9. A Year On !

Well, it's now September 2008 and more than a year since we had the "Mad Mad Week" painting and decorating Valmar Gite and preparing for our first guests on 16th June 2007. After the "Mad Mad Week" though, I had to make another trip over to France on my own, to put the finishing touches to the house, with just one week to go before our first guests arrived !! There didn't seem to be toooo much that still needed doing........ until I started the task of course ..... and things always take so much longer to accomplish when you're on your 'Todd' (your own) don't they !
But the decorating was almost finished .... look.....

Gulp !! One week to go.

Not one to be detered, I set about finishing ALL of those fiddly bits. There was still a fair bit to do outside the house as well. We had commissioned a local landscaping company to landscape the grounds and sow grass seed everywhere.

With three days to go the 'enterprise' turned up with their machinery, to begin the work on the rather steep sloping site.

And look, the pool now has water for the first time !!
But you may just be able to see that the nice clean water is being quickly contaminated by lots of nice dirty soil that is being thrown around the place by the tractor, strimmer, rotovator etc. Oh dear !
Now please bear in mind that it's not really practical to build a house, decorate and furnish it and have everything 'just so' for the arrival of your first guests, when, with the house not quite finished, it is the middle of June and the Summer season for Holiday letting purposes in this part of France, runs only from the end of May, until the end of September, if you're lucky. So you can't think..."Well we'll just wait a few more weeks until the nice new grass is grown and everything is really absolutely finished", because if you do, the summer has come and gone, which means no guests and no income for another 7 or 8 months. So you just have to 'make do'. I was confident that everything would be 'more or less' ready for the arrival of our first guests and with two days remaining the main task left for me to complete was 'the building of the barbecue'. Our website, which was already up and running, stated that guests would have the use of a barbecue, so a barbecue guests would have ! Although it was quite a large Barbecue of rather heavy concrete block construction ( I reckon it weighs the best part of a tonne) I still figured I could 'knock it up' in a day, giving me a final day to spruce up the house before leaving for home. That was until 'The Perfect Storm' arrived. The landscape gardeners were in the middle of rolling the lovely grass seed they'd just sown, when I saw some rather ominous looking black clouds heading our way from the direction of the opposite side of the valley. Sure enough, the storm enveloped us. Rain like I've never seen before, descended upon us, thunder and lightning and gale force winds. Now, I wouldn't have minded the storm quite so much had I not been RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF BUILDING THE BBQ.

This photo was taken from the Terrace and the BBQ is the thing beneath the tarpaulin. I had just put some nice sticky BBQ cement, cum gluey stuff, on a couple of the concrete sections when the rain hit. So, as I couldn't just leave it (the gluey suff would have gone 'rock hard' and wrecked the BBQ), I had to carry on and actually built the top half of the BBQ whilst standing under the tarpaulin, with the rain hammering down. It was one of those surreal moments when you think to yourself "What on earth am I doing here" Note the mud-bath between the nice tiled floor of the Terrace (Yes, the ones that our first new guests would be walking on in two days time) and the BBQ. That was supposed to be grass !And those blobs of mud to the bottom left corner of the photo WERE actually my nice blue training shoes... WERE. They had to go straight in the bin after that.

But - somehow - two days later the house (at least on the inside) was pretty much ready for our first guests.

The kitchen/dining area looked like this

And the Masterbedroom like this

The outside, although lacking any grass, at least looked presentable and judging by the comments left for us by our 'first season guests', when you have sunsets like this

Grass is not quite so important !

So, now more than a year on, how did we get along after nearly two summers' of letting Valmar to Holiday makers....I'll let you know soon !

8. A mad mad week !

On a previous visit to France in October 2006, I met up again with the builders' site manager, the enigmatic Monsieur Monica and during the site visit was pleased with the progress being made by M. Monica and his colleagues.

The house looked like this at the time:-

The roof now on and the walls waiting for the crepé and the 'Parement de Pierre'.

