… for which there is no direct English translation, but it is kind of means a strike to the heart, ie: something that makes a big impression on you, something that you fall for. Well, I just had one. I have not been enjoying the act of house-hunting at all so far. Because of the bizarre vagaries of the French property market, it is the buyer and not the seller who ends up paying the estate agents’ fees. Quite how this can be justified is beyond me – the seller gets all the service; all the agents do for the buyer is display the place for sale on their website. For this, they expect to receive a mammoth 6% of the property price. Not bloody likely!
Unfortunately, cutting those blood-thirsty swines out the equation massively limits the number of places you can view, so it has been very hard going: hours of searching, driving round, emailing mairies and all with very little to show for it. However, we may have just struck gold. Quite some time back, Matt stumbled on a place for sale not too far from where we are now, on the outskirts of a tiny village called Champeau. He contacted the seller, an English lady, and she replied to say that a friend had recently moved in on a temporary basis and, what with the poor state of the market, she was going to take the place off the market for the time being. Truly bizarre logic, there. Matt wrote back to her to point out that it surely can’t be a good idea to turn away interested buyers on the grounds that you are having a hard time finding interested buyers and this seems to have done the trick. We had to wait a little while for the current lodger to return from a holiday before we were able to go and view it, which we finally did, this afternoon – and I am completely sold on it. It is the only place we have viewed that we can actually afford outright (though we will of course haggle as best we can to get the price down further), it has a lot of land, is in a very quiet area, and the house itself is very lovely. 16th Century, lots of character, 2 large double bedrooms (one with a beautiful fireplace), 2 bathrooms, a more-or-less decently sized kitchen, and possibly best of all, it is totally furnished. Having rented all these years, we have never accumulated any furniture, and we were expecting that we would be starting off with a load of cheap, nasty, Ikea-esque furnishings, but this place has some really lovely wooden tables, cupboards, sideboards etc, decent beds…. it’s good to go!
It isn’t perfect: we wanted a place with a barn that we could expand into in the fullness of time… and there is one on the grounds, but it is owned by someone else. In fact, the set-up is really quite odd: the original property was huge, but has been divided into the barn (plus 2 small rooms), a holiday home section, owned by 2 Parisians, who apparently are rarely ever there, and then the rest that we just saw. We can’t imagine that anyone would want to buy the barn on its own: it is for sale for something like €66,000, needs work, and has only a small amount of land. We wouldn’t be able to afford it for quite some time, but if it stayed vacant until we could that would be fantastic. On the other hand, if some odious tit bought it, we would be stuck with them right under our noses. Not a pretty thought.
The other downside is that there is a neighbouring house literally a few metres away, occupied full-time by an English family. Yep, family -as in horrible little brats running around the place. It is a testament to how much I liked the place that even this is not enough to put me off. Matt is very keen on it as well, though not as much as me, I think. If the barn was part of the deal, he would be totally sold too, but as it stands, it does add some uncertainty to it all. We both have limited experience at the whole house-buying thing, especially out here, so aren’t too sure how to start the bidding, but I am going to get some fatherly advice shortly.
In other news, our friend Iain Clarke is coming out for a long weekend tomorrow, which we are really looking forward to as it has been very quiet and (for me) very boring lately. He has gotten lucky with the weather too – it was originally due to be cool and rainy the whole time, but the forecast has been revised and we can now expect some sunshine and temps in the mid-20s. Much more civilised. More news soon…