spent raising our family in a house that came to feel like a part of the family. The photos in this home tour were taken by a professional photographer, and are the same ones that were used in our listing. Since, it’s been about six or seven years since I’ve d ..read more
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Shipping Container Day!
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
4M ago
Our shipping container finally arrived in France last Tuesday, so I thought I’d take a break from unpacking to update you on how everything went. When my husband and I decided to move from Tennessee to Normandy, France earlier this year, there were a million things that we had to figure out. Finding a shipping company to handle our international move was one of those things. Normally, a moving crew packs your belongings for you, but after doing a bunch of research I found a company that let’s you pack your own shipping container. It saves a ton of money, so that’s the approach we took. You can ..read more
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How to Save Money on a Shipping Container
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
4M ago
Planning an international move? Here’s everything you need to know to save money on your shipping container, plus a detailed account of how you can expect the shipping process to go. When we decided to move from Tennessee to France, we knew we wanted to bring some of our belongings with us, and that meant figuring out the whole shipping container thing. Everyone online seemed to think it wasn’t worth it. They said it was expensive, and that you were better off selling everything you owned and buying new stuff when you got there. But, that just didn’t make sense to me. Even if it wasn’t cheap ..read more
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We Moved to France!
My Frugal Home
by Erin Huffstetler
4M ago
Yes, really! And I’m so glad I can finally tell you guys. Back in February, my husband asked me what I thought about moving to France, and I had an immediate answer for him: as long as I can bring my craft supplies. Ha! If that sounds rash, it really wasn’t. For three years, we had been trying to figure out where we wanted to move because our forever home had stopped feeling like our forever home. We were feeling the squeeze of suburbia and meddling neighbors, and our hearts were breaking more each day, as we watched all the beautiful Smoky Mountain views around town disappearing behind new d ..read more
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