‘"Carpe per diem - seize the cheque" (Robin Williams)

As I’ve said in previous posts, if our French Dream is to last beyond our first year then we have to find a way of earning a few euros. We are not alone amongst those moving to France these days - so many of us choose not simply to retire here but to actively seek out a new way of life in this wonderful area of the world long before drawing a pension.

My French language abilities are just not good enough at this stage to consider looking for salaried employment so self employment is the best bet. What to do though?

Could I earn money as a writer? Whilst it has always appealed I’ve never done it before and this blog is my first attempt. (Perhaps you, dear reader, can tell me if it is an option worth pursuing? Be gentle with me please J) And in reality I have no understanding of how the media works and how to make money out of writing, let alone what I should write about!

Perhaps an internet based business would work since the internet allows anyone to be an entrepreneur and to reach a global customer base (they say!). What products could I sell? Here are just some of my ideas:

• French Antiques - but I know nothing about them
• Batteries and memory cards for cameras - too much competition
• French cheese - too smelly
• French artisan soaps - too smelly 

Lovely French Cheese - but very smelly!

Another idea we considered was as a result of talking to a lady called Sally Stone at one of the French Property Shows we visited. She was offering people the opportunity to buy a franchise in her business called ‘Les Bons Voisins’ (Good Neighbours it means in English and every time I hear it I start singing “Everybody needs good neigh…...bours” in an Australian accent – bet you did too!). It’s a great concept, offering caretaking services to second-home owners and property management for absent gite owners. We were very tempted but ultimately, to be passionate about a business, you have to do something you love doing and we just felt that cleaning houses and changing bedsheets seemed like doing more of the things that we disliked doing in our own home!

Purchasing an existing business is another option but again, what to do that would make best use of our meager talents? We are not vivacious party people so running a bar is out. I love cooking but there is a massive difference between making a tasty casserole for the family to running a restaurant. 

Day boat business for sale in Brittany

One ‘business for sale’ advert that did catch my eye was a small day-boat hire business – perfect until I realised that it was in Brittany rather than the Perigord Vert!

The simple reality is that it is better to start a new business by utilising your existing skills and experience. That left two options; something that utilised my 25 years of experience in human resource management – but I’d had enough of that kind of work, that’s why we came to France, and my French language skills would be a very limiting factor; or something based on my love of photography and the work I had been doing on a hobby basis for an estate agent friend of mine in the UK.

The latter came about in 2008 when I had purchased a licence to use some technology that enabled me to produce virtual tours. Working at weekends and on summer evenings I would visit properties for sale and capture the images required to develop the virtual tour. Over time I started to do more and produced still photographs, floorplans, property details (you know the kind of thing, “A deceptively spacious broom cupboard in a highly desirable area of Runcorn”) and on-line brochures. Eventually I was able to work four days a week in HR and do my photography work on Wednesdays as well. I absolutely loved it! Below are a couple of examples of photos I took in England:

Is there a market for this kind of service in France? Our own research and experience suggests there is. Just take a look at a typical immobilier’s web site (and we’ve looked at a lot during the course of our house hunting) and you will be lucky to see three or four grainy photos. Given the way that most house hunters use the internet for their initial research, that is simply not good enough in this day and age.

Our view was supported by a number of estate agents we had spoken to at the Property Exhibitions and they were keen to know more, but of course they were never going to commit to working with someone who was still based in Cheshire. Well we’re in France now, so here goes…..

House Hunting Part II - The blue house in the woods

Our initial enthusiasm and excitement for the house hunting process had begun to fade when fate played her hand. 

Our first view of the house from the road

Nigel from Piegut Immobilier had been trying to persuade us to view a blue painted, modern, timber framed house in Busserolles. We had seen it from a distance many times and discounted it because it did not fit our criteria of “character stone property” and I made it clear to Nikki that I had no desire to live in “a blue, wooden garden shed”. However, we had come to trust Nigel’s judgment based on a previous day out with him and so, when we agreed to a second day of viewings with him, we agreed to have a “quick look” on the way past.

We were smitten! There is no other way to describe it. Here was a beautifully designed, well insulated house that was ready to move in to without any work required. No new kitchen needed, no new bathroom, no need to replace or refurbish a single thing. It sat in three acres of its own attractively maintained parkland and enjoyed a fabulous view that could be appreciated from the large covered deck.

On top of that, it was 10 minutes walk to the village baker in Busserolles, a village that had already given us a great welcome to France and where we had started to establish new friendships. Having driven hundreds of kilometers hunting for a house in the Perigord Vert, we had found one just 3 minutes walk from where we were already living!

