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………