All our worldly goods

Everything I had read about living in France had prepared me for the weight of paperwork that would be required to support most major transactions and renting a house was to be no different. Fortunately for us we had the services of Silke from Piegut Immobilier who carefully explained everything to us in her excellent English (one of the many languages she speaks).  She then jumped in her car and led us the last few kilometers to Busserolles.

 Having only ever seen a few photographs of the house we were renting we had deliberately set our expectations low. In our minds we were moving into a dirty, smelly house which would need us to spend the first week doing nothing but cleaning out grimy bathrooms, trying to make the kitchen into an area free of botulism and banishing spiders and lizards from their cosy haunts.

Talk about having expectations exceeded - they were blown out of the water. Silke opened the door to a sparklingly clean house that was furnished beautifully and was much larger than we had anticipated. The bathroom was immaculate with a Jacuzzi bath as a lovely surprise and the kitchen was modern and well equipped. The only thing that seemed strange to our English eyes was that the oven was installed in the utility room rather than the kitchen. Time would prove the sense of this arrangement – when the weather gets hot it is great to be able to prepare food in the cool kitchen whilst the oven churns out the heat in a separate room.

But the best discovery about the house was the basement – it was a cavernous wonder! Why such joy? Well, we were moving from a four bedroomed house in the UK to a two bedroomed fully furnished house in France. Clearly we would have to put much of our furniture and other belongings into storage but our tight budget did not allow for any kind of third party storage. We had therefore gambled on being able to store everything at the rental house and in our minds we were going to have boxes piled ceiling high in every room.

Only once we set our eyes on the huge basement with its fully tiled floor and wide access doors at ground level did we realise that when the removals lorry arrived in a weeks time we could simply say to the guys ‘just put it all in the basement’. Fabulous!

The centre of Busserolles village

 We were therefore able to spend our first week in Busserolles recovering from the journey and finding our way around the locality. Tess and Rolo loved the huge garden at the house and we discovered some beautiful countryside walks right on our doorstep. We also met our delightful neighbour Nadine who spoke no English but was happy to explain things slowly and to help us with our French. She soon became our guide to rural France and humbled us with her generosity as she brought us haunches of wild boar to try, vegetables from her garden and bottles of the local plonk.

Rolo discovered lizards and became obsessed with these charming little creatures who nervously scuttle away whenever they sense any movement nearby. They move so fast it seemed unlikely he would catch one but one day my wife discovered a twitching lizard tail and assumed the rest of the lizard had been swallowed by Rolo. We waited anxiously to see what effect fresh lizard would have on his stomach. 

One of our friendly lizards

Nadine was duly consulted as to how serious the outcome might be for the poor dog. She smiled knowingly at us and patiently explained that when these lizards feel in danger, they actually shed their tail which then twitches invitingly to distract their predator. Rolo would be fine she said but we would probably see a tail-less, but very much alive, lizard in the garden.

Relating this story (or should I call it a tale?) to another local we were informed that his cat was an avid lizard hunter and their garden was full of short tailed lizards!

On our third day we went to the local Credit Agricole branch for our meeting with Marie Lambert. Once again there was going to be copious amounts of paperwork to sign but Marie hit a problem. A computer fault meant that she could not get any of the documents to print. We sat there patiently whilst she called her IT helpdesk but the silent looks we exchanged between ourselves hinted at our increasing exasperation. We knew what was coming next, a grudging apology and a request to come back another day.

How wrong we were. Marie instructed us to waste no more of our time at the bank, we should go and enjoy the local market, have lunch and she would call us on the mobile when she had found a solution. What emerged was the proposal that she would come out to the house later in the day and we could sign everything there. Just tremendous service, I can’t imagine any British bank employees leaving the cocoon of their branch office and making home visits.

The following Friday afternoon we had a knock at the door. I was taken aback to find a large white Britannia Appleyard removals wagon outside with Nigel and Jonjo, the two men assigned to our job, standing on our doorstep. “I wasn’t expecting you until Monday” I blurted out. Not a problem they said, because French laws meant that they were not allowed to drive at the weekend, they were going to spend the weekend locally and thought they would come and see where the house was so as not be late on the Monday morning. They were clearly chuffed at the idea of unloading most items straight into the basement and so, despite the heavy showers that blighted the day, they cheerfully set about unloading our worldly goods.

By the end of the day, everything we owned in the world was with us in Busserolles. Project Cinquante was complete; the dream was now a reality.

Don't forget the dogs

I think its time in this story for me to introduce you to our two furry friends, Tess and Rolo.

