Our house is evolving

I've just read my last post; it was in June! Gosh how time goes by, we're mid-august now and I can't keep up with each day. The year will be over before we know it; leaves dropping from the trees and light dressings of snow seem to be looming. The scariest bit about all that is that we don't have a Kitchen or heat or hot water...really sort of important things for a winter in the middle of rural France where temperatures can drop to below 20. The chickens are already putting themselves to bed earlier than usual and the nights are colder; what will September and October bring?

We have achieved so much with our build; mum and dad arrived just in time for us to concrete the ground floor level of the house. We made a great team; dad & Stu mixed and barrowed, mum and I layed the floor. The first room was a bit dodgy, the second considerably better and the last room was pure genius - we could definitely take it up as a full time profession, in fact I think I might. So after a week of concreting we have a floor with a damp-proof layer BUT it still needs some underfloor heating before another whole layer of screed will be required....god help us.

Our beams are exposed and there are loads of electrics now running through the beams and down the walls giving us light in all the downstairs rooms and 2 bedrooms upstairs. We even decided to get a plasterer in to sort one of our downstairs rooms out, which now looks almost like an actual room....I could put a sofa in it just to make me feel better, but it would be silly really!

Stu has exposed our beautiful fireplace in the Kitchen, he's pointed the chimney breast which is made from red bring and has laid a hearth from large pieces of granite that we pulled up from the floor, it looks fab. Stu and I also concreted his 60sqm workshop in preparation for hot water and heating tanks. That leads me on to us trying to make decisions on our hot water & heating using renewable energy. It's not simple, 3 quotes and 1 meeting in French later and we still can't decide what to do...it's holding us up; the house is crying out for some heat and a finished floor and we're running out of time. It's the first real pressure we've felt. It's a large investment and we don't want to get it wrong, we need a little shove from behind like a child on it's first day at school, a little 'it's ok - you're doing the right thing' type of encouragement.

When our puppy, Red arrived, our world as we knew it ended! He has eyes that make your heart melt and a tale that wags so excitedly that you can't help but smile, however, even though we had read loads of books and watched Cesar Millan we still weren't prepared for how much time this little bundle was going to need. It was a massive challenge for us to start with, we were so focussed on our build and working so hard each day and all of a sudden we had a routine to put in place and someone or something else to think about, it was really hard. He got wayward and started biting, probably because we gave him too much freedom and not enough boundaries - we needed supernanny! We've had him nearly two months now and after some hard work he is so much better, he loves his cuddles in the morning and has learnt lots of tricks... he loves swimming and chasing chickens! He's growing so quickly but doesn't realise how big he is. People in the street love him, the French are a nation of dog-lovers so when we take him to restaurants he generally gets better treatment than we do! We love him and wouldn't change him for the world; I think we're over the shock now and he's settling in as a very important member of the family.

On the animal front, the most exciting thing over the last 2 weeks has been the arrival of some new chicks. I'll write soon with all the beautiful (and the gory) details!

This & That

It's been a while since I've written and as I type now I am sat in an empty bedroom with pink and white flowery wallpaper, wooden floorboards and a marble fireplace looking out through a flaky old window to a view of lush green scenery out on the horizon and down below some chickens trying to take cover from the rain under a large bush. The cockerel looks 'dampened', is that a word? I'm not sure but his feathers hang low and he doesn't look as regal as he usually does. He could simply go into his house and keep warm and dry but I can only assume that as that is not part of his routine usually, he couldn't work out that perhaps just for today, he could in fact make it part of his routine. And why are all the Hens under the bush but the Cockerel isn't? Is he looking after them, making sure that they have shelter before he does? Or perhaps he's a picnic short of a sandwich; I prefer to think that come what may he will be hunter gatherer for his brood and that hopefully when he comes back to the nest they won't be put off by his sodden & bedraggled looks and that they will let him serve them for his efforts.

It's been wet, very wet for quite some time now. Not every day - we have an interlude of sun and when it does come out it's extremely hot, but the common theme during most weeks seems to be a downpour of magnificent proportions - not just a light shower, this is serious rain. Obviously we do have the rain to thank for all the wonderful lush greenery around but come on - this is June, it's summer isn't it and we decided not to move to Wales or Scotland because it rained too much! Have we made a catastrophic mistake? It would be the law of sod that each time I check the weather forecast for England, there seems to be sun. I'm sure when I lived in England the sun was always in Limoges and the rain was just outside the window. I could be at the British Hearth Foundation now sweltering in a British Summer and chatting to all the old dears buying their Mills & Boon about how Britain has never known a summer like it. Oh well, for now I will enjoy letting the rain do the job of watering the garden and bringing on my lettuces and runner beans and in August I'll gloat that we are in the pool when the British Summer has already come to an end and the beginning of a new school term is just around the corner.