A frantic couple of days were then necessary, touring the local DIY stores, in order to make the final choices for materials to complete the construction and 'kitting out' of our new house in the beautiful countryside of the lot-et-Garonne in the South-West of France, near to Villeneuve-sur-lot. I had chosen two bathroom suites, a kitchen, all sanitaryware and all the wall and floor tiles for the house and Terrace in those two days. The works were due for completion by April 2007, but the builder was actually ahead of schedule. (So much for the reputation that French builders are both slow and lazy). All that remained to be done was for Christine and I to arrange a trip over to France in March 2007, so that we could decorate and put the finishing touches to our new “Maison Secondaire“. We decided that we could just about decorate and furnish the whole house in a week, with a bit of help from family and friends.

And so in March 2007, we hired a transit van and squeezed into it, all the furniture, ornaments, paint, knick knacks and tools, that we had accumulated since the start of the build, some ten months previously, plus my mate Stefan and we set off for France. Seven days of hard graft lay ahead of us. Our French builder had told us prior to leaving, that the interior of the house was finished )save for our decorating) and that rather than send us photographs of the completed work, it would be better for us to have a “Grande Surprise” when we arrived. To some this may have sounded a little dubious, but so far he had not let us down and again we put our trust in him, that everything would be just as he had promised.
After more hours driving the transit van than I care to remember, we arrived at “Valmar” on a glorious sunny Saturday afternoon. I did say that we'd crammed "everything" into the van didn't I !

The big smile on the faces of Christine and I, express the amazing relief we felt, as much as anything else, that we had managed to drive several hundred miles, through England and then France, in a VERY heavily laden van, without so much as a flat tyre or accident of any sort (or me falling asleep at the wheel).

As we entered through the front door of 'Valmar', we were pleasantly surprised that the house actually seemed larger than we had envisaged. The interior was finished, save for the decorating, just as Monsieur Monica had said and we were both impressed by the high standard of the finish and attention to detail.
So we unloaded the van (which fortunately always takes a lot longer than it does to pack full, doesn't it !) and crashed out for the night.The next morning we collected my mother from the airport at Bergerac (she chose not to spend several hours crammed into a transit van with us - The older you get the wiser you get ! ) and we all set to work in the house, sanding scraping and then finally painting.

With the occasional break for a 'beverage' - of course !

(This is me and my mate Stef - partaking in one of those 'beverages !)

As I’d read that French paint was expensive to buy, we decided to buy our paint in the UK and take it over with us. This plan almost worked, until we ran out of white emulsion for the hallway walls and ceiling. Stef and I trotted off to the supermarket and to our amazement found a 10 litre tub of emulsion paint for eight euros fifty. We both thought this was a bargain, until we tried applying it to the walls. To cut a long story short, the quality was not good. I suppose wherever you are, you get what you pay for.
Four days later we had painted all of the interior walls, ceilings, the “Volets” and all of the exterior woodwork. Guess who got to go up the ladder and stain the first floor volets ?

Yes, me !

Our next task was to furnish the house. We had bought some furniture with us, but we still needed to buy white goods and a few other things. We naively thought that as we had our own transportation, we could simply walk into one or two large furniture stores, find the best deals and carry the goods off home with us, in our own van, time was after all, of the essence.

Our experience of finding new white goods in France,was not nearly as easy as it would have been in the UK. Unlike in the UK, many of the French stores we visited only stocked the display items and we were told that we would have to wait anywhere between one and six weeks for delivery of most items. This, however, worked in our favour in some cases, when the store allowed us to purchase items from display and gave us a five percent discount to boot ! I found that in general that was as much a discount as I was able to negotiate on 'ex-display' goods.

As “Valmar” was going to be available to rent as a Gite, we wanted to ensure that it was equipped with good quality appliances and it took us three days to buy a fridge, dishwasher, washing machine, cooker, two single beds, a sofa-bed, television, dining suite and all of the soft furnishings.
By the end of the week we were all exhausted, but satisfied in the knowledge that we had succeeded in completing the bulk of the tasks that we had set out to accomplish, to decorate and furnish 'Valmar'.

On the Friday afternoon Monsieur Monica arrived, with the architect Monsieur Dias and two bottles of champagne and we all sat on the terrace and toasted the completion of the project.

But wait !