Both were rescue dogs and both are real Heinz 57 types with perhaps an unspecified terrier gene being the only common thing between them.

Meet Tess (left) and Rolo

 We took in Tess as a puppy and she is now 15 years old. She has an adorable temperament at home but her dedication to the sport of chasing rabbits and squirrels has meant that we have spent many hours stood around in woods waiting for her to come back from her latest foray. She was always super fit with a whippet like body and for years we kept hoping that one day she would “settle down”. We were right, but she was 14 before arthritis set in and it was only then that she finally decided it was easier to walk at our pace.

Rolo came to us as chubby little 10 month old whose lack of house training became evident in his first few weeks with us. He had neither inclination nor energy to chase furry woodland creatures and he happily waddled along beside us. With regular walks, his tubby bum soon disappeared and whilst he showed no interest in hunting with Tess, he started to demonstrate two obsessions that plague us to this day – a hatred of anything in a fluorescent jacket (postmen, road workers, refuse collectors all included) and an obsession with other dogs which includes the desire to be very angry indeed with anything big enough to eat him as a snack!

These two characters were joining us on our French adventure and so in plenty of time we set about getting them their EU Pet Passports as part of the Pet Travel Scheme (PETS) which provides for qualifying domestic pets to travel to and from the UK without undergoing quarantine. The first step was getting them vaccinated against Rabies and having blood tests done to confirm that all was OK. They were already micro chipped and up to date with their other normal vaccinations so in due course our vet was able to issue their passports.

Whilst both Tess and Rolo were good travellers in the car, the furthest they had ever gone was about three hours so this was going to be beyond their (or our) experience so needed some thought and planning. One option was to arrange for them to be taken over by a specialised animal transport company but we didn’t like the idea of handing them over to complete strangers (particularly if they might be wearing fluorescent jackets!).

Having concluded that they would travel in the car with us, whilst they normally sat loose in the rear of our estate car we did decide that it would be safer for them (and for us) to have them enclosed within a travel cage. This was a small investment but undoubtedly gave us great peace of mind that they were secure in the car and also appeared to help them to settle very well on the journey.

Testing out the Travel Cage

We also decided at this point to utilise the services of Eurotunnel as it would mean that we could stay with them in the car throughout the crossing rather than having to abandon them on the car deck of a ferry. Eurotunnel have clearly recognised the market opportunity and promote their pet friendly services on their website. With secure exercise areas at either end of the tunnel and complementary poop bags, its great to see they have thought about the needs of the travelling pet.

Except of course they are not providing services for pets out of the goodness of their hearts. For each dog it is an extra £15 per trip. That’s an awful lot of money for a complementary poop bag. The irony is that we could have loaded up the car with 27 small children and it wouldn’t have cost us a penny extra to travel through the tunnel even though they provided complementary baby changing facilities. But for two dogs and a complementary poop bag – that will be £30 extra please!!

That said, the staff at Eurotunnel were extremely courteous and friendly and the train supervisor even came to say hello to Tess and Rolo as we travelled beneath the waves. Just a shame he was wearing a fluorescent jacket…

The journey down to Busserolles was incident free and we were able to stop regularly to exercise the dogs in the superbly maintained rest areas that crop up regularly along the length of the French motorway network. We made one overnight stop in the Campanile hotel at Chateauxroux (pet friendly with a charge of just €5 per dog) and arrived fit and fresh to collect the keys from Piegut Immobiler on Monday, 4^th June 2012.

Project Cinquante comes to life

I always felt that one of the flaws in my plan would be that if we completed the move in the summer, finding a long term rental property could be a serious challenge. Why would anyone rent their house to me for €600 per month when they could get €600 per week if they let it as a gite over the summer months? And now we were going to be moving to France in June, right at the start of the summer season!

I trawled the internet for long term lets and my fears were realized – every property owner came back with a similar response – “yes, we’d love to rent our house to you, it will be available from September”.

So I tried another approach and contacted a number of the French estate agents in the Perigord Vert whose sites I had been bookmarking for several months. Bingo!

A photo received by email of our rental property in Busserolles

An email landed in my inbox from Nigel Barette of Piegut Immobilier. He had that day been asked by a client to find a tenant for a two bedroomed property in Busserolles, a small village situated bang in the middle of our property search area. A quick exchange of emails and a few photographs and the deal was struck – our initial base in France was sorted!

With a date and a destination fixed, the rest of the plan started to come together.

