Things I love about our new house

Today's a day to appreciate what we now have...

 The view from our back door across our garden where this morning we saw a pair of partridges wandering around the garden.

The Log burner in the evenings when it's a bit chilly..

A celebration and a recap...

Well today we celebrated with a glass of wine - or two! We have completed about 75m of post, wire and stock fencing after two days of very hard work. Fortunately the ground is pretty good so the posts went in well, but it was still tough going and hubby has worked really hard. And the upshot of this is that the dogs are less likely to get into the field with the three bulls!!

 Aside from this cause for celebration, I thought a quick recap of what's happened to get us to where we are now..

•  Find a French estate agent or Notaires website that covers the area of France you want to live in - for us it was Leggets Immobiliers who are an English company
• Work out what kind of house and lifestyle you are looking for – country, village, town or city - for us it had to be the countryside, with no immediate neighbours due to owning 4 rescue dogs who bark a bit!
• Do you want it to be your “maison principale” or a holiday home - maison prinicipale was the answer for us
• Can you afford to buy outright or do you need funding and if so temporarily or a mortgage - we should have been able to fund outright but more on that later (financing to be covered in a later post)
• View a variety of houses and don’t buy the first one you see – unless after viewing others it still is the one for you - we did manage to go for second viewings on two houses during our first trip to France
• Go back to the UK and sleep on it! Don’t do anything straight away (unlike us!)
• Put in an offer and negotiate until you come to an agreement- but remember there will be a lot of on top costs to consider so be sure you can afford them as well – again more on that later as we sure weren't aware of the extra costs!
• If there’s something in the house or outbuildings that you like, don’t assume it will still be there when you move in unless you have discussed it as part of the negotiation – again more on that later as we are missing some amazing parts of the history of the house as we made the mistake of assuming!
• Visit the property again as often as you can during the process to make sure it is what you want and what you think it is - again we were lucky and made 4 separate visits so were really clear what the house was like
• The legal process for buying a house in France is effectively in two parts. The first part consists of the Acte de Compromis. It’s a legal document, read it carefully! The second part is the Acte de Vente – or completion! More on this process later!
• Once you’ve signed the Acte de Vente the house is yours – and that’s when the real adventure begins….

Next time I’ll talk financing…  and the pitfalls we found…

What have we done!!?

Keys received, lunch eaten, a little food shopping done and dogs collected we made our way to the new house.

Bearing in mind that we had made 4 previous visits to the new house, so thought we knew exactly what to expect, we were still a little nervous as we pulled up outside the house. It’s really important to be sure that rose coloured glasses haven’t tinted your view of just exactly what you are buying. Be realistic. Exactly how much work does it need doing? Is it really what you need, never mind what you want? Do you have the time and/or money to do what work needs doing? Do you have the time and/or money to do the maintenance on a long term basis?

We were nervously elated on arrival. But we had no furniture and only a blow up mattress to sleep on. And a car and trailer full of stuff!! We were tired and excited, and we had 4 dogs who had spent 13 hours in the car followed by a night at kennels and then a new place to contend with. We needn’t have worried about the dogs. They just loved the open space and grass to run on, not to mention the cows in the field next door! Hm, fencing the garden is an absolute priority!!

And why did we have no furniture? Because I messed up the email to the removals company confirming the booking and when we rang them to make payment they said we hadn’t confirmed so it had been taken off the schedule. As it turned out it was probably better that it didn’t arrive the day we got the keys as the whole process took much longer than we thought it would and the removals lorry would have been waiting for us at the house for quite a long time!

Todays advice….

Check with the removals company they've received your confirmation email and try to make sure you get plenty of sleep before you arrive, and seriously think about having the furniture delivered the next day at the earliest.

We've arrived

I know that I’ve jumped a few processes between the last post and this one and I will go back to how to do things that will get you to where we are now but I just want to share our excitement! We’re here, French home owners, complete with French mortgage(and English one too until the UK house sale is completed – let’s hope it’s not too long!!) and a complete amazement at the completion process at the notaires office! But back to that later…

We decided that as we have 4 dogs we would travel via the Eurotunnel rather than a ferry crossing. Everyone has to do what’s right for their dogs, and this was definitely the right thing to do for ours even though it was exhausting and the dogs ended up being in the car for 13 hours! 3 spaniels and a terrier cross poodle in one car boot could have led to bloodshed but they were in fact absolutely amazing. I had spent time the previous few weeks in training them to stay in the car when the boot was opened, which paid dividends on the journey whenever we stopped at service stations both in the UK and France. Shame we didn’t check how tight (or loose!) all their collars were as the little one managed to slip his collar at the Eurotunnel car park! Fortunately he always comes to a whistle (which is more than can be said for the spaniels!) and he came straight back to me. I have to admit to being very relieved! 

Our amazing estate agent, FiB, had located a kennels for us and the dogs spent their first night on foreign soil in kennels, which again turned out to be a godsend, while we went off to a local B&B (we can highly recommended it – Les Treilles in Thoursais Bouildroux – and no they aren’t paying me!) run by an English couple who provide the most amazing breakfast, and advice on settling in to the French way of life too!

