So how did we end up buying a house in rural france? Well apparently this is how...
2009 was an interesting year that's for sure
In revisiting my old blog I am remembering lots of tiny details that honestly had escaped somewhere in the files market irrelevant in my brain. One of the amazing things about writing and keeping any form of written account of your time before is that it can trigger much bigger memories than a photo.
My father has dementia so badly that he starts the same sentence before he’s even finished it and my grandmother, his mother, had it too. Sometimes when I’ve left my keys in the front door or put some critical things in a basket on Amazon but then forgotten to actually check out I wonder if its coming for me too?
But here’s why this story of probably some of our happiest times (not always - more on that later) is a great way to help me should the time come. Hopefully I can read about the ten or more years that we’ve been renovating a giant house in France and remember not just the house but the stories within - the visitors, the laughs - the time we drank champagne out of an enormous football trophy that Seb had bought in a brocante to decorate his room.
So for my second newsletter, a blog post from Jan 2013 talking about 2009 - the year we bought a french house.
AND THEN WE WENT TO LOOK AT IT
So how DO you end up buying a house in a tiny hamlet in SW France? Well IT involved a lot of ‘bookmark-bar dreaming’. You know the thing. You see a house you love for sale by trawling french property websites, you drag it onto your bookmark bar and then open it every now and then to see if its still for sale. You imagine yourself there throwing big dinners for friends, cooking Confit of Duck, wafting in the backgarden picking lavender. Chances are - it still will be for sale because most tumble down French property is difficult to sell. Only crazy English people buy falling down, in need of attention, French properties. So in the current market they can sit there for sale, getting more and more run-down as months or even years go on. Which is what happened here. Until, two unconnected events took place.
1) My mother-in-law, Joan, died. She was 82 years old and had lived a wonderful full life. There were stints dodging doodlebugs in WW2 in London delivering babies and then going to Canada as part of the war effort where she met her husband, Lee. There were visits to Africa as a midwife and missionary and after returning from Canada with Lee and his children from a previous marriage to her home in Devon, she went on to give birth to my husband Peter and his sister Ruth. They, finally settled in Bristol and had several grandchildren. These children and grandchildren, including my husband Peter were left a nice sum of money when she died (her husband Lee had died in 2000) for which we were very grateful but had no plans to spend impulsively.
2) Peter did a bit of ‘bookmark bar dreaming’ clearing out. He decided to revist all those properties he had optimistically bookmarked and have a REALITY check. There was no way we could afford any of them even with a little windfall. Except…. As he got to a Maison Du Maitre in the Haute Pyrenees with it’s own 1 acre wood, 6 bedrooms and bright yellow (albeit falling off) shutters, he noticed the price had been reduced by almost 150000 Euros! Zut Alors – this would never happen at Foxtons… Miraculously, this home was now within our grasp.
And so, in May 2009 with the children left at home with my parents, Peter and I flew to Pau to meet up with a probably slightly desperate estate agent called Patrick at a property that had been on his books for over 2 years. We fell in love straight away. We saw beyond the nicotine stained EVERYTHING, mould encrusted bathrooms, ceilingless and floorless rooms with rats and mice living there. What we saw was an enormous house where we could holiday with our friends, a huge barn that we could spend a lifetime renovating long after the house was finished, a wood where the family could build a treehouse and a local village with restaurants that served soup, salad, steak and chips followed by creme brulee and a carafe of red wine for just 12 Euros each. And so reader, we put in an offer….