We booked our removals with Britannia Appleyard of Rotherham – they were the only company who seemed willing to come out and actually see what furniture we wanted to move before providing us with a quote. The others wanted to base their quote on an estimate of volume provided by yours truly. This seemed a risky route to go down as my ability to estimate volumes is, well, non-existent! I suspected we might end up either paying way over the odds or getting stung with penalty charges when they realized there was far more to load on a van than Mr. Morford had suggested.

Everything I had read suggested there were two things that would particulalrly infuriate me when trying to deal with French business processes – arranging a French bank account and setting up an internet connection. In reality, it could not have been easier to do either of these things. The secret lies in the fact that many Englishmen have gone before me and the amiable French have recognized that most of us are rubbish at speaking la francaise. As a consequence a number of French businesses have set up English speaking help lines and are no doubt capturing a big slice of the expat market as a consequence.

 Here are two examples that left me delighted me with the service from French organisations.

Coming from an agricultural background I was drawn to the idea of doing my banking with Credit Agricole. The Charente-Perigord division not only has an English speaking department it also has a slogan that appealed to my Yorkshire roots – “The Bank of Common Sense”.

You know, if there was a political party called the “Common Sense Party”, I’d vote for them – perhaps I should be the founding member and one day get I’d elected to the European Parliament? Maybe President of France? Anyway, back to Credit Agricole...

I gave them a call (and we’re still in Cheshire at this point) and spoke to a very nice lady called Marie Lambert. We exchanged some e-mails, I sent her copies of things like birth certificates and passports and we agreed to meet her as soon as we arrived in France. Marie’s office was over an hour away from Busserolles but that was not a problem she said, she would drive out and meet us at our local branch in Piegut. Far from being horrendous, this was proving to be real smooth sailing and I’ll tell you more about the lovely Marie in a later post.

So, to telephone and broadband. Nigel from Piegut Immobilier passed me the number for the English speaking customer service team at France Telecom (or Orange as they have now become) which is +33 (0)9 69 36 39 00

Once again I was blown away by the friendly and helpful manner in which my request was dealt with and within 10 minutes an order was placed for a landline, an ADSL broadband connection, a wireless router plus a TV package giving us access to 54 channels. All would be set up within a few days of our arrival and all the necessary equipment would be delivered to a local collection point. They were as good as their word and we have not had cause to fault them.

We need a cunning plan

My children still tell the tale of how I planned for our family holiday to Florida in 2003. No true Yorkshireman is going to spend so much money on a holiday to a far-flung land without ensuring that every minute is spent wisely. So I did my research and developed a plan – a very detailed and cunning plan.

It didn’t just indicate which theme park would be visited each day – no, that would not suffice. My plan indicated which ride was to be tackled at which time of day, when and where we would eat and what the precise time and location that Mickey and Minnie were to be given a hug. The objective was to minimize wasted queuing time and maximize family fun. I was damn sure they would enjoy themselves!!  

With my reputation to protect I set about developing a plan for the move to France – it even had a name, Project Cinquante (my first post on this blog will help to explain that one!)

Having determined that we wanted to make our new home in the Perigord Vert, the second fundamental decision we made was that we would initially rent a property whilst we looked for a permanent home. We couldn’t afford the time or the costs involved in making numerous short trips to view properties and we didn’t want to rush such an important purchasing decision.

We had met some Property Finders during our visits to French Property Exhibitions and we seriously considered utilising their services to undertake the donkey work of developing a shortlist of potential properties in France. But I was out of work, my wife had had enough of being abused by patients in her NHS job and we just felt that the time for procrastination was well and truly over.

With those decisions made, it was time to get on with a detailed plan. On an Excel spreadsheet (I’m sure Microsoft will pay me handsomely for such a high profile product placement – do get in touch Bill) I listed out every step required, starting from the point of selling our house in Cheshire through to arrival in France. Key aspects of the plan were identified and we divided up the ownership of them between us:

• ·      Selling the house in Cheshire
• ·      Renting a house in the Perigord Vert
• ·      Opening a French Bank Account
• ·      Moving all our worldly goods
• ·      Setting up French Utility Services
• ·      Getting the Dogs to France
• ·      Healthcare in France
• ·      The journey
• ·      The Budget for all this!

We put in many man (and woman) hours researching every aspect of the plan and that investment ultimately proved to be worth it as the plan was implemented. We bought books about buying property and living in France, we scoured the internet using excellent general information sites such as Agloinfo and Frenchentree and we poured over magazines like Living France and French Property News.