The following morning was a bit of a blur to be honest. We had lots of information thrown at us in a very short space of time. First stop the bank to collect our house insurance information (assurance in French) as this is a legal requirement and without it the notaire may well decide to not complete the sale. After that we went  to the house to meet the sellers so that we could agree the meter reading for both the electric and the water meters. Many explanations about how things work later we then moved on to the notaire. Now here a word to the wise. Don’t be late or they could decide to cancel and rearrange, but being on time,  or even early, doesn’t mean that you will be seen at the time of your appointment! And expect everyone involved in the selling of the house from the vendors to be there. There were 10 people in the room not including the notaire. And if you’re foreign (English!) you are now required by law to have a registered translator present. In the past FiB has done translations for her clients but as she’s not a registered translator she’s no longer allowed to. Anyway we were there a few minutes early for our 11 am appointment but it was 11.40 when we were finally called in. After a very long meeting, all conducted in French, with Val our translator, translating the things being said to us, we finally left the notaire's office at well gone1.00pm!! And yes it really does take that long to go through every piece of paper, every report on the house, every document relating to the mortgage (discussed in detail openly in front of the vendors right down to how much has been borrowed, how much insurance, what the insurance covers and how much the monthly payments are)we finally got to sign for our new house! The actual signing was a little bit of an anti-climax as it was on an electronic signing pad – like signing for parcels – but it was done. The house was ours, keys were handed over, lots and lots of kissing and hand shaking, and the vendors saying that they had all grown up in the house and had nothing but good memories and they hoped for us the same! They were probably all in their late 50’s and 60’s so that gives you an idea of the age of the house.

So with a lump in our throats after their lovely wishes for our future, we got into the car and went…. No not to the house, but to the Super U supermarket for lunch with FiB, then to collect the dogs and then off to the house….

Found the house!

So here is the house we chose after much soul searching. It's in a tiny hamlet of just 4 houses so doesn't need a name or number. And on Tuesday it becomes ours, but there's an awful lot happened between finding the house and it becoming ours!!

We've been really lucky with our estate agents who has been amazing - and no she hasn't paid us a penny to say that, neither has Leggetts! But more about that in a minute...

So we liked the house, wanted to buy it and what happens next? Well just like in the UK you put in an offer, negotiate until you agree a price, and bingo! You have a house! No it's not quite that simple obviously!! We did the negotiating through our estate agent who is actually Scottish, has lived in France for 11 years and speaks fluent French. She's been truly amazing!

We offered 85% of the asking price, and then negotiated over a couple of days up to 92% of the asking price, but that price includes the estate agents fees. Now like I said we've been amazingly lucky with our estate agent and she agreed to take a cut of 20% on her fee in order to get the deal agreed. There's a lot of "hidden" fees when you buy a house in France so don't expect the figure you agree to pay for the house will be the final bill because it won't. There's the notaires fees (in our case around 10,000 euros), fees on any bank loan/mortgage, tax fonciere(council rates which have to be paid for the rest of the year when you sign for the house), translators fees of 120 euros (legal requirement) and I'm sure I've missed one or two!! So make sure if you're buying that you allow enough of a cushion in your funds to cover all these extras.

French loans/mortgages tend to be at a interest rate than you might expect, but there are an awful lot of hoops to jump through before a French bank will agree it. Expect to provide copious amounts of paperwork and expect it to take three times longer than you expect or the bank says! For example I was divorced well over 30 years ago and have been married to my current husband for just over 30 years but they still wanted a copy of my divorce certificate!! That was tricky! Thank goodness I'm on good terms with my ex husbands wife who was able to provide me with a copy cos I couldn't find mine!

So the advice for today is make sure you have lots of copies of every legal document you own! Birth, marriage, divorce certificates, passports, proof of current address, and anything else you can find!! Better to have too many than not enough!

We went through a LOT of stress over the finances, because, although we put our house on the market in November expecting it to sell fairly quickly so also thought we wouldn't need to borrow any money, it didn't actually sell any where near as quickly as we thought it would. On top of that we expected the French bank to do what they said they would do when they said they would do it. Neither of these things happened and there was a point at which we thought the purchase would fall through for any number of reasons but, again, we have been really lucky and the vendors have been brilliant! They've been tolerant and understanding of the delays. They could have claimed our deposit as we couldn't complete when we should have according to the Acte de copromis (more on that next time) but they didn't. They allowed us to deliver some stuff to the house 2 weeks before we completed and they were so friendly and accommodating, and we tried out our best French on them and they didn't laugh once!!

I truly hope that anyone else who buys a house in France is as lucky as we have been. Next time the Acte de compromis and what that actually means!

More thoughts on viewing houses and what next?

I've described the two houses that we loved, but haven't mentioned the one's that weren't but in truth it is worth looking at the others as well in order to hopefully give you some ideas/suggestions and information.