Since I last wrote we've had two sets of visitors. The first was my dad who arrived just before his birthday at the end of May. Seeing as he was filling his retirement with silly little things like racing round Nurburgring in exciting fast cars, doing charity work and having lots of social engagements booked up each weekend I decided to give him a job. He is now Head of Electrics at Muck to Merlot, Chez Watson, France. The job is a grand one and I won't hear anything to the contrary - although he was on site by 8am every morning, didn't leave til around 10pm most nights, worked a 6 day week and had a team that consisted of him, him and him - he was fed and watered impeccably (other than the odd 2 Euro bottle of plonk which didn't really go down that well), he had his washing and ironing done for him and of course the company was great. The electrics have come on leaps and bounds, most importantly the old fuse box with furry little cables, with no earth whatsoever is now pretty much out of action and we have a shiny new plastic fuse board up on the wall with loads of wires going off here there and everywhere - it looks great! I have a washing maching and a fridge which has made my life considerably easier and we even have light - such a simple thing we take for granted, but we can in fact now see which walls we are knocking down and which should be left. Phew!

We celebrated dad's birthday on the 30th with two new arrivals - Kat & Ben. They drove down like the proper townies that they are (& we almost used to be) in their BMW Coupe, armed with posh wellies and an even posher BBQ. They did the journey in record time and arrived early enough for us to cart them off to the local campsite for their first shower in France as we were one nut & bolt away from sorting out our plumbing and all the shops were shut on Sunday - so we had a night of no shower. We baked a cake and had a feast from the barbie and sang Happy Birthday to dad, it was a lovely social evening and our first proper gathering in our new home. Kat & Ben tucked in that night to the tent in our front field, which Kat described as 'Glamping' rather than Camping as they had a full double bed, base, mattress the lot, table & Chairs, kettle, tea and even a heater wired from the house. They said they wouldn't use it as they liked to rough it a little more than that, but I'm pretty sure it was on by night two! They were fantastic, they stripped wallpaper, cut down trees and moved huge boulders from the barn floor - they worked like trojans followed up each night by a meal outside with a fire going next to us. Good friends, good food & good chats; it was over all too quickly as by the Thursday they were back to boring things like work, paying the mortgage..you know - stuff like that. The best bit was that we didn't put them off and they have already booked to come back and we can't wait.

Head of Electrics still had another week before his return home, which was great because there was lots more to do not only with the electrics but he also stepped in to help with other jobs. We put a gate up in preparation for our puppy, and also had to whack out all of the ground level floors with a deadline for the machine hire. Each time Stu and I reached the point of not being able to dig anymore, dad did a stint on the machine - we all spent most of that week still shaking when we went to bed and having to unfold each limb out of bed the next morning. Still we did get the machine back on time and we have kept to our schedule of digging all floors up. By the end of the week we were all pretty shattered, but we needed to find enough energy to collect a beautiful little puppy and go to a local party before dad went home.

Chickens

The farmyard gets bigger….