Our financial plan for Project Cinquante relied on us selling our house in Cheshire, paying off the mortgage and using the remaining capital to fund our first two years in France. Whilst we therefore needed every penny from the house sale we knew how price sensitive the UK housing market was and we had no intention of still trying to find a buyer 12 months down the line. With Mark Butterworth from Agents4U (an estate agent in Northwich, Cheshire), we developed an aggressive marketing strategy and had five viewings over the first weekend of being on the market, a remarkable result in such a depressed housing market.

Our house in Cheshire

Whilst we had a couple of hiccups along the way (cold feet caused one offer to be withdrawn and an awkward plonker in the chain decided at the last minute to delay completion by an additional week) we were eventually able to plan on moving out at the end of May 2012.

Great! We would be homeless but with money in the bank and no debts for the first time in our lives. It felt both liberating and scary at the same time, like skiing naked down a black run.

In my next post I’ll tell you more about how Project Cinquante came to life.

The Goldilocks Decision

Having made the momentous decision that 2012 was going to be the year in which we would to turn our dreams into reality, the next big question was to decide in which of France’s many and varied regions we wanted to make our new home?

I guess like so many who have made the move before us we were inevitably attracted to the French regions where we had previously enjoyed our holidays. For us this included Normandy, Provence, Limousin, Aquitaine, Burgundy and Ile de France (Paris to be precise).

Each of these areas had left their impact on us: cruising along the gentle River Saone on a family boating holiday; sipping red wine on a summer’s evening in the gite garden whilst watching the mellow Limousin cattle munching grass; gazing at Isabelle’s long, tanned limbs as she lay by the pool (did I mention that before?); watching our daughter run naked through the fountains of the Parc Citroen (not a drunken student prank this one, she was only 7 at the time to be fair!); having our car broken into and our passports stolen whilst we visited a war cemetery near Caen (I'm afraid that memory put Normandy out of the running - unfair I know but the emotions of that day still linger).

We had also been subscribing to magazines like Living France and French Property News for several years and we had read countless articles describing life in every area of France. The problem of course is that everywhere sounded wonderful; no one was going to write about their chosen home in anything but glowing terms.

So we started with the Goldilocks decision making process.

Provence in the South – way too hot for us.

Brittany and Normandy in the North – an Atlantic climate too much like the UK.

The ‘middle bit’ around Limoges – just right.

Paris – great for a visit but much too busy and clogged up for us, not to mention way too expensive. The Creuse and Correze departments of the Limousin offered some of the cheapest property in France but their remoteness perhaps didn’t offer us the best opportunity to implement our business ideas (more of which in a later post!). The departments to the south and west of Limoges (Dordogne, Haute Vienne and Charente) – just right.

Of course, these three departments cover a huge area so we started to narrow it down using transport links as a guide – we marked on a map all the airports within two hours of the region which offered flights to the UK and we took note of where the TGV stopped off as it raced south. What started to emerge as a target area for us was the Parc Naturel Regional Perigord Limousin with Limoges Airport close by and the airports of Bergerac, Poitiers and even Bordeaux within striking distance. The excellent TGV service allowed Paris to be reached in less than three hours from Angouleme to the west.

The Parc Naturel Regional Perigord Limousin covers a large area but as we read more about the region it became clear that the section of countryside known as the Perigord Vert would suit us very nicely.

Lush, green countryside dotted with little hamlets and bustling market towns. Lots of beautiful deciduous woodland interspersed with meadows grazed by gentle herds of cattle. And above all, we knew from previous trips that it offered us the peace and tranquility that we so desperately sought.

The Perigord Vert is primarily encapsulated within the Dordogne department. Whilst it has unfortunately developed something of a ‘Dordogneshire’ reputation because of the number of English people living in the area, we knew that this rural area was still quintessentially French and conservative in its outlook and we had only ever encountered extremely welcoming and hospitable natives. Beside which, we were not looking to get drawn in to the “Expat Community” who still get their groceries delivered by Asda, play cricket at the weekend and go in search of fish and chips on a Friday night - we wanted to move to France because we saw a more fulfilling was to live life and we wanted to make friendships with the French, to learn from them and to immerse ourselves in the local culture.

With property prices well below the French national average we realized we might achieve our dream to live mortgage free in a tranquil cottage on the edge of a village with space around us to breathe and an acre or two of land for the dogs to roam free on. We also knew we would have to find a way to make a living and it appeared that this was an area that would suit what we had in mind as a business (not telling you more yet, you’re going to have to wait!).

On my wall at home in the UK, I pinned a map of the area we had now decided to focus on (see below) and started to absorb the detail of the towns, the topography, the main routes and the places of interest. I started to turn the dream into a clearer vision of where we were going to make our new life – then I started to plan in detail how we were going to make this happen. I’ll tell you about that next time though!