Living in France has been my dream since I was about 16. I have no idea why but I think on reflection I just liked the idea of having a castle and lots of land and forests to get lost in! In fact I failed my photography A level because I spent the 6 hour exam on prestige properties scrolling through Chateau pictures, It always seemed crazy that these places actually existed, full of history, empty and falling apart.
I visited France first of all with Dad on a weekend away to the annual Django Reinhardt festival in Fontainebleau. We were lucky enough to stay with an English family who owned a manor on the outskirts of the village and we had the best time listening to gypsy jazz and drinking in the square of the town. I must have been 18 at that point and I weirdly knew this would be where I would end up.
Fast forward 2 years and I meet FJ (Frankie) and she takes me to visit Penny and Francois for a week in Catus. Penny took us round all the local markets, we swam in the rivers and played a lot of guitar! It was a week of being immersed in rural France culture, small coffees, fresh food, bread, cheese, ‘pardon Je suis anglais’ and hammocks!
Returning the year after felt more like coming home than it did coming on holiday and we’d spend the week trying to work out a way that made us stay and not be able to go back to work… anyway I think it took us about 8 years of consecutive trips with more and friends for us to decide yep… that’s enough, lets do this! I think that epiphany happened at the end of 2019 just before Christmas where we were shamelessly watching ‘Escape to the Chateau’ whilst scrolling through French estate agent websites.
I remember google translating our first message to an estate agent in bed the following Sunday morning and my hands physically shaking with excitement to send an enquiry. I wish I had a picture of that house as it was absolutely gorgeous but the guy came back and said it was under offer! But once we’d sent one message I could copy and paste it to other agents and it got a bit addictive… I think at one point I had about 6 estate agents on the go… I had to reign it in as I still had no idea if we could get an overseas mortgage.
It turns out, it was a lot bloody harder to get an overseas mortgage for a property less than €90,000, that it was to get a mortgage on a 2 bed house for £250,000 in the UK…go figure! I think we must have filled out 20 mortgage application forms to different international brokers and all came back with rejections… So I think we almost had given up until one of the original estate agents got back in touch April 2020 to see if we’d progressed at all and if we had any dates available for viewings… I explained the finance problem and he very helpfully put us in touch with a company his agency use.. So I was sent a form to fill out which I reluctantly did for the 10000th time and sent it off not thinking much of it, 2 days later I got an email from the broker with two attachments 1. Fixed 20 year, 2. Variable 20 year… wait… what… and actual offer in principle… Ok breathe!!
So our Broker was called Meryl and quite honestly she became a second mother to me throughout 2020 answering any questions or sorting out any problems we had with different aspects of the sale!
In August 2020 we went to France with the offer in principle and started the hunt, which took all of about 1 day before we came to Bertrand Joly and fell in love with it. We came back for a second viewing with Francois who gave it the structural once over and told us it was an amazing house and we should ‘JUST DO IT!’ Problem was whilst we were on our second viewing, so were another couple and they seemed French and serious! There is some speculation in hind sight as to whether they were real potential buyers or stooges… either way it worked and we spoke to estate agent there and then about putting an offer on. She told us these guys were very serious, cash buyers and likely to put an offer in today. So we left disappointed and deflated. We flew back to the UK the day after (Saturday) and kind of tried to move on… well at least until I couldn’t resist and sent the agent a message asking if the cash buyers had put an offer in…, maybe they hadn’t and all of a sudden we were excited again.
Monday morning we were in the car waiting for our drive through covid tests when I looked at Franks and say ‘I haven’t heard back from the agent yet…. shall we just send an offer? Like seriously, lets just do it’ So whilst Frankie was getting swabbed I wrote to the agent saying we would offer €160,000 and by the time we’d both been swabbed we had put an offer on our first house! Driving back my phone beeped and there were two replies 1. No they hadn’t put and offer in 2. I will forward your offer to the seller! SHIT!!!
10 minutes later, “OK she has accepted at €160,000 (£137,000) I’ll send over the compromis de vendt (sales agreement) now!” I think we drank a lot of wine and got a Chinese to celebrate that night! IT felt exciting and terrifying!
