Snapshots of A House in Brittany

We've watched  a load of 'Do Up' TV programmes (who, buying 'here' in Brittany hasn't?) but we have never seen that what we have been up to in Brittany is anything like any of these shows - with or without an audience... But, after a few 'mooching' trips we found this little beauty and paid just £12,000 for it. What many people would have regarded as, pretty much a ruin - perhaps,  but rather than being able to compact our work on the house into just a few months in an intensive way... or a year or two, perhaps more realistically, we have chugged our way through 17 years of ownership meandering through bite sized pieces of renovation with a few intense phases that have involved a few other trades along the way. 

In the beginning we were flabbergasted; couldn't believe...that a couple of Brits could, with the greatest luck, just breeze in and pick up an 18th Century farmhouse with three barns a well, a bread oven and the three quarters of an acre of land that were left close around it for such a pittance. Even now I have to pinch myself when we are approaching the house as we do 6 times a year journeys there...

The only reason that a house and land like ours could be offered for the price of a Fiat 500 is if there were ongoing plans for a new housing estate to be built. And, I have seen this happen in Sussex; that a house can be blighted by plans for a nearby development... but, as with many things here in the UK they were still asking far too much for a house in the country which was due to be hemmed in by not very nice neighbouring properties... actually though in France new Lotissement (estate) houses are just awful... and far worse than most things built in the UK tend to turn out. So here's a series of before and after photo's of our own project in Brittany along with a continuation of the blurb about the work which still, after all these years is still on-going!

Yes, we've been slow to renovate our house. Family commitments clipped our wings to some extent and, fairly early on in our ownership of Le Roz... (Ker Leroy as the house was known - in Le Roz the hamlet ) we took an opportunity which presented itself to get involved in a business start-up introducing folk to Brittany property which we run from the UK and which, because we always need to be on our toes, we also update things on the sites whenever we are there, also taking opportunities to meet agents and enjoying a low key...very nice time... It has to be said it's an ideal form of semi-retirement.

Occasionally people have eyed, with mistrust, the role we play in making introductions to property in France.... Our position is one I see as an altruistic one. Place before some punters a bargain and they regard you with the scorn they normally reserve for car dealers or double glazing salesmen. Our motives in starting our business at www.ahouseinbrittany.com was not money (heaven knows we could have worked out a dozen other ways of doing that more quickly and in greater amounts) and our passion for Brittany is verging on sycophancy. But we wanted to provide a parting in the long grass; a straightening out of what we found was a quite confusing system to those familiar with buying property in the UK. The system in France was not at all well defined back then- at least not for those coming to it from outside. In our own search in 1999 we identified 3 routes to goal and tried them all over the space of 3 trips.

Firstly via Notaire's - those well respected employees of the state,  entrusted with the transfer of property from seller to buyer - dotting the 'I's and crossing the 'T's... Even if you find your house through any other means the Notaire is an essential link in the process... but they are obviously not the only means of finding the right property. The way I sum up a Notaire's role to the uninitiated UK buyer is to say that he/she is like a solicitor (but with knobs on) and even if you have a linguist's 'grip'...you don't have to run around after them trying to speed things along and/or agonise over when the process stalls or goes into free-fall because someone fails to get mortgage funds or a buyer dies mid-process. And... you only need one Notaire for each transaction - not one for each side of the deal as here in Blighty.

Secondly there are, of course, Estate Agents in France (Immobilieres) although back in 1999 they were (to my way of thinking) very low key. I'm not demeaning the profession by any means - especially as the rules and regulations governing involvement is much more stringent than in the UK. But national chains were by no means as well established and seemed to hang back in terms of projecting French property to the potential UK market. And, I may upset all those hard working Immos, Marketing (note I used a capital 'M') was not a huge skill on the French side. It's improved in leaps and bounds and now gaining real ground... Thanks, I'm sometimes thinking, to the cross-over of UK buyers in France who have become commercial agents and have seen the rise and demise of the early leaders in the business who offered French property to the UK market - principally with the massive assistance of the internet. Without this it would have been impossible.

Thirdly there are brokers, portal sites and forwarding agents (which is what we have become). And, in a sense this is the way in which we found our own house. When we hit the buffers with the two former methods.... we tried this latter method and, because it went so spectacularly wrong we ended up finding our house from the debris of the failed forwarding agents efforts. So, when an unwitting Chambres d'Hotes owner pointed us in the direction of a neighbour in the valley who had just come back from a property exhibition at Birmingham's NEC we accepted the offer of some late evening hospitality, drank some good wine enjoyed bread and cheese, met new friends and... the following morning... bought a house! Obviously it obviously wasn't that simple - there were plenty of twists and turns and all sorts of messing about - but that's why when a further opportunity presented itself to get involved in offering Brittany property to predominantly the UK market we took it and have been making the introductions now for 15 years.

First bucket of water from the rebuilt well! It's better than the mains!!