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…