1 – THE REASON FOR THIS BOOK

Magazines with an interest in promoting the French property market cling to clichés such as: ‘It was love at first sight’, ‘How we found our dream home’, and even more improbably ‘We never had a moment of regret’.

And, to perpetuate this imbalance they rarely touch on:

• The dodgier sales methods of some estate agents.
• The pros and cons of using unregistered British builders.
• Language problems – using the telephone is the ultimate test.
• Health care – when top-up cover is essential.
• Taxation – with national and two levels of local tax to consider. And this does not mean you can escape the long arm of the Inland Revenue.
• Bureaucracy – the French have, pro rata, more paper pushers than any other nation on the planet.
• The resentment of communities to ‘foreigners’, particularly those who speak little or no French.
• How France’s ‘peasant economy’ can benefit your lifestyle.
• How to adapt to life in France. Or, why one UK family in three sells up and returns to Britain within three years.

These seem, to me, to be pretty glaring omissions. In fairness, the better magazines, and certainly the broadsheet press, do run well-written articles relating to banking, health, taxation, and so on. But the advice is invariably, perhaps inevitably, generalised in a way that can become misleading. Our experience, at the blunt end, has often been ‘that’s not what we expected at all.

Take a visit to a French doctor. You know two things. Firstly, the EHIC (which you should have obtained in the UK) provides reciprocal free healthcare throughout the EC for yourself and your family. Secondly, the French health care system is superior to the NHS.

However, this helps little in practice. Go to a French doctor with a minor ailment and you get the full medical: heart, lungs, blood pressure, etc., as well as questions about diet, bowel movements and exercise. Then you get the prognosis for each of the leading English contenders in the Champions’ League with pointed reference to the number of French players each English club has on its books. Finally, you will be given a prescription and a bill. Both of these mean you hand over a wad of cash up front. This may not be what you had anticipated, but it’s the way it works.

According to your circumstances you may get some of your cash back. Eventually. Well, maybe. French healthcare is good, but expensive. It has created a financial black hole in the French economy. You pay your bills up front and you pay again in taxes. And it can only get worse.

Our plan was to buy and renovate an old building. We had limited funds, but had recently brushed up our DIY skills. But that was DIY UK and this can easily get lost in translation. If you don’t believe it, take a closer look around a French builder’s merchant. I could identify around half the products and make a fair guess at a few more. But a closer look did nothing for my confidence. Some things look the same