It wasn't quite that easy. There was still lots of 'touching up' to be done, the swimming pool still wasn't finished, the garden wasn't landscaped, we had no pool furniture, we hadn't purchased a BBQ yet and a lot of the furniture was still in it's polythene wrapping. Although the exterior now looked like this :-

The pool still looked like this :-

Still a long way to go before that is ready for guests. The foreground is still a mess, but just look at those views in the distance.

Imagine the view once the pool is finished (well it is now).

I'll be continuing the story soon, with more pics and details of our experiences during our first year "letting" Valmar.

Come back soon for an update.

If you can't wait until then, visit our website here http://www.valmargite.com/

Thanks for looking at my Blog

I'll be back soon !

Martin

7. Construction underway !

I've not updated the blog for a while, so apologies to you all.
Right let's resume the story :-

We signed a 12 month written contract with the French builder that the architect worked for, in May of 2006 . (We preferred them to the alternative English builder we had considered, mainly because they seemed much more interested in what we wanted to achieve and appeared very professional and organised in their approach). From what I could tell they had a well established reputation in the area and of course my French teacher said that I should choose a French builder in order to improve my French (I don’t think she quite understood the gravity of this, but boy how right she was there). I also liked the idea of putting something back into the community that we were fortunate enough to be buying a small part of.
Works started on time on 21st May 2006. (Quite bizarre really that we started the foundations of our own self-build project in England on exactly the same day six years earlier !

As you can see, due to the site being on a decent slope (pente) the builders had a bit of 'terracing' to do, before construction commenced !

Being on the side of a hill has it's advantages - fantastic views for one. But the down side is that - Bigger the slope = bigger the construction costs.

I think I once read that for every 1 degree of slope a site has, you can add about 1% to your build costs. In our case a 12 degree slope, probably did add about 12 % to our costs.

I ensured with the builder that we were notified of the exact day they were to dig the footings, so that we could go over and watch the process. I needed some reassurance that these people knew what they were doing and wanted to make sure that they didn’t skimp on this crucial part of the project.









This is me just posing, pretending I was helping out with the footings, but it was in fact a pleasure not to have to.

Christine and I watched the concrete being poured into the trenches, which I have to say was a much more relaxed affair than our own experience some years earlier, when the trenches began collapsing, Christine managed to cut her wrist open on some reinforcing mesh and we had torrential rain for about two days afterwards. All hands to the pump and chaos are my memories.
By comparison, the French guys (there were only two of them, one digging out with a JCB and the other using his laser level, to ensure the concrete was poured correctly) seemed to know exactly what they were doing and had apparently done this a million times before.

Our next visit was in July, by which time the ground floor slab had been poured and trunking for cables and pipes as well as foul drains had been laid beneath the ground.

The ground floor walls had been erected and by the time we left at the end of the week they were up to the ground floor ceiling.

A start had also been made on the swimming pool.









Another trip over in August and the builders had cast another concrete slab at first floor level (they do seem to like their concrete over there and it is all very well reinforced with iron meshing. Even the base for the “Plage de la Piscine“ is reinforced concrete, ready to then take the slabs on top. I figure the slabs once laid on top wont budge an inch for decades, against the English idea, of a bit of hardcore, “Whack it down”, a couple of inches of sand and slabs on top of that, which does last for maybe tens years before you need your hiking boots, whilst walking, to make sure you don‘t twist that ankle on them. The reinforcing is one of the reasons why the pool (10m x 5 m) cost more than 50,000€ to construct. Another being that we have had concrete steps leading from the house down to the pool . There is also to be quite a large “Plage” around the pool and there is a concrete pool house (“technique local“) attached to one corner of the pool, where the pump, filtration etc has beeen housed and which is large enough for some additional storage. But the main reason for the seemingly large cost of the pool construction, is the sloping site. As mentioned above, do not underestimate the costs of building on a slope.

It is our belief that these costs are more than compensated for, by the view from the house down onto the pool and across the adjacent fields., which in August are “A sea of sunflowers”.
The last trip of 2006 at the end of October, revealed the roof complete, the bulk of the construction work on the pool completed and work about to start on the inside in earnest. A time also for choosing the essentials, Showers, Baths, basins, sinks, doors, floor tiles, wall tiles, guttering, style, material, colour etc, etc,etc.
Talking of colour, the builder gave us an option of doing the decorating ourselves. Just for painting all interior walls, ceilings and the exterior shutters their price was almost 8,000€. (Paint is very expensive in France compared to the UK). So, figuring we can do it for less than half that price, we decided to pay for flights for a few friends and have a paint party when the builders had finished their efforts in March 07.

