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.

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.