If you visit us here at ChezLeMoulin and you are unwise enough to ask me how we came to be at the mill, your ears will be bleeding and Churchill the dogs head would have dropped off long before I come up for air….So to save you the pain it’s all here, and you can switch off anytime you like, no one will be any the wiser. Get yourself a glass of wine…
I hate sand in my nickers, my hair, I hate it in sandwiches or my suitcase. I don’t really like the stuff and with kids there’s more than enough sand in a sand pit. So when we needed a holiday for two kids and two adults with busy jobs in the grand metropolis of London and no sand we looked for something different. After we bought our first decent car and had a couple of less than successful holidays in Devon and Cornwall ( trips to hospital, dogs eating prize chickens, etc) we decided we should head south. The sun, the wine and tranquility. It was the 90’s and ChezNous’ brochure was the place to find your holiday rental in France. I scoured the pages and eventually found the perfect converted barn. We headed for the Dordogne, a gîte, a pool, cheese, wine, French bread, collecting glow worms and we were sold. Two weeks later, with a car full of wine, sun tans and memories we headed home thinking, – running a few gîtes, we could do that! And then we thought maybe we should test it again, just to make sure and so we did, then again and strangely enough again. We did it with the kids, we did it with friends, big groups, small groups, multi-generational groups. Each time it grew, from we could, to we should, to we will, when we retire.
The kids said, you can’t leave us, we love you, we want to live with you forever..but they were little. I told them when we retire you’ll be 18 and 20, you will be desperate to get rid of us….and they were. They saw free holidays and as much beer and wine as they could drink. They packed up left home and got married. Ok they were 22 and 24 by the time we moved but it took us a while to retire and get going.
At the end of 2014 my husband finally agreed to pack in his job. We accidentally sold our UK home and moved into a tiny cottage we had bought to let out. We had a clear plan for 2015: decide where in France we wanted to settle. That was it.
We booked two long trips to our Canadian holiday home, another tale if you ever have the time. February and September accounted for. March set aside, for our youngest son’s wedding in Kent. Then I booked a month in a gite near the Pyrenees, for the whole of April 2015. It was a region we had only spent a short time in and thought we should explore a bit more. We love mountains and of course there’s very little sand, lovely walks, skiing and the views. We’d done the tour de Mont Blanc and crossed the alps on the motor bike and cruised both sides of the Pyrenees but our visits to the South West of France really had been fleeting.
I’d read the books on running gîtes and researched on how to buy in France. We’d been to a place in the sun live and the Leggets open evening at our local estate agents. We even found a French tutor to improve our 1970’s school French. So I knew I didn’t know anything and we couldn’t speak the language. Perfectly prepared to settle in France!
Before we left on what we thought was the first of serval scouting missions, we thought maybe we needed a bit of structure to our trip. We didn’t want to fanny about saying ‘what should we do today’. We were on a mission to decide if this was a possible option for the rest of our lives. We search for houses on line, found estate agents and booked some viewings. We set a budget at what we thought we could afford to spend, to buy a house, including any renovation work, money to live on for the first year and a contingency budget…we’d been planning a long time and this was our hard earned retirement fund. We had an idea of exactly what we wanted. A house, 3 or 4 bedrooms, liveable not a complete wreck, a bit of stone, some beams, a bit of land, maybe an acre or two and something we could turn into a gite. You know the sort of thing, escape to the sun, beautiful farmhouse with a barn or outbuilding.
On the 1st April 2015: we headed off, full of the joys of spring, literally. For a whole month in France we decided to take everything, car, motorbike, bicycles. The gite we’d booked was in a tiny hamlet. Little were we to know, our hosts Brian and Marianne had made a similar trip three years earlier from just down the road. We were greeted enthusiastically by Monty the dog, an amazing view of the Pyrenees and temperatures that stayed around 25 degrees for the whole month.
On Day two, off we set to look at our first property. It was perfect, honestly amazing. But maybe not quite the right location, too close to the road, so we looked at another; almost perfect but the English owners had done some poor quality renovation so we looked at another. Perfect, except that the view of the mountains was slightly spoilt by a row of pylons. One week turned into two. The more we saw, the more we chatted to Brian, Marianne and Monty the dog, and several estate agents, the more we thought this was the place. We took a day off and took the bike to Spain for Lunch. This was, definitely, the life. We talked and talked, probably more than we had ever talked to each other. Usually it’s me that talks and David that doesn’t listen. At our son’s wedding he said, during his speech , that it was the longest he’d been able to talk without being interrupted…cruel but probably true. We stuck pins in maps to show what we’d looked at and where we’d been but the perfect house was not slapping us in the face. We’d been spoilt. Brian and Marianne had got there first and bought the only perfect house.
