Lets leave England

In 2004, due to my partner and myself being made redundant from our jobs, myself from my Admin position in Social Services (they were amalgamating with the NHS) and Iain whose IT company was restructuring and moving. We decided now was a good time to start a new life in France. Like so many English we were dissatisfied with the way the country was going – to the dogs – as we say !

So we came across to France for a holiday and to look around, we fell in love with a large house in the country with two and a half acres and decided it was for us. The house looked lovely, it had full central heating and electric shutters and although it needed a lot of work, we felt the basics were there. So we ploughed forward and made the giant leap and bought the property. Made sure we had an English translator and English speaking Notaire and thought everything went rather smooth.

The house had a woodburning stove, a cooker and some kitchen units… our first surprise after buying was – all of these had disappeared…. Our first encounter of the term in France “buyer beware”. It seems that the French will remove anything and everything from the house before leaving. Not much of a problem for us, we thought, as we knew we would have to renew them anyway – we just thought they would have been handy for the time being.

The house had oak beams downstairs and these had been painted over for many many years with white paint etc. we thought our first task was to remove the paint. The second problem was when we checked the wiring in the walls, most of it had burnt out (it is not common in France to have a surveyor and one could not have detected what was behind the walls) – and the third problem was we were informed it had mains water to the house. Alas, misinformed – we had well water and the mains came in to the edge of the land. OK, we can tackle this, it’s not out of our reach to sort it, and anyway we had bought by this time and put it down to experience.

Sold up and came over to France with a caravan, our dog and our four cats.

Here the nightmare and hard work began………….