This page and (future) other pages in this section will be devoted to news, projects, and other general information about what we are doing at Rosemoor, and maybe elsewhere as well.

For those who do not know us, or the place we call home, we are lucky enough to have found a beautiful corner of south-west Wales to live and earn a modest living.
Our work is literally on our doorstep, as it involves letting holiday cottages, which were converted from the outbuildings belonging to the house we ourselves live in.

We came to Rosemoor in the beginning of 1998, so at the time of writing we have already completed a decade here. Long though this may seem to you, or us, for that matter, we are still regarded as being "from away", according to the "real" locals. Of course the fact that we are dutch does (not) help in that respect.
Still, from the very beginning Rosemoor has offered us a wonderful place to live, and it still does. We have the Atlantic coast less than two miles away, hundreds of miles of coast path, beautifully rugged moorland hills, wonderful islands very close by, deep wooded valleys, lots of green directly around us, a great variety of wildlife, flora as well as fauna, very little light pollution (the Milky Way is very easily observed from where we are), fresh air and seaside light, peace and quiet. All in all, city life is much further away than the actual distance to the nearest city or town from where we live.

When we came here Rosemoor had already been run as holiday accommodation for about 25 years by our predecessors, and it was beginning to show signs of its age; with lots of urgent and less urgent work required. It didn't help that our predecessors had had some family tragedies in the years just before they retired. In the circumstances we think they did a marvellous job in what must have been very difficult times for them.
Anyway, our time here has been more than filled with a great variety of projects, most of them related to building, maintenance, upgrading, etc. of the complex, the grounds and the nature reserve which we keep. We've kept extensive photo diaries of all those projects, have often written about them in our yearly printed newsletter, but have never before reported on them through the web. Clearly, that is now going to change - if we can stick to our good intentions.

To give you a somewhat better idea of what goes on here, and of what might eventually make its way into these pages, John is very much a hands on person, who likes to build, make, and to a lesser extent repair things. Jacqui is the same, but she is often driven more by the result than the actual process of getting there. This sometimes leads to tensions in our household, as John may well take (too) long doing something, just because he likes doing it.
Jacqui often complains that he can be totally gripped by something or other, leaving all of the (perhaps more mundane) rest for her to contend with. Guilty as charged (at least some of the time). But we usually find a way out of these sorts of problems...

The thing that has been very high on our list of projects over the past year is our new heating system. Shortly, it consists of a central boiler facility, burning logs, wood chips and/or pellets, which, through a mini district heating system, supplies all buildings on site with heat and hot water. Building the boiler house, chip store and log store has been a major project, which we started in August 2007. In March 2008 the boiler was commissioned. Currently we are in the process of finishing the log store. The links on the left show some of the work involved. This is one of those projects that John really loves: massive joinery, and big timbers.