We're in!

Bit of a delay thanks to France Telecom taking 2 months to set up the broadband....

This is the moment we open the door to our new home straight from the notaires. Turn back, K! There's mould everywhere and the field's solid rock! The central heating's 40 years old and drinks oil like a tramp with the keys to the Special Brew factory! No one knows where the fosse is, or even if it has one! The living room fire's so hot it melts the sheep netting down the bottom of the field and we can't turn it down coz it goes out!

Ahhh, whatever. Better than a pokey flat in Blighty, eh? Monkey Puzzle tree's life is rapidly running out though - as soon as I get a winch and a saw. Bloody awful things, look like kid's drawings of trees.

Back to Blighty

A spot of rain on the way to the UK

Having my head stuck in the clouds, I often find that my idea of something is nothing like what it really is. Take the idea of fish and chips: I think of big crisp chips splashed with malt vinegar, light crisp batter, chunks of delicious white fish, and a crunchy gherkin or two. What do you get in reality? A yellow soggy mess. Same with my idea of England: I think of cosy fires in pubs selling delicious beer, hearty simple meals, rolling green country, little winding rivers, etc, etc. Drove back to the UK last week, and was suprised at just how crowded it is, and how unlike my idea of it it really is - there were cars bumper to bumper from the Eurostar terminal to Lewes, solid. Compared with France it was like a termite mound. Also, all the houses are squeezed together right next to huge open spaces, roads are everywhere, and people look so unhealthy. The food is cheap and looks it, shops are everywhere selling nothing of quality, adverts shout at you from every available space, noise everywhere. Serves me right for going into Brighton!

Anyway, we saw our friends, had the British Food Trinity (fish & chips, sunday roast, curry), drank a lot of beer -which was a bit sugary to be honest- and looked in shops which didn't sell what I wanted. We then loaded up the removal lorry, and set off to the Tunnel because the thought of an overnight ferry journey in force 11 gales didn't appeal. Got to Mesle the next day, unloaded everything into the gite (except Pachypodium which went somewhere warmer), and came back to Bubry.

Three days of cleaning and sorting the house out here, then we're in. Two beams to replace in the gite, gas pipes to replace in the house, bit of a clean, unpack, and get on with it.

Reflections on the last few months

Three weeks left until the place is ours (as long as all goes according to plan). Here are my thoughts on moving to France:

1. If you want to live in France, then just go and live in France. You could spend years taking wee holidays and you still won't know what it's like to live there. Sell up, go over, and rent. Then settle in and take your time.

2. Forget agencies - they want your money. Go straight to a notaire and save yourself 7% of the asking price.

3. Never accept the asking price - offer a third less and negotiate. Prices are made up, and there's no rule as to what a place is worth.

4. Remember that a building can be altered but an aspect and location cannot. Better something needing work in perfect surroundings than a dream house near a proposed dechetterie.

5. Found a place you like? Take a good look around the place before committing -Google Earth's good to see what's around about- there could be a dirt bike track through those lovely trees at the bottom of the garden.

6. Land rented out to a farmer? You might as well not own the land: unless the farmer breaks the tenancy agreement you can't evict him/her, and some tenancies are generations old.

7. Local farmers get first dibs on land for sale over a hectare, which can delay the sale for months. This is why there're lots of farmhouses for sale with no land: the big boys and girls have nabbed it all.

8. Most stuff is nearly a third cheaper in the UK, and there's more choice. Ship it over.

9. Employ local tradesmen and talk to your neighbours who hold the keys to a lot of stuff you'd never know about - like the local farmer's distillery for example! Hic.

10. Old house? Keep off the modern building materials as they're designed to keep damp out, whereas old buildings are designed move damp out. Mix the two and you have condensation, damp and rot. Use matching natural materials and ventilate. Better for you and the planet.

Limbo

Now we've decided on a place and are signing the compromis de vente (spelt wrong) on Monday, we have more spare time to plan what to do when we get there. Been looking at polytunnels (which are a third less expensive in the UK), chicken tractor designs, and thinking about Christmas.