The following day we had some more animals to collect; only this time we were far less aware of what we were doing. We had found another English couple an hour away who were breeding birds, some as layers and others as meat – Stu had spoken to them and agreed to have a trio of one Cockerel and two Hens. When we arrived we met Jill first, she was a well dressed lady – didn’t look like a Chicken Farmer at all. We sat in the sun having a cup of tea whilst their ducks wandered past us, the Jack Russell fought for our attention and the Geese made lots of noise in the background. Jeff also sat with us and talked about their life in France and their kids in the UK, how prices had gone up and it was because of the English. As we were talking, I guess he was summing us up in his mind because he decided to bring out some ducklings and gave us a ‘gentle sell’ to try and get rid of some birds. I gave the little thing a cuddle as he looked at me making a funny squeaky noise. He was cute and I loved the idea of some ducklings, but I wasn’t as confident as I was with the kittens and felt that we were already in deeper than we could swim so we should take small steps. I gave him back saying that although we did want ducks this was something we would leave for a while. Jeff took us over to the three birds we had agreed to buy; they were waiting in a very small cage for us. We looked them over as though we knew what we should be looking for, I just saw feet that reminded me of dinosaurs, beaks that looked like they could be painful, a few feathers tufting out on the Cockerel - was their such a thing as ‘tufty feather disease’, perhaps I should be taking this salesman up on my findings, or maybe I’ll just stay quiet in case it’s nothing. We told him we were happy with them and he said he’d show us the rest of his Bird Fleet. We walked up to a dusty area, where we had lots of long pens built from a simple wooden frame and chicken wire attached to one another. The first pen had a Cockerel in it that looked four times as big as it should be, I would have been scared if it had come anywhere near me. The second had some beautiful beige birds – Buff Orpingtons I think they were. I liked them; they were pretty and fairly small. The next pen had quite a few birds in it and they were all pecking at a dead hen, I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t take my eyes off them. How could they be doing that to one of their own? It wasn’t a pretty sight. He moved us on and showed us a few birds that he recommended would be good for us, but I was nervous. Stu and I agreed that we should go home with three and come back another time for some more. We paid our 50 Euros, he put them in a box for us and off we went with our Chickens in the boot. When we arrived home we put them into the house Stu had built for them and put some food down in their little garden area, they pecked around and seemed fairly happy with their surroundings. A little later I was working in the house and I heard a cry of excitement from outside, I ran out only to find Sash looking at me with a big grin on her face – I ran over to the chicken house and she told me to look inside. It was our first egg. Not any old egg either; it was the first bit of produce from our farm, a beautiful warm egg, a blue egg. That night, we decided we better put the Chickens into the house ourselves to show them the night time drill. This seemed like a good idea at first – Sash headed up the team as we talked tactics before entering the Chicken garden. I had a broom, sash had a stick and Karen and Stu just made themselves big with their arms stretched out. We all walked slowly, following Sash’s commands herding the Chickens towards their house; they didn’t like us and they definitely didn’t want to be anywhere near us. Just as we thought we had them close they applied their own tactics similar to the Red Arrows darting off in different directions, just testing how agile we really were. We weren’t as agile as them. The evening went on and the situation didn’t change, the birds outsmarted us every time. Finally Karen, driven by tiredness and a no desire whatsoever to spend the entire night trying to put these birds to bed, mustered up some sort of inner strength and focus to catch a bird. She went for it, cornering the Hen getting two hands around her belly and not letting go as she flapped her wings and struggled, she got her over to the house and in she went. One down, two to go. She didn’t stop there; surprised by her own skills she went on to do the same with the second Hen, only this time Karen did scream a bit but we managed to get the Hen inside before bursting into a fit of laughter. A camera would have been ideal and £250 would have been coming our way from ‘You’ve been Framed’. Just the Cockerel left and he was a much scarier proposition, plus he had found an area behind a building which was difficult for us to get to. Sash and I got into the undergrowth and tried to move him back where we wanted him but in his bid for freedom he flapped his wings so hard that he managed to get over the fence and was heading through the Lilac bush towards our tent in the front field. This wasn’t good, 6 acres and we could have been chasing him all night long. Sash and I shouted to Stu to get round the other side of the Lilac bush and he, like Karen was now at the point of ‘do or die’; the Cockerel needed to get safely into his house so we could go into ours. Stu climbed through stinging nettles and brambles and finally caught the bird, he flapped and squawked but Stu held on tightly and got him back round to the Chicken garden and safely into his house. We locked the door and laughed at ourselves praying that the Chickens would learn to go to bed on their own before too much longer.

Marble & Scamp

We’ve arrived.

After a very long journey towing the tractor we finally arrived at our new home on Sunday 16th May. We travelled with Stu’s Mum - Karen and Sister - Sasha and we were all tired by the time we arrived. We had two car loads and the tractor to unload and dinner to think about, which all seemed too much for me at 5pm having left the UK at 4am and driven straight through with no driver swaps. The tractor started straight away so we had some fun and cut the back field. Stu had the first go of course and it ran like a dream, he dropped his hydraulics at the back lowering the topper to the ground and then selected first gear, gave it some revs and with a few chugs, off he went. Then Sasha had a go, she sat on Stu’s lap and steered Percy up and down the field with a huge grin on her face. It was my turn next, and call me controversial but I just can’t stand all those perfectly straight lines up and down the field, so as soon as Stu stepped away, I twisted and turned all over the field making circles and zig zags everywhere, Stu was shaking his head at me, but I was quite amused! Then Sash had a go on her own, Stu took great pleasure in showing her how everything worked before she zoomed off round the field – enjoying the idea that zig zags are the new straight line. We made it to Macdonalds at 9pm, it was all we could manage.