6. Crunch Time

Part 5 - To leap or not to leap !
Having found what appeared to be our dream plot of land, three days before the end of our September vacances, we revisited the notaires office for a second time. After discussing the finer points of the proposition, we eventually signed the "Compromis de vente" agreeing to purchase the land with a “condition suspensive” that if we could not get our own plans passed by the deadline (31/12/05), we would not lose our deposit and the deal was off. (A very satisfactory way of going about things over there I think and with the peace of mind that none of that gazumping nonsense would come into play.
The plans submitted by the very nice M. Dias.were passed by the DDE about two days before the deadline (All these French people seemed to be so nice, and I don’t believe it was just because they were after our money ! )
So January 2006 came and we both went back over to France on the 21st to sign on the dotted line............. We found ourselves sat in the car, outside the Immobiliers discussing what we were about to do prior to meeting up with Annie, before walking over to the Notaires office with her again.
As we sat there, I looked at Christine and said,
“Do you think we are doing the right thing here“ (just to test the water you understand ! )
She replied,
“It‘s a bit bladdy late now“ and with that we went in and signed the ACTE DE VENTE .
There are times in your life when you sometimes arrive at a crossroads and think, “How the hell did we get to this point“. It was scary, but I believe at times like this, you just have to take the leap of faith ! (So far the net has always appeared)
So that was it, we owned our very own, very small (just under an acre) piece of France.
I thought all the stress of emails back and forth ,adding to, then tuning and fine tuning the planning and design details, was finally over, but of course I should have known better. Things were only just beginning...................

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……………..

4. The ideal plot?

Part 3 - It's now or never !
There were three days left of the “Holiday” and Christine and the children had understandably had their fill of walking around old houses and trudging through fields. I however knew, that if we didn’t find something that week, the likelihood of us joining the thousands of others, that look for that dream “French country house” and give up because they don’t find it first time round, was a distinct possibility. After all with two teenagers, there are only so many times you can afford to holiday abroad, in a year. I also believed from the research I had conducted, that there was still some growing to be done for the French property market and thought that another six or twelve months delay might be quite costly, financially. I am also a strong believer in doing it whilst you can, if the possibility is there. It is better to have tried and failed than to live a life of regret (Sorry, getting a little carried away with the philosophy there). So the following day, I left everyone by the pool and I trawled the estate agents again. It was at one of them that I met “Annie”, a very nice French lady, who’s English was much better than my French. Annie took me to three plots of land , which again just didn’t fit the bill. I had one more plot to look at that day and that would probably have been just about it, for the holiday.
There are moments that occur in every persons life, that, on reflection, they know they will remember for eternity. One of these moments was about to happen for me. Just around the corner from the last plot we’d seen, we were on a hillside, winding up a country road when Annie, who was driving, suddenly stopped the car. She didn’t say anything, just started getting out of the car. I assumed we had arrived at the final plot and as I alighted the vehicle I looked to my right. The open space to my right sloped away from the small “Voie communal” we had just driven along. The view was stunning. I looked at Annie in disbelief. The plot was a little more expensive than the others at 53,000€, (About £36,000 at the time), but it was so “Out of this world”, I thought surely she had made a mistake. I asked her “Are you sure this is the right one”. “Yes“, she said “Of course”. Goosebumps ran up my arms, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. The “Terrain” sloped down into a gentle valley. There were vineyards running up the valley opposite , a small wooded area in the foreground, the odd farmhouse dotted here and there, farrowed fields, and even a church on top of one of the rolling hills in the distance. It was as near to perfect as I knew we would ever get. The words “Location, Location, Location“, sprang to mind. This was it . This was the plot I’d been looking for. Pictures or photo's never quite do justice to those beautiful moments that we ocasionally come across in life do they. This picture doesn't do the view real justice, but it gives you an idea. This is the view that I saw that day -

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………