Only one problem – it was outside our budget.

Open plan living area

We expected that we would be able to negotiate the price down given our position as cash buyers but as it had only been on the market for a few weeks it seemed unlikely that the vendor would be keen to move very far. However, our experience of the previous weeks of house hunting had brought us the realisation that our budget was not going to buy us a house that would come close to our criteria without the need to spend a significant sum on refurbishments.

Given my need to stay focussed on establishing a new business (don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten my promise to tell you about that - you'll just have to keep following the blog!), the opportunity to purchase a property that would provide no distracting refurbishment projects seemed like a damn fine idea!

Main Bedroom

We could also see savings in other parts of our overall budget – removal costs to shift our belongings over the road would be zero (just me at one end of the sofa and Nikki at the other, off we go up the lane; simples); heating and running costs for a modern, energy efficient property would be lower; we even had our own trees to provide logs for the wood burning stove.

Aerial view showing our rented house
(red pin at the top) and the blue house
(blue pin at the bottom) with yellow
line marking the plot boundaries

Using every logical reason we could think of (remembering of course that buying a house is largely an illogical, emotional decision!) the budget was adjusted as far as we could go and we decided to make an offer, although it was well below the asking price.

Rejected!

Not surprising I guess but disappointing non-the less. “Ah well, it’s not the only house on the market”. We went through the “plenty more fish in the sea”, “more pebbles on the beach” routine and supped another glass of delicious Bergerac red.

It didn’t work. All the reasons that had made us fall in love with the ‘blue house in the woods’ in the first place stood up to our attempts to dismiss them. We wanted that house so badly; more than any other house we had viewed, we could visualise ourselves living there. Panic ensued when we spotted another immobilier showing clients around one day - showing people around ‘our’ house!

So it was that we went back with a revised offer but this time we stipulated that we wanted to purchase the house complete with all its contents. Our thinking was that by removing the need for them to organize a removals van to return to the UK, it would be an attractive prospect for the English vendors. On our side it meant that we would not need to purchase expensive items we would require such as wardrobes, a washing machine and a garden tractor (a must have when there are three acres of grass to mow!). Whilst we would end up with some unrequired surplus items (five sofas would be a tad excessive for a two bed house!) we had learnt that there was a good market locally for second hand furniture, so we could recoup some of our outlay.

 

Our approach worked and the revised offer was accepted – we celebrated with champagne that night!

House Hunting Part I - The fall of the favourites

Having settled in to our rented home in Busserolles we were excited by the prospect of starting the search for our dream French home.

This was a subject that had occupied us quite happily for years before ever arriving in France (the “dreaming years”). We would each spend hours at a time sat at our separate computers as we trawled the internet looking at French houses. At the end of each session we would excitedly share our favourites and our bookmark lists became clogged with links to those we thought might just be “the one”!

We signed up to the main property portals offering French homes for sale (France Property Shop, Sextant, Greenacres and Latitudes were among our preferred sites) and would eagerly await the weekly updates of new properties landing in our inbox.

The exercise of picking out our favourite on-line properties did help us to develop our criteria for selecting our dream French home; it would be a characterful stone cottage with wooden shutters, perhaps in need of some improvement but not a major restoration; it would be in a tranquil location, not overlooked but within easy access (walk or cycle) of a baker and a small village shop; and it would have an acre or so of land attached so that the dogs could happily romp in their own meadow…..ahhh, the dream!

Despite all the internet searching, we knew that there could be no substitute for physically viewing a property so, having arrived, we couldn’t wait to get started. We would be searching the whole of the Perigord Vert region, which meant that we had hundreds of square kilometers to search. Starting with our list of favourites from the internet search we made contact with the relevant estate agents, the ‘immobiliers’, and set up our first few viewing trips.

Before I tell you about our viewing trip experiences, a word or two about immobiliers and the way they work in France in comparison to estate agents in the UK. French properties are rarely marketed by just one immobilier – because it is the buyer who pays the immobilier’s fees, the seller has no qualms about asking every immobilier they know to market their house. As a consequence two things happen: firstly, before you visit a property, the immobilier will only ever give you a vague idea as to its location because they fear that the competition will find out and start marketing it as well. Secondly, the immobilier will want to take you to see not only the house that you have enquired about but also as many other similar properties on their books as they can – this is because if they take you to see a house first and you later decide to buy it, they get all the fees!

