ONCE UPON A TIME - part 2

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly you need a healthy dose of imagination when undertaking a project like this. My wife had the ability to see through the grime and rubble and visualise what it could be like. Before lifting a hammer she had already decided the colour of the drapes! I'm not blessed with as much insight. To be honest I wasn't sure about the place at all - but then I could see the enormity of what we had committed to. The one redeeming factor is that wine is cheap, it dulls the pain at the end of a hard day, and fills you with optimism!



(This photo of the Courty family and friends was taken in 1933 during work raising the height of the adjoining barn and re-roofing the main farmhouse. When the war came, parts of the farm would be home to French refugees displaced by the Germans. Farming was always a very precarious existance in this region. Two world wars also took a heavy toll on the populatoion of the Limousin and by the 1950's the farm itself was deserted. It remained - alone and uninhabited until two English idiots arrived in 1998 and saw something that was worth saving!)


Another word of advice - don't undertake something like this unless your relationship is rock solid. Ours has been for 28 years but during the last four years of working on the property it has been stretched at times. When we signed the contract on the house we had a "clause tontine" inserted, which essentially gets around France's onerous inheritance laws. But don't do this unless your marriage is absolutely stable - the complications which crop up should you divorce are enough to give you sleepless nights!

Finally, always view properties during the winter months if possible. It's essential to see these properties at their very worst. It is unbelievable how enticing a place can look during the spring and summer. The photograph below was on our second visit and I hardly recognised the place from the dismal ruin that I saw on the misty, overcast, day when we first visited.
Basking in the winter sunshine, the property looks inviting but be objective: the garden is nowhere to be seen, hiding under 50 years of weeds and bramble. Ok the roofs look good, and the walls solid, but the woodworm have been having a free meal for half a century! Do not underestimate (in terms of time and money) just how much work is going to be involved. The only cast-iron certainty is that it will be much, much more than you initially thought.



Would we do it again? Certainly NOT! Do we regret a moment of it? NEVER! It was a combination of circumstances which occur once in a lifetime. To be offered early retirement at EXACTLY the point when we were daydreaming about this project and, at 50, still young enough to undertake the work ourselves; to get a quick sale on our UK property at EXACTLY the time when the market was right,; to be able to buy here just before the prices really started moving; and to just happen to be on our second bottle of wine on one of those rare, sultry, English summer evenings when we made our decision. Some things in life are simply meant to be, this was one of them.