Tuesday morning we got a devastating call from the agent saying the seller had found someone else to sell it to who are cash buyers and we were off the cards which is totally legit as she hadn’t signed the compromis!! So we had a bit of a cry Tuesday morning at work and after talking it over we decided it was probably for the best and we’d go out for lunch to get over it!
Tuesday Lunch- Agent phones and say ok, she wants to sell to you now but wants €5,000 more…. but to compensate I’ll reduce my fee by €5,000…. I don’t remember much of that convo other than I said yes yes yes a lot! So within 72 hours we’d viewed a second time, put an offer on, got accepted, got dropped, then reaccepted again! I think we went to the pub that evening and drank a lot with Harry and Rosie!
There was one clause though, The seller would not sign the sales agreement until we had got an official mortgage offer…
Meryl got all the documents together to send to the bank and by the end of August we were waiting for the bank to approve it all and send the offer! We decided to go to Salcombe for a week with Harry and Rosie as it was likely we’d get the good news when we were there on the beach! In fact the complete opposite happened and I got a call from the agent mid way through the week saying the seller had found another cash buyer and that we had 24 hours to get the mortgage offer… PANIC!
Meryl was an absolute boss and phoned the bank immediately who explained because of Brexit they were dealing with a lot of applications and ours was sat at the bottom of the pile as we didn’t have a completed sales agreement i.e no signature from the seller. So we had a chicken and egg situation: no mortgage offer until the seller signed vs no signature until the mortgage offer! Again, we had a cry and reluctantly admitted defeat. We set up camp in a pub and tried to find the positives in the sale falling through.
At 08.00 am Uk time the following day I woke to my phone ringing from the agent… ‘I did it Rob, I got her to sign!!!! You need to print the sales agreement off quickly and send it to the bank, can you do it this morning?’ We skipped Breakfast and headed out on a mission to find a printer which was actually a lot harder than it sounds! I ended up in a private yacht club and I had to pretend I’d just moored my boat up and needed to complete on a house purchase for a chateau in the Dordoigne! I don’t know if the woman behind reception believed me or not but she very kindly let me email the sales agreement to her laptop and printed it off for me! We signed next to the sellers signature and sent it to Meryl who worked her magic and got the mortgage agreement pushed through within 24 hours!! We were driving up the M4 when she phoned to give us the good news! So we were back on and now the seller had signed it meant she couldn’t find anyone else to sell it to!! ON Y VA!!
Contracts and health insurance forms were signed and mailed back to the bank and within 8 weeks we had transferred the deposit and were all set to fly out and sign for the house! Flights were booked for the 24th November and we were going to the Notaire in Gourdon to pick up the keys! A week before France decided to shut the borders and go into a two week lockdown… Shit! By this point we were so used to putting out metaphorical fires we opened a bottled of wine that evening and devised a plan! We quickly arranged for a proxy signing and had to send all the legal forms special delivery to France so it would get there in time before the following Thursday… somehow we managed it, I don’t know how but it all happened and on 26th I got a call from the agent ‘Congratulations Rob and Frankie, you own a French Farm!’ It certainly wasn’t how we had imagined it to happen but none the less, we’d done it and that was an amazing feeling!
We booked flights on December the 10th as we had an attestation from the agent saying we had to be in France to pick up the keys so we left at 02.00am from Leighton Buzzard, flew to Paris, picked up a connecting flight to Toulouse, hired a car, picked up the keys and finally, after months and months of waiting drove up to the house we’d fallen in love with 4 months earlier.
It was amazing, breath taking and incredibly filthy! A house that had been empty for 5 years accumulates a lot of grime, damp and spiders.
Weirdly I think we feel it our duty now to restore this house and bring some life and love back into it…
I’m now sitting here in the office with the crazy 70’s wallpaper, the sun is shining and spring is well and truly settling in. The garden needs another cut, the fruit trees are all turning green and I couldn’t be happier. I’m also wondering who is going to bother reading this… Probably no one. If you’ve made it this far then well done! This was always going to be the longest post as its quite the journey! Anyway, I’ll stop now and think about taking down another ceiling!
Thanks for reading, I’ll do another one soon… maybe on the topic of ‘adjusting to France’
Merci, Bisous,
Rob x