So then we thought, let’s go back to the dream. The Dordogne circa about 1996. Beautiful scenery, stone houses, large derelict barns to renovate. Kayaking down the river. Off we set to find out if our 1990’s dream would match up with 2015 reality. Known as little England, it lived up to its reputation. The property was beautiful, but much more expensive than Midi-Pyrenees, the estate agents were snooty….yep definitely a bit snooty (that’s a very middle class word, rather old fashioned and therefore all the more suitable) and the nail in the coffin was lunch. Pretty village, nice lunch but the loud posh voiced English….’garçon’ was the final nail in the dream coffin. We didn’t fit. It wasn’t for us, we felt more at home in the quieter more rural Midi-Pyrenees and we headed back South.
Our estate agents were beginning to despair of us actually buying a house. They had shown us everything on the books that vaguely matched our criteria. We had seen complete wrecks, village houses with tiny gardens, a massive chateau with the village football team playing on their flood lit field. We accepted that we needed to be flexible. We wouldn’t find perfect. Valerie, one of these agents convinced us to look at Le Moulin. We had dismissed it, far too much land and way, way, over budget, but she said it’s a buyers’ market and there’s always a deal to be done. We knew that trick, we didn’t buy the chateau, the one we could have poured pots more money into, way more than we could afford, without making a visible difference. We really couldn’t manage that much land. I’m not an animal person, I didn’t want goats, donkeys, horses or pigs. Maybe a we’d have a dog or two and a few chickens. But really it was a small holding not a garden. Eventually we did cave in and went to have a look and we liked it a lot. It was still far too big though. We needed a rethink.
I am the queen of a nice spread sheet. I like a plan, if it’s colour coded even better. I did one for our Disney holiday. Every hour of every day accounted for, restaurants booked, trips to meet Piglet and Pooh, and Mickey and Minnie. So, yes I did a spread sheet. This would help narrow our search. Three weeks and sixty property viewings, it was time to make a much-needed short list. We reviewed our favourite properties, we listed our priorities and gave each house a score out of ten against each criterion. I added up the scores and there we were. Six properties, each with a nick name that help us remember it, Pylons made the list, Polynot ( not poly tunnels but the remains of goose housing) , Pilot, yes the owner was a pilot ….and Le Moulin. We arranged second viewings for the top six.
The list went down to three. We really couldn’t decide, each had its own advantages, so we considered our position. We were heading home soon but we thought, ‘we will be back’! If we don’t buy one of these, something else will turn up… So, we came up with a plan. Property really wasn’t selling fast and we knew that all the properties on the short list need a lot of work, but we liked them all enough to buy them.
We worked out how much we thought we needed to spend on each to achieve what we wanted, putting in pools, upgrading electrics, digging drainage….and we ignored the asking prices. We put in an offer for the first property, it was rejected and we upped the offer. Still no bite, so we moved onto the next, same thing. We could have upped our offers but we had three properties on our short list and a strategy. So we put in an offer for the mill, number three mainly because it wasn’t getting any smaller. The offer was way below the asking price, we loved the property but it was just too big, too much land. It was the one property we both liked best, but it was going to be expensive to achieve what we wanted. Our first offer was rejected. We decided to make another offer, but first we did a third visit.
Mark and Sarah were the house sitters, looking after the property. They had done an amazing job of making it look good and they gave us wine and cheese and sold us the dream. A mill is a daunting task, every day is a school day, how the water flows, floods and droughts. The house came with six cats, three pigs and ten ducks and more rooms than we could count, four stair cases and ten toilets. But it had a working kitchen, hot running water and WiFi. So we wrote a letter to the owners, explaining our position. That we knew we needed to buy expensive land management equipment, put in a pool and upgrade bathrooms and make the gite work. We explained we would only make this one last offer, because that’s what we were willing to pay. And then we went home to the tiny cottage. Exausted but prepare to return to a slightly different location and do it all again later in the year.
