The Loire.
The Loire.
COMMENT
Below and on the following pages are a few of my observations on buying and owning a house in France. Generally I regarded the whole experience to be a great adventure & even the few negative experiences have been part of that adventure. It is good fun to practise and to improve your French, and I have found the French people to be very friendly. If you are just starting out on your own adventure, I hope the information on this site will be of some help.
THE LIST
If there was one thing that I had to recommend to anyone engaged in buying a house in France, it would be this. Before you go, make a list of your criteria, consult it while you're there, and try to stick to it. This will help you to remain objective whilst viewing. We made a list of two parts. The first part contained our absolute criteria such as maximum price, driving time from the nearest ferry port, structural condition, and location, and the second part contained features we would like to have but that we didn't consider to be crucial. By sticking to the list we ended up rejecting some properties that we fell in love with but which would have been an absolute nightmare as a restoration project, and bought a property that we hadn't been immediately attracted to but which had matched our list exactly. The list kept us from letting our heart rule our head.
THE
FRENCH PLUMBER
We had booked a French plumber to come and fix the immersion heater in our house in France as we had no hot water. Despite repeated phone calls, he arrived 3 days later than we had arranged. We were only there for a week and stayed in for those three days in case we missed him so we were quite annoyed. After he had fixed it, it lasted for a day & then broke down again. The next time we were in France, we booked him to come back to fix it. This time he arrived a day early, fixed it again, and presented us with a cheque for 50 euros saying that he had overcharged us last time by mistake, "It happens all the time monsieur". It lasted for a day & then broke down again. The next time we were over I decided to relax into the French way of doing things. I booked him to come back, put a note on the door telling him to go in and do his work, and we went out whenever we wanted and simply left the door unlocked. Coming back from the bar one night we met him driving down the hill in his van. This time he had fixed it and it stayed fixed.
TIP
If you buy a house in France by law you must have building insurance in place the moment the property passes into your possession, it is sometimes possible to take over the cover from the Vendor rather than starting from scratch.
ANIMAL TALES FROM FRANCE
My wife came back from the shop one evening in some excitement saying she had seen an otter in the river. Later we met Madame, our neighbour who speaks no English, and told her about it. We call her Madame even though she has told us her name, it just seems to suit her so well. Madame immediately rushed off to get a book, (she has a book for every occasion), and from our description finally picked out what she said the animal must be. We then looked in our French English dictionary and were perplexed to discover that my wife had seen a racoon! Either our French is much worse than we feared or Madame knows something about France that has eluded us. I have since seen the creature, and whilst I couldn't swear it was an otter, it is definitely not a racoon.
One of the delights of our summer breaks in the house in France is waking up in the morning and seeing the house martins swooping in from the valley towards the house and, at the last moment, just when it seems they must come crashing through the window, they wheel to one side and swoop back out over the valley.