On Monday we had a Kitten to collect – his name is Marble and we had heard about him through an internet site. These kittens were free to a good home and they had one grey & white one left, which we thought sounded lovely, so we agreed to come and take him off their hands. We arrived at a typical French Farmhouse and a very pretty welcoming lady was outside gardening and waving madly at us. Her name is Jenny and she used to breed Birmans in the UK, unfortunately her beautiful pure bred Birman had it off with the local Farmer’s black and white moggie and she was stuck with a load of kittens to deal with. She welcomed us into her home where we found 4 beautiful kittens curled up on the sofa. Three of them were black and hard to tell apart, the fourth was Marble who stood out with his lovely grey and white coat and piercing blue eyes. Jenny offered us all coffee and we sat and chatted about her life and how she ended up in France; so many stories to hear from so many people searching for something more just like us. Jenny seemed lonely though, she smiled as she chatted about her home, her cats and her friends, but I felt she was missing something in her life. We played with the kittens who had slowly woken up as we chatted – Marble was funny playing with various toys around the sofas and coming up on to our laps every now and then for a cuddle. I had a black kitten in my lap who laid fast asleep for almost the whole time we were there, another kitten stayed curled up on the sofa and didn’t enjoy being picked up. The last kitten was busy playing, being cuddled and looking after his brothers cleaning them. Sash liked him, she said he was a good natured kitten and that it was a good sign he was cleaning the others. He was pure black with white markings underneath that looked like he was wearing a bikini. Needless to say Marble was packed into the cat box with a brother by his side, the kitten temporarily named ‘Kini’ came home with us too and it didn’t take us long to realise that ‘Scamp’ was a much more appropriate name for such a lively inquisitive kitten. The brothers have taken to farmyard life very well; they love the long grass and all the barns to explore. They use the litter tray even though we’ve moved it a couple of times and they sleep all night long snuggled up together in their bed. They entertain us and talk to us and give us lots of cuddles; we love having them as part of our family.

The deal is signed...the house is ours...

Wow - October 2009 since I last wrote, how time flys when you're having fun! I thought I would put a quick update out there for everyone as today is officially our last day in the UK, I've stripped the bed, tidied the bathroom, emptied the wardrobe, packed the car and it finally feels as though we are clearing out giving both sets of parents their space back - garden space, garage space, store space, spare bedroom space, dining room table space...hmmm it's amazing how much space two people can take up now I come to think of it!

So, most of you will know the story of October 2009 to now, so here it is in a nutshell. When I last wrote we were coming home for Christmas happy in the knowledge that it was just a matter of time before our new house would be ours. There were complications, but we thought that was just par for the course of what a difficult experience buying a house in France is supposed to be. However, sometime in February we decided enough was enough and we really needed to push for a completion date or we may never get into the house. Having been more than laid back up until that point, a little push didn't seem so bad, but the moment we did the Vendor freaked out, she didn't have enough time to get her belongings out...urrr September to February - we thought we'd given her reasonable time, she was stressed, worried...she didn't want to sell. I opened an extremely apologetic and sympathetic email from our agent saying that she wouldn't sell to us and there was nothing we could do about it. February 2010 and we were back to where we were in February 2009...at the beginning - a very worrying place to be.

It took us about 24 hours to stop crying and panicking and to resume fighting position and come up with a plan B, which turned out to be quite a fun plan. We bought Bertha, a double bed, roomy lounge area, tight but perfectly efficient bathroom, lovely hot water and a little kitchen....we were in unknown territory...the forecourt of a caravan dealership. As sales people ourselves, buying things doesn't normally fluster us, but this most certainly did. With £2000 cash as our budget we had to choose from the 'Bargain Basement' section of the forecourt - but a bargain we did find. After a few laughs (from the salemen) when we thought he was talking about a foot pump not a water pump, we finally did a deal and 3 days later collected our new home. Our friends found it just as novel as us and after turning mum's dining room into a sweatshop we did a quick re-fit of the cushion covers and were in France 3 days after that.

Here comes the good bit, we went with 15 viewings booked, on day 1 we saw a couple of ok properties on day 2 in the morning we found out that 2 things we wanted to see had already sold, which worried us slightly - suddenly the middle of rural France had a fast paced property market that seemingly we couldn't keep up with. On day 2 in the afternoon, the agent presented us with a property that we weren't booked to see and we both fell in love. It was the one, and we both knew it straight away. We negotiated and agreed a price on day 3 and unbelievably signed the Compromis de Vente (an exchange) on day 5. So buying a house in France didn't need to be difficult after all, in fact it was so easy that we knew it was all meant to be.

Our property in Vervaux, St. Priest La Plaine, has more land than the last one, just as much building potential for gites, is far more private with a nice driveaway off of the road and is brimming full of established trees, little garden areas and rolling countryside everywhere you look. It is also closer to the motorway and to Limoges Airport. The owners are lovely and so pleased that we bought it, they want to come back to see what we've done with the place. It all feels right. We submitted our 'CU' for change of use on a couple of the barns in preparation for gite renovation in the future and came straight back to the UK to start planning the build and embarking on getting all of our wordly belongings over to France.

March and most of April passed and then we had the good news that the planning was all positive and the owners were keen to sign the deeds over before they went on holiday. And so a couple of trips in hired trucks and a meeting with the Notaire later, we are the proud owners of a new home, significantly poorer in money but much richer in hope and dreams that can finally be realised.

Our internet is not set up in France yet, but I will update you as and when I can.

A Bientot
xxx