France
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Hello! We're new on WorkAway, quite the adventure! Our names are Claire and Michiel, we're a Franco-Belgian couple living on an old farmstead near the coast at Wissant, North of France. For 4 years now we are renovating the farm bit by bit. After living in a mobile home for 2,5 years, we finished refurbishing a stablehouse as our home last year, just in time to welcome our newborn daughter. We took a little break this winter to adapt to parent life.
We're welcoming help renovating a large farmhouse, as well as feeding the animals (chickens, sheep and 2 adorable, hairy pigs), maintaining the garden and/or keeping our daughter happy while we're outside working :)
If you'd decide to come and live with us for a few weeks, we'd be very happy and eager to get to know you! We have quite some experience in hosting our friends and visitors from other sites, people say we're very hospitable :)
We love hosting people and look forward to meeting you!
Claire and Michiel (and Fleur)
Gardening
DIY and building projects
Farmstay help
Help around the house
General Maintenance
This project could involve children. For more information see our guidelines and tips here.
In your spare time, you may go for long walks on the beach or on the countryside with a view of the English coast across the channel. There's a lot of museums in the region as well, mostly dedicated to WW2 or the sea and sealife.
This summer, we'll start construction on the largest farm building. There's a lot of demolition to be done, floors, walls and and wooden beams, as well as powercleaning roof tiles, sandblasting walls, preparing and pouring concrete, reinforcing the woodwork, ... The tasks on hand will depend on the status of our works. There's some heavy lifting as well as light work, so anyone should find what suits them! For those with green fingers there's our biological vegetable garden to maintain, as well as feeding our nine chickens, seven sheep and two very kind, hairy pigs.
Languages spoken
English: Fluent
French: Fluent
Dutch: Fluent
Polish: Fluent
German: Beginner
Spanish: Beginner
This host offers a language exchange
We're a Franco-Belgian couple, with partly Polish roots.
We provide your meals and housing in a room of the not-yet renovated mansion house, with a toilet and sink nearby. Kitchen and bathroom are shared in our house. All ameneties on site are available for you, woodstove, barbecue, pergola, terrace, mountainbikes, tandem, jacuzzi, kayaks, SUPs, ...
We're in the middle of the 'Parc Régional Naturel' so there's a lot of wildlife to be spotted around the farm and a lot of nice walking and biking routes around. We're also within the 'Grand Site des Deux Caps', which means that a lot of the nicest spots are arranged for visitors with explanatory signs etc.
If the weather allows for it, we'll take you on kayaking trips at sea, we might even have a barbecue on a sandbank 4km off the coast, only visitable a few times a year!
Internet access
Limited internet access
We have pets
We are smokers
Can host families
Office space would be shared. Michiel is an architect who works mostly from home.
There's more than enough space on our farm to find a nice spot for a van :D
Please no cats, they are too good a predator for the many small birds that live in our hedges. Dogs are more than welcome as long as they're kids-friendly and don't start hunting our chickens!
More than two
5 hours a day, 5 days a week