This all means that we're in a kind of limbo at the moment, as we can't do much until we have a hand-over date, so we're spending the time walking, reading, drawing (me), making a cacophony on the ukulele (me) and sitting in front of the fire in the evening.



Found out a couple of nice things: distilling your own is legal here (each farm is allowed one still) and there's an organic dairy farm up the road. So we're sorted for White Russians.

Went for a walk along the bay of Morbihan (meaning "little sea" in Breton) last week and came across this Ent. K's just behind it, within arm's reach.

This week I have been mostly...

...house hunting for a change.

We've seen 31 properties now, and I am getting a bit exasperated as they nearly all have something significantly wrong with them, like a new incinerator being built in the area, near busy roads with trucks roaring along them, or wet no-good land, or not enough land.

Saw this on Wednesday. All lime render and posh tiles, but NEAR A ROAD!


We're thinking about the organic nursery we saw on week 1 again: was it so bad, or was it just superficial stuff? When we saw it we thought we'd be able to find something perfect and rejected it, but perfect isn't going to happen.


I think the location of the place and the land are the most important things, as everything else can be altered with time and effort. Next on the list is structural integrity. Estate agents are ok, but notaires are better: most property is with them, and they're easier to get along with as they're not on commission. But what matters is getting a place to live, so whoever has what we want wins.

So, new rules for house hunting: must be in a healthy place (no pesticide-laden fields next door, or noisy roads that will drive me mad), must be in an interesting place (no flat featureless plains), must not be about to fall down (or be too hideous!), must be able to grow enough food on the land (without digging drains/clearing conifers). The rest is superficial.

Got three more lined up for next week - all in Finistere. We're re-visiting the organic hippy place, and are looking at a farmhouse with 12.5 acres, and a longere with -ahem- 32 acres!


Whatever happens, this time next year we'll be eating what I've grown, and all this will have been worthwhile.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

PS - you know you can get paid for just being registered as an organic producer? Pay the Man E650 for membership and get a grant for E3000-ish a year. All that is required is that you keep off the Roundup - you don't even have to sell owt! Vive la France and it's wholesale consumption of EU funds.

House of Dreams cancelled!

See the nice big field in the photo to the south of "our" place? That's maize for feeding to dairy cows, which is pre-treated with a pesticide called "sprinter", which is a nerve agent. Our water supply passes through this field, picking up lots of nice things to help our garden grow, like "sprinter", fungicide to get rid of mildew which grows on maize due to being grown in the wrong climate, and of course, nitrates from the excessive feriliser added. So, thanks to greedy and ignorant farmers, what appeared to be a near-perfect place ain't. Kind of resembles a tropical island surrounded by shark-infested waters!

Back to the drawing board. We've got another 3 places to see this week, so fingers crossed.

Finistere it is!

Went to a hobbit estate agent and viewed three places in or near to the Armorica National Park. Two we're seriously thinking about, one we ain't.

Place no.1: 1930s farmhouse with a hangar and a gite, on one hectare:

Place no.2: an organic farm with 2 hectares, polytunnels and a tractor:
Place no.3: an old set of cottages with outbuildings, on 2.3 hectares (a hobbit is opening the door):

The organic farm was too much work - the place was a dump, dark and damp, and some hippy had smeared the walls with ochre but had forgotten about the rotten sills, the tiles, and the hact the the hangar blocks out the sun. Fields were too wet, polytunnels were HUGE and needed reskinning, so "non merci" to that one. Suprising how photos don't tell the true story.

Place no.1 was perfect -apart from not enough land. There was a perfect neighbour who was also a smallholder, knew the area, knew everyone, and loaded us up with fresh organic veggies, but he told us that it would be hard to find extra land if we needed it, so unfortunately house no.1 was out.

