A decisive week

We had a few days to relax before a busy Wednesday with 2 viewings booked. Our first viewing on Wednesday was at 10am back in Cessac near La Souterraine where we had previously viewed the house from the outside and decided it was a contender and we wanted to see more. Cessac is a good hour and a half away from our little gite in the Correze, so to err on the side of caution, we left just after 7.30am. Our bodies were not used to the early start, waking up in darkness seemed truly strange, we had a quick bowl of cereal and made a flask of coffee to help us come round to some sort of wide-awake normality by the time we met the agent.

We pulled up at the house 15 minutes early and so stretched our legs and had another look over the land. Very quiet. Very peaceful. Beautiful views. It was calming. Eventually our agent pulled up with a very small old man sat in the passenger seat. He was under 5 foot, wore dark blue trousers that looked like the bottom half of a cheap boiler suit, an old brown shirt with navy blue jumper over the top, a hat (of course), not a beret but a flat cap and had a walking stick - not rubber-end-handle-nicely-sawn-and-vanished type of walking stick, more of a found-it-in-the-woods-and-chopped-the-end-off kind of walking stick. We shook his hand and said 'Bonjour Monsieur' as politely as we could, his face was weathered but he gave us a very kind smile. Our agent told us that he had a very traditional accent that stemmed from Spain and that he rolled his r's so much she could barely understand him. He staggered around the land using his stick to help him and showed us in and out of the house and the millions of barns, garages and cellars moving the cobwebs out of the way with the end of his stick so we didn't get dirty. When we got to the orchards we all stopped and picked plums from the trees for a quick snack; they were delicious.

The downside to the house was that it had a small lane running in front of it and the same at the back, so all the land was off to one side and you really wanted to just simply swivel the house 90 degrees...hmmm if only it were that easy! You entered the house through a central door and on your left there was a big kitchen with huge fireplace and small utility space with a sink and larder beyond that, to the right was a lounge with a fireplace that had been concealed but each end of the stone mantel was still poking out from the wall, next to that a small bedroom that would be better opened up to make a larger lounge. At the back there was a loo and shower before you went up the stairs to 2 bedrooms and another room that was untouched but which had a ladder up to the huge loft space. It had potential but a few walls would need to be moved to get there! The house was attached to a huge barn and another small house which would make great gite potential. Opposite the house was another huge barn with a small parcel of land next to it. The rest of the land went off to the side of the main house with another small barn, what would have been a walled vegetable garden, an orchard, a field and then over the lane another plot for animals. It had everything we could have wanted. The best bit was it was 40,000 euros cheaper than the house we really loved.

We went on from there to another viewing which was a dead loss and then finished the hour and half journey home discussing the pros and cons of our first love versus this cheaper option that offered us more land and just as much possibility for much less money. It didn't matter how much we talked about it, we both felt instinctively that we loved 'our first love' more.

When we got home we decided to put pen to paper and finalise all of our costs and seriously consider putting an offer in on this house we obviously loved so much. The result was a bit too much for either of us to bare. It was clear that we had let our hearts rule our heads and even at the price reduction we could only really afford to buy the house with little budget for renovation and certainly no money left over to get a business up and running and feed ourselves too. We had to agree that this property was still out of our reach and we needed to take a good hard look at our situation to make sure we were viewing properties that were genuine contenders. We weren't happy.

When we woke up the next morning, we both had a slightly more positive view on things. We could move on from all this undecisiveness and start viewing things that were the right for us and that made us feel good. Also we realised that to make our business brilliant we had to have the right budget behind us, I got on with my business plan in the early hours of the morning and then we spent the afternoon in Limoges window shopping in a busy town with lots of young trendy people. We sauntered in and out of shoe shops and clothes shops, really trendy expensive ones dreaming over Ed Hardy t-shirts and Harley Davidson biker boots. We looked at books and bought birthday cards, we popped into the post office and ran some errands. It helped us, we had a lovely afternoon in the city sun; a small injection of 'normality', it was just what the doctor ordered.