We had shortlisted a number of properties which, in theory at least, all fulfilled the brief we were working to but in reality some of them were not what they at first appeared. One house we looked at turned out to be semi-detached, which was not clear in the description at first glance, but once we read the details a second time more closely it was actually mentioned. There was another house that was on a large plot of land, great to grow veg and for the dogs to run around in we thought. In reality there were so many outbuildings that in fact there was only a small garden that would have been suitable for our needs and it was across the road, so that ruled that out. The other lesson we learned from this property was that more is not necessarily better. Another one, although detached was so close to the house next door, which was also slightly lower due to the hill it was built on, that my dogs could have jumped from "our" garden straight into their swimming pool. So we discounted that too. And there was a house that was passable, but the detached derelict barn that came as part of the deal was in danger of falling down and the risk of someone getting injured by falling masonry before we could get to it to fix it up ruled it out too. On our last day the estate agent had arranged to take us back to look at two for second viewings and had also found a mystery house which had only come on the market that day.

All three fitted the brief and all three were definite maybe's. However over the weekend we had spent some time with friends of ours who had moved out to France 11 years ago but live about 3 hours away from where we were looking. Mr B had renovated a derelict barn from scratch almost entirely single handedly, while Mrs B established the small holding. They gave us a lot of really useful advice about what to look for, such as a bulge in a stone wall which is indicative of water ingress between the layers of the wall which would mean major work. When we went back to look at one of the houses, we realised that although the house looked okay, the barn's back wall was in need of some serious renovation. We had missed this first time round. And the house just didn't have that mysterious "feel" that everyone looks for.

The other two houses were very similar. Same amount of land, similar in size, but one was the finished article and one was, how can I put it, not!! Anyway my first thought was the finished article would be so much easier and in the long run, and probably no more expensive. We went back to the hotel to talk it over. The more we talked the more we realised how much we would want to change in the finished house as it wasn't really to our taste - all the beams had been clad with pine cladding for example.

So guess what.... The doer upper it is! It's nearly a hundred years old and the upstairs has never been used! And I don't care because I walked in and just felt at home... And fortunately hubby loved it too!

So the advice for today is.....
Look at the pro's and the con's of each house you see, weigh them up and compare them, trust your instinct and if you fall head over heels in love with something, make absolutely sure it will meet your needs before letting your heart rule your head. OH, and although we were incredibly lucky to find our house first visit to France, it often takes 2 or more visits, so if you don't find it first time, don't settle for something that doesn't really work for you. Keep looking!

Doesn't time fly... Or the move happens on Monday!

So much has happened since my last post I can't believe it, but I'll try to keep the story in some sort of order and carry on where I left off...

We went out to the Vendee region of France and looked at lots of houses over about 5 days, fell madly in love with one house and saw the potential to fall in love with one other. As it was our first visit we had arranged to see a variety of different types of house that fulfilled our main requirement which was detached with no close neighbours - we had 5 rescue dogs one or two of which bark at everything that moves - with a large garden to grow veg in. Everybody will know what they think they want, but, as is often the case, we are not always right. Sometimes rose coloured glasses of how we think life will be can colour our decisions, and sometimes other people can see what would be perfect for us even when we can't see it ourselves. So my advice for what it's worth (and take it or leave it I won't be offended either way) is that you go and see property with an open mind, listen to suggestions, remember that a picture on the internet will not give you a true idea of what a house is like, but at the end of the day you'll be the one living there.

Anyway I digress. We were told by quite a few people that we wouldn't find "our house" the first visit. How wrong were they. We found two!! The one we fell madly in love with was our romantic idea of what a French house should be, huge ceilings, big windows, lots of light, and it tugged at both our heart strings. It was truly beautiful, and truly cheap too but we didn't buy it. We walked round and round both the house and the garden numerous times trying so hard to make it work for us, to try to see it working for us in it's finished glory, which will be beautiful when it is finished, but it didn't matter how hard we tried we just couldn't make it work. It was on a busy (by French standards that is) road and we have dogs. It was only really 4 rooms, 2 up and 2 down, even though the rooms were big and we couldn't work out where my studio would go or where his workshop would go, and the garden had too many trees and not enough room for my fruit and veg growing aspirations. But we still love it and if anyone wants to buy it it looks like this and can be found on the Leggett Immobilier website...

The Conifer house

So what are we buying? We're buying the country dream, the house I always wanted, the get away from it all self sufficiency ideal truly amazing country farmhouse!

The White House

It is much bigger than we were really looking for but we don't care! It's in a tiny hamlet of four houses, but the nearest true village is only a mile or so away, so isolated but at the same time not really. It needs a huge amount of work but we don't care! It has been a much loved family home with a lot of memories.It will probably turn out to be a money pit but we don't care! It's been a real emotional roller coster but in less than a week it will be ours. There is no fencing to keep the dogs in so that's an urgent fix, but we don't care!!

It will be our home and the intention is for it to be our forever home...

So until next time when I will tell you the next stage of the adventure ...

A bientot!