This leaves house no.3. which needs a bit of work. We went for a second viewing and deicided to put an offer in, and it was accepted! So now we're panicking a little about the amount of work to do, and the fact that what we've dreamt of is about to happen... be afraid!

The secret garden.

View from house no.1 to front gate and spring-fed pool through trees.

House no.1 - a 70s interior decorator's wildest dream inside!

View from the houses to the third barn.

6 acres, mature oak and ash, some hazel and sweet chestnut coppice, 3 small barns, one big one, two houses, springwater on the land, nice and quiet and private. Large town of Carhaix about 10km away which hosts huge music festivals, near the national park, good deep soil, job done*.

Our new life starts this Friday when we sign for it!

*apart from the total modernisation of the houses, and getting a new wood and solar heating system, insulation, new kitchen and bathroom, starting veg beds from scratch, putting boundary hedges in, planting an orchard, building a greenhouse/polytunnel, making a dairy and brewery, and maybe having a cup of tea every now and again.

House hunting rant!

I'm suprised at how many estate agents there are here - every small town boasts at least two, and they each have at least a hundred places for sale on them. Seems that the whole of the department is up for sale! However, it's not such a good thing, for us anyhow.
Most of the places for sale are of two sorts: new build Lego box houses with small gardens comprised of builder's rubble, or what Time Team would imaginatively describe as a "post iron age farming settlement", an agent would describe as "maison a renover, beaucoup de charme", but which appears to the author to be a series of broken walls with brambles poking out of the roof for fifty quid.
To find a small house with about 2 hectares of land is hard due to the law here which says that land for sale must be offered to the local farmers first before anyone else can buy it. This has good and bad points. It's good that good land is offered to someone local who can produce food from it, and this keeps land out of the hands of prospectors and developers. However, this has meant that farms here get bigger and bigger, land is lost to small producers, variety in the landscape is lost (every other field here is maize), and you end up with large farm buildings cut off from the land they need, and therefore they just stand empty and falling down because no-one can use them.
Also, things ain't as cheap as they were. 5 years ago the British were over here in droves snapping up cheap places and renovating them. The Bretons (not French - bit like calling Welsh English) have cottoned on to this a bit and are asking for more. Also, the Brits are selling up due to various things (liver damage and divorce seem to be the most common reasons!), having spent small fortunes renovating -often badly- their homes and wanting some return on their labours. This means you can not get charming old farmhouses with a bit of land for under E200k these days, unless they're completely knackered, and have had the original occupants die of old age inside. Still, hope oft endures.
Also, I'm nowhere near an expert, but even I can see that repairing and rendering cob walls with concrete spells disaster! Around here is mainly cob, which is left unrendered traditionally, and patched as and when needed - but not nowadays. Brittany is famous for being wet, so you have lots of buildings that would be listed in the UK looking like sandcastles with the tide coming in around them. The method as far as I can tell is to patch holes with concrete blocks, put plastic double glazing in, and cover the lot with concrete rendering. Recipe for disaster there, like. Concrete is impermeable to water, so any wet inside the wall can't get out, and instead will turn the wall to mud. Voila - a mud wallow for the pigs where your house should be!
I guess the reaosn is that there are so many places here like this that it's not seen as important to conserve them. The Bretons seem to prefer something modern (i.e. clean, dry and warm!) and are not interested in these old places - maybe because they've grown up with them. In the UK most people are from urban enviroments with bad, boring architecture and want to preserve anything seen as unusual, or of quality, or with some history attached. Hence the National Trust, etc. Their towns are well-preserved on the whole though, and clean as a whistle. No litter, no billboards, hardly any traffic, the old buildings are still used, and not looking like they've been pickled and put on a museum shelf like ours have, and this is the most important thing: buildings are for people, not the other way around.

Off to the Armorica National Park today to see an organic farm, a country house + gite and 2 acres, and a wind-blasted corps de ferme (farm complex) up on t'moors. The first two might break the bank, the latter the spirit. We'll see...