Sat in the UK looking at properties for sale in France on the internet you create an image in your head of some potentially fabulous homes. Often they are larger than you could afford in the UK, or they have lots of land, a well, barns and so much more. The reality when you view these properties is often very different as we discovered. ‘In need of renovation’ often means there is no electricity, if you are lucky there may be an outside toilet, usually no drainage and sometimes no roof!
In France the estate agent usually takes you to visit properties in their own car. One of the first we viewed was a huge town house. The lived-in area was most bizarre. As most of the house was falling down the owners lived in the barn. They had created a little home inside the barn. It had plasterboard walls, a low ceiling and two or three separate rooms but then when you walked out a side door from the kitchen you were literally inside a barn! The house itself was enormous but on reaching the second floor it was impossible to go any further as the floor was collapsing, it resembled the roller-coaster track at Alton Towers! We did venture into the cellar, the floor was nothing but rubble and you could see higher up where there had been other floors at a previous time. Half way up the wall in one part was a fireplace with a date above it – 1156.
In one house we found the owners false leg on the side. In another, the top floor had been newly converted into three bedrooms with stud partition walls leaving each room so small you probably couldn’t fit a bed in any of them.
One of our favourites was an old stone house with an architecturally important oval barn, something quite distinct to this region. The owner was called Monsieur Poulet which was quite appropriate as there were chickens walking around in the kitchen, there were even chickens on the dining table and cages scattered around which were full of young chicks!
We enquired about the bathroom which was probably a mistake. It was in the cellar accessed by a ladder. Once down there it had a stone and mud floor with a pile of brieze blocks on which was proudly sat a very kitsch ornately painted floral Spanish ceramic sink. We didn’t dare inspect the toilet too closely.
By this time we had, I am sure, made our mind up about the property, especially as the architecturally important barn, which was undoubtedly far nicer then the house, turned out to need a new roof and half the walls were falling down. Further to this, the estate agent informed us Monsieur Poulet had sold off half the land but kept the asking price of the property the same. Being polite English people we decide to finish the tour. The grand finale was the newly converted separate building which had formerly housed the bread oven. Monsieur was extremely proud of this conversion with it’s double bedroom. On entering it soon became obvious that the ground floor contained nothing but a ladder in the centre leading up through a ceiling hatch. Obviously Monsieur Poulet considered that ladders, rather than staircases, may be the new up and coming trend.
On climbing the ladder we discovered that the new double bedroom consisted of two single bed size areas of floor either side of the ceiling hatch. Needless to say we didn’t buy it!
Next time we will tell you how we found our house…..a bientot!