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Unimproved properties
Improvements under way
Cath & Doug Smith
La Tronchaise thesmiths@latronchaise.fr
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Photo GalleryIn the pages accessible from this section of our website we tell you the story of our 'French Adventure' in words and pictures. We hope that you find it interesting. Pages will be updated and added-to on an on-going basis. In the year 2002 an unexpected allocation of two extra days holiday allowed us to bolt an extra week onto our French summer holiday. But what should we do with this windfall week? It was not a difficult decision, we decided to spend the week looking at property. We looked at between 3 and 6 properties every day, but none of them were suitable - too small, no garden, near a busy road, too expensive or just too decrepit! On Thursday, we turned up for our afternoon appointment at Oradour sur Vayres, only to find that the local estate agent was not expecting us and was already with another client. 'Don't go', he said, 'my wife has no clients this afternoon so she could show you our properties - the only problem is that her English is not very good when it comes to technical building terms'. We were just pleased to be seeing some more properties so we set of with Françoise - whose English is excellent! The first two houses were not suitable. Françoise told us that the other house didn't really fit the description of what we wanted, but she would take us to see it anyway if we didn't mind going with her to pick up her daughter from school first! School run over, we set off to visit the last property. Françoise tells us that our faces said it all! We fell in love with it immediately. We signed the compromis de vente that evening and then continued on for our holiday in Perpignan. The exchange of contracts was set for later in the year and we arranged to return for the ceremonial handover at the offices of the notaire. We returned to our property in September. The first time we had seen our purchase since that evening in June when we had spent 3/4 hour viewing it. The remainder of the summer had been spent poring over the 2 or 3 digital photos we had taken. When we saw it again we couldn't believe how big it was, and the enormity of the task we had set ourselves. The barns were huge and full of junk, although, sadly, not the car that had been parked there when we viewed! We met our near neighbours - a very friendly couple in their seventies. The only task we could realistically achieve in the time we had to spend there during that holiday was to measure everything so we could prepare some plans for future work. We measured anything that didn't move, and a few things that did! We took levels all over the garden, putting in wooden pegs that we would continue to trip over for the foreseeable future as the lawn turned into jungle-worthy undergrowth. Finally we went to visit the two areas of woodland that we had purchased with the property. One was small and accessible, the other was bigger and much less accessible. We struggled across ditches and hacked our way through brambles without much success. This wood would have to wait! Our neighbour offered to graze his small flock of sheep on our erstwhile lawn, and in so doing saved us the expense of finding someone to cut it when we were not there. After 10 days we returned to England to draw up our plans for the buildings and our future. |
