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.