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 !).