5. A visit to the Notaires

Part 4 - Rules are not for breaking !
I returned back to base and excitedly told Christine of my discovery. I dragged the rest of the family to the plot and after agreeing with my superlatives about my discovery, Christine and I found ourselves at the Notaires office the following day. We were under the impression that we were just going to find out a little more about the land etc. To our surprise "The Vendors of the land" met us at the office. What was all this about ?, we just wanted to know a bit more about the land, not get into great discussions - “Nothing heavy !”.
We discovered during the meeting (with an interpreter present) that, although planning permission (Permis de construire & a CU) was in existence, it expired at the end of the year, i.e in less than twelve weeks time and that no more development for that particular area was going to be permitted after that date. In effect the area was going to become what is know in the UK as “Greenbelt“. This meant that if we were interested in purchasing the land, we would have to apply for, and have approved, our own plans for the type of house we wanted built on the site - before the end of the year. (The plans the current owners had drawn up were for a very grand affair and simply beyond our budget).
Annie, as ever, was very helpful (well she would be of course, she had a vested interest here - 5,000€ commission !). She recommended the architect of the builder she had used, to have her own house built.
Now let’s just look at what we were facing here:-
We basically had about four weeks to have plans for a house drawn up and submitted, so that the DDE (the french equivalent of the UK planning dept) had sufficient time to peruse them, all in a language we didn’t understand by far, by people we did not know and had not been recommended, not to mention all the golden rules that I knew should not be broken like,
1) Always get everything written down and translated into your own language by someone independent.
2) Use professionals that you have carefully researched, preferably who have been recommended by others.
3) Visit the area you intend buying in a number of times, particularly in winter or off season.
4) Don‘t make decisions on the spot
5) Think with your head, not your heart , to name but a few.
We left the Notaires office and returned to our accommodation to try and get our heads around what was being presented to us. I spent the afternoon number crunching (or more simply put - pressing buttons on my calculator) and speaking to our financial adviser on the “Dog and Bone” and after doing the maths :-
“Christine, you know, we can actually afford to go ahead with this“ I exclaimed, hoping that I’d not missed something critical in the calcs! “We can afford to build a modest house of about 100sq metres“. (It was only going to be a holiday home, so 2 bedrooms would be sufficient).
She basically put her trust in my mental arithmetic ability and we decided we would revisit the notaires office the following day and find out more……………..