We went walking, saw the kids and went to the pub for lunch, planned our trip to Canada and though a bit about where to start the next search. Two weeks later In the middle of a field in Kent on our way to the pub my phone rang. ‘Hello this is France calling, we have the results of the French vote!’ I was leaping around the field. We had our French dream! It really was happening. At the beginning of June we signed the contract and on the 25th July we visited the Notary to complete. We were met at the house by Kris, who’d owned the house ten years earlier and had been feeding the animals and by our furniture movers and we were here.
So this is our advice for those of you interested in a move to France. We are always happy to answer your questions:
1. Have enough funds to buy the property, to do it up and to live on for at least a year. If you are starting a business, it will take you this long to get it going. This is really the number one.
2. Getting building work done in France is like anywhere else, it’s all about who you know. Builders are much more expensive here, so if you think you know roughly what the cost of something will be forget it, it will be twice the price. Once a builder has done some very expensive work for you the next time it will be more reasonable. Good builders are busy, but go with recommendations and look at work they have done. Choose a small job, not a whole renovation project. Get your ‘devis,’ (quote), don’t forget to send it back signed and with the deposit. Once a builder has completed a small job, you will know if you are compatible. We have used local French builders when we needed builders. They have become our friends and French tutors. Don’t think it’s easier to use an English builder, they tend to use English products and these are not necessarily the best thing for French buildings. Methods are very different. There are some good English builders here but there are some absolute horror stories.
3. ‘Fosse Septique’ is the standard system of drainage (yes poo) read about it and understand how it works. Basic rule, if you didn’t eat it don’t flush it. Don’t be worried about having to put in a new system, it’s very common with old properties but allow for the cost. The rule is if you have a system that works don’t change it. There is lots of information on-line about how to do this, there are lots of people that can advise. We’ve done it, Dick Strawbridge- escape to the Chateau did it, everyone is doing it.
4. Sort out your French bank account. We use Credit Agricole Britline – they are the English-speaking branch and Okay. Not brilliant but Okay and the online site is all in French. You need to understand French banking. It’s very different, credit cards are expensive, they have annual fees. Banking charges are high. Cash withdrawal and card monthly spending limits are low, so you can easily reach your limit and get your card refused even though you have a big pile of money in the account. Cheques are still used widely, you can use cheques to pay for big things without incurring massive charges. Writing a cheque with insufficient funds to cover it is illegal.
5. Make friends. You will need them, here you don’t have the same network you had in the UK. You need advisors and confidants. We thought we were moving somewhere there weren’t many English people. We had the idea that with full emersion we’d be speaking French like natives in no time. We were wrong. We have made many great English-speaking friends, and German, Dutch, Australian, Lesbian, Gay, refugees and even some French. We need them! Don’t come with the attitude I don’t want to meet expats, we’re not all bad.
6. You can get by with very little French, some expats never do learn French. But, we still say learn the language, learn some French, any French is better than none. I’m still having lessons, after five years I’m not fluent by any means but I speak on the phone, talk to the doctor and chat to my neighbours a bit. Our neighbours don’t speak English, they have strong local accents , it’s like French people trying to understand a Geordie. We both did French at school. That was very, very far in the past and neither of us paid attention, we were never going to need it. After many years of holidays, I could confidently order beer, wine, ice cream and buy bread. That was about it. So about five years before the big move I started French evening classes, then I did a two-week full immersion course in Annecy, and we had a holiday home in Quebec. Then, before we moved, we had a French Tutor. After all that my french was probably O’level grade E. Never give up. Every day is a school day.
Useful pages
- English Speakers in the Haute Garrone: Facebook you can ask anything, some one will Know, there are similar groups all over France.
- Ask mother in France ~Facebook and Web page Nikki McCather is the author of ‘ What Have we got Toulouse’. Useful advise for people moving with children, She arrived with two School age children and pregnant with their forth and went on to a fifth have her last baby here. She’s done starting businesses, the school run, university applications and a whole multitude of medical emergencies.
- The Local France, and Connexion France, Both English news sites that require subscription to read their full articles.
- Comme une Francaise Facebook and web page, and You Tube French language , helps with all those little confusing phrases where you thought you were saying one thing but what you said means something totally different! I find this really helpful my husband finds it far too fast.
Recent Comments