For maintenance of your villa in the South of France, you can choose from two types of services: a concierge service and a maintenance company. Both aim to keep your property in optimal form, in the short or long term.
A concierge service is your direct contact when you rent out the villa. Or if you would like to have your villa in order before you arrive in the South of France yourself. The concierge service therefore often operates as a pool manager and a key manager. This type of caretaker often also directs the gardener. But the manager of your villa can also solve minor repairs such as an unexpected leak from a boiler, or the finding of swimming pool tiles on the bottom. All this type of work is often, but not always, under the banner of concierge services.
Maintenance of your villa on the French Riviera
Outages discovered by the concierge or caretaker “last minute” are often more expensive than planned. After all, these kinds of defects are only discovered when the sunny season starts. You want to rent out the villa or you want to enjoy your property in the South of France. How annoying when you discover – after arrival at Nice Airport – at home that the wrought-iron balustrade has started to rust during the winter and that the rusty brown rainwater has leaked over your tiled floor in the sunscreens. Or that the air conditioning does not get up to speed and the weather forecast predicts 36 degrees. Or that part of your garden lighting has been gnawed through. They are all recognizable problems. Those who do not have a concierge service are of course more often faced with surprises like this.
Do you always pay for the main prize?
If you need a service extra quickly, you usually pay the main prize. Moreover, it is certainly difficult to find a good and reliable company when you are in a hurry. Only workers without work (this resembles a rebus) pick up the phone and can come and repair the work with a sigh. You have to wait, pay and see whether the quality is adequate for a few years. We regularly see that a local company likes to come back every year to replace something again because inferior material is used. Logical, because who does not want to carry out the same “squeaky” repair every year. Of course, the repairer would rather sell a completely new installation than repair something. Think of swimming pool pumps, air conditioners, and blinds. But also painting fencing.
Maintenance of your villa on the French Riviera
In the field of paint, there is a lot of difference in quality. Cheap is expensive and that is certainly the case under the warm southern French sun and the influence of the sea breeze. Paintwork that is repeated every year resembles regular maintenance but is in fact not necessary. Today, steel can be treated with a two-component paint, so you only have to repaint it once every five years. The same goes for constantly re-grouting tile anywhere. This literally lasts for years with an epoxy joint. This way you only pay once for the work and you can use your budget for another part of the house.
Plan your maintenance work for the winter
Anyone looking ahead and planning can save a lot of stress, misery, and extra costs with a maintenance plan for a villa or second home. By reserving a budget, you can guarantee the technical state of maintenance of your villa. And a villa that is perfectly fine also remains fixed in value. Painting doors, the exterior walls of your house, building a better drainage system for severe rainfall, these are all things you can plan in advance. And if everyone knows what needs to be done, without stress, the quotation will also be cheaper. Find out more about maintenance and renovations in the South of France here.
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