Working with your husband… Good or Bad?

La Maison Bleue

Mark and I have been working together for 15 years. Before that we both worked for large corporate companies in the City.

So it was a pretty big change to give up our secure well paid jobs to work for ourselves..and just to make things more interesting, within days of stopping work in the UK we moved to France with a 1 year old to a house that had earth floors and only water and electricity to one room!

Fifteen years on, we have two French companies and we are still talking to each other!..

Working for myself came pretty easily for me, my grand parents worked for themselves, my father has always worked for himself and so has my brother. So when I was growing up life was pretty flexible, work hard when the work is there and enjoy the slack periods.

One of the first things that Mark did when we moved to France was to convert one of the outbuildings into an office for himself! He likes to walk across the drive to his office and escape from arguing children and me ‘reminding’ him the bathroom window is STILL leaking!.. He also works listening to music whereas I can’t.

I much prefer to work in the heart of the house. I have carved out a small space at the top of the stairs where I can hear EVERYTHING that goes on both upstairs and downstairs. When the children were smaller I could work whilst they were napping or asleep and now I can work early in the morning without disturbing anyone.

We disagree about stuff, of course we do, but there is usually some middle ground or after a somewhat heated discussion and then the necessary reflection, one of us may have to admit that the other was right. We have always had our own areas of responsibility, and I think this is very important. Mark has always designed, developed and maintained the gite website whilst I do all the administration and lettings. Mark has renovated all the gites and now maintains them whilst I do the annual decorating.

We do spend most meal times discussing the gites, how they can be improved, should we do more advertising, should they be rephotographed, which rooms should be remodelled or redecorated… and I’m not sure if this is good or bad!

On balance we work well together and I think the main reason for this is that Mark and his Pink Floyd are in a separate building!