3. Let The Search Begin

Part 2 - Where in France.
So how did we decide which region of France we were going to look at. The places we’d been to already were OK, but as I said earlier, nothing really grabbed us.
The choice was made very Simply.
I was doing an evening class in GCSE French at a local college at the time and one of my fellow strugglers had an old friend that had moved to a small village in the Lot et Garonne dept and worked at an Immobilier’s in the principal town of Agen. Perfect ! an English speaking estate agent. We’ll have a look there, I convinced Christine.
So we booked another Jolly and in September 2005 we stayed in a very comfortable Gite near the Bastide village of Beauville, not Far from Agen.
The countryside was very much like home. Not arid and hot, like Languedoc, or too built up and touristy like Nice and a damned sight warmer than Brittany. Yes this part of France was very pleasant. My GCSE French was just about sufficient to ask for the menu at a restaurant and we all quite enjoyed the sign language at the local supermarket and Boulangerie. Yes, this was real France and the culture was very different. Almost without exception every person we met was as warm as the climate and showed heroic patience with my wild gesticulations. I enjoyed the interaction and Christine and the children enjoyed watching me, even more.
But we were here to look for that lovely old ruin to restore , with an asking price around 50,000€, so many other Brits go hunting for.
But wait. Where were all the ideal “Résidence À rénover” we’d seen in the magazines and brochures before we came out here ?. We visited all the Immobiliers in the area and viewed several properties over the course of the holiday and the suspicions I’d had, before we arrived, were founded, that the French property market had risen quite sharply over recent years and there weren’t as many of those “something for nothing” opportunities left.
Ever the optimist, I decided that we would just have to settle for a nice plot of land ( I knew that land prices were still much more affordable in France than back home) and then we would do another self-build, when we could afford it. It would be an investment for the future. After all we had almost completed one self-build in the UK, surely it couldn’t be too different over in France ( Sometimes, eternal optimists just don’t know what they’re letting themselves in for ! ) And so the quest for the idyllic plot of land on which to build our “Maison Secondaire commenced………

2. A Sea of Sunflowers - A self-Build diary

Part 1 - The sowing of a seed.
Christine (my wife) and I, enjoyed taking our two young children, Christopher and Kimberley on holiday to a variety of different locations, some in this country and some abroad. We first went to France when Chris was 4yrs and Kim 2yrs of age. Being a young couple we scraped together enough pennies to stay in a mobile home on the Brittany coast and despite 10 days of almost continuous drizzle, we enjoyed ourselves enough to return a few years later when we were a little more extravagant, staying in a hotel in the centre of Nice. The following year another visit introduced us to the Carcassone area of the Languedoc. By now we were starting to “get the French bug “ a little. But , despite some really lovely places, none of the areas we had visited, quite “floated our boat”.
Sometime during the Summer of 2005, a friend of mine just mentioned in passing, that a friend of a friends brothers, aunties sister -in-laws cousin, twice removed (or was that three times removed) Anyway, someone somewhere owned a property in the Gers, that required some renovation and it was supposedly for sale. To cut a long story short, it had already been sold. This however, sowed a tiny seed, somewhere deep inside my grey matter and I started considering the possibility of a renovation project in France. We were nearing the completion of our “Dream home“ self-build project here in the UK and Christine knew I wouldn’t be able to sit still for very long, before getting “ants in my pants” and looking for something else to immerse myself in, so to speak.
I started buying various French property magazines, then books about the property buying system in France and before I knew it we had booked a holiday in September with the intention of having a damn good look at a particular region to see if this new crazy idea of mine was worth pursuing (I think Christine was secretly hoping, or possibly praying, that it might just be one of those phases I was going through. A bit like the phase I went through when I decided a self-build project would be a good idea in the UK. And look what happened there !).

1. What's this Blog all about then ?

My wife and I recently bought some land in France, had a house built on it and now rent it out as a Holiday Home. Here's a photo of it.

I have set this Blog up to share our experiences with others. There are apparently 10's of 1000's of UK folk (as we still are) that are seriously thinking about doing what we have done and I wish to pass on our experiences to others, so that they might benefit, if and when, they commence their own adventure. In return, I'm hoping to link up with those more experienced than we are in running a Holiday let, so that we might improve the service that we offer to our guests and also learn more about the beautiful region of South-West France. You can ask me questions about our experience if you like, by posting your comments, or for a speedier response, email me through our website. I would like to get some really good chatting going on within this Blog and hear all sorts of views and opinions, which can include anything to do with France. Ask me a question or tell me about your experiences. Our website is http://www.valmargite.com/.
Feel free to go and have a look. You will find lots of info about our gite as well as other stuff about activities in the Lot-et-Garonne dept and Tourist Information for the region.

I have broken our "story so far" down into different posts, so you can jump around to the bits you fancy. There are also lots of links to other places/people we've come across so you can also disappear elsewhere if you wish. Go back to the top of the page now and select which part of the story you'd like to read from the menu on the right. To read the full story from the very beginning, just expand the individual month buttons and start at post No 1. and work your way through.

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Thanks for visiting my blog.

Regards

Ray