The consequence of this modus operandi is that the immobilier’s preference is to meet you in a mutually convenient location away from the house you want to view (typically in the town square or by La Poste) and then to drive you in their car. As well as making it more difficult to know exactly where you are going, it also ensures that the immobilier has you captive for the day!

Consequently some of our viewing trips turned into tiresome days as we were dragged from one unsuitable property to the next. We always seemed to be “just passing” a property that they had on the market which would invariably be described as “an interesting wildcard worth having a look at”. The fact that it met very few of our criteria seemed to matter not a jot and, being English and very polite, we would try to find something positive to say about the property.

“At least we’d be able to get to the bar easily – it’s just next door” or “The saw mill is noisy but it’s quite well screened by those trees”.

Eventually we learned our lesson and realised that brutal honesty was best! When a mystery house was suggested we would question the immobilier carefully and refuse to go if it sounded anything less than perfect.

Of even greater disappointment was the fact that even properties we had asked to view based on our internet research turned out to be real disappointments when we got up close and personal. One by one our list of favourites fell by the wayside. A previously unmentioned busy road running at the bottom of the garden; a fabulous location but with a barn so ruined and dangerous that it would have needed to be demolished; a property that looked wonderful in the photos – photos that had been taken two years previously, since when the house had been empty and was crumbling at an alarming rate.

The photographs shown in this post are just a few of the properties that we viewed but subsequently discounted. We started to become thoroughly disheartened by the house hunting process and could only console ourselves with the fact that at least we were in France and lucky enough to be in rented accommodation so not under serious pressure to buy. Deep down though we yearned for a place of our own that we could call home and start to make our mark on.

Piegut en Felibree

Whilst market day on a Wednesday has Piegut bursting at the seams because of the popularity of its extensive market, for the rest of the week it is a fairly sleepy little town. However, during our first weeks here it seemed that they were taking the preparations for the annual fete very seriously indeed.

It didn’t matter which way we came into town there would be different roads closed off as temporary scaffolding and cherry picker platforms enabled the local population to decorate their street from pavement to roof line. This was not just a bit of patriotic bunting either but thousands upon thousands of artificial flowers in every colour imaginable.

It seemed to be an incredible amount of effort for an annual town fete but further investigation proved that this was rather more than that and made us realise how lucky we were.

It seems that this was going to be the Felibree, a major festival celebrating Perigordian culture that takes place in a different town of the region every year. By wonderful chance for us, this year was the turn of Piegut; the last time they had hosted it was over 50 years ago!

The local villages are all involved and each one is allocated a part of the town for which it has to prepare and put up the decorations. The common theme to all the decorations is the artificial flower but it can be used in myriad different ways. Every single flower is handmade and, because of the vast numbers required, people from the local communities start work creating them six months in advance. Each street has a different colour theme reflecting the different villages and the flowers appear strung from building to building, cascading down the walls and clustered together to create different images.

The Felibree celebrations last over three days with music, dancing and feasting. We decided to go along on the final day to witness the advertised parade through the town. We planned to park just on the edge of town and wander in to see a parade made up of about half a dozen tractors pulling decorated floats with jolly people on board waving to the crowd. How wrong we were!

For a start we were not allowed any nearer than about a kilometer away where we were directed to park a field and set off on foot. The entrance to the town had been transformed into a medieval gateway with towers either side – decorated of course with artificial flowers. The town itself was full of people dressed in traditional Perigordian costume, some demonstrating ancient crafts, others dancing to music made by musical instruments not used this side of the 15^th Century. Food (as ever) was in plentiful supply with a particular highlight being a large group of people cooking up strange looking meat in vast cauldrons set over open fires which was then mixed with other exotic ingredients and turned into a foul smelling, but surprisingly tasty, black sausage.

I have to confess that although I tasted said sausage, lunch for me was an enormous duck burger – there’s something new for McDonalds to put on the menu!

The parade itself involved not a single tractor or trailer – instead it seemed that all those dressed in costume paraded through town, each group behind a banner representing their local commune, dancing and singing to the wonderful strains of the traditional folk music. It took nearly an hour for them all to pass where we stood and then culminated in……….well in a rather disappointing finale which involved endless speeches by rotund local dignitaries weighed down with their chains of office, each apparently trying to out do the other with their public speaking prowess.

We headed back to the car loaded with wine and tasty treats purchased from the stallholders and having enjoyed a fabulous day out. We were struck by how hard the people of this region work at preserving and celebrating their local customs and traditions, without the sense of embarrassment we have in the UK when we see Morris Dancers, but with a real sense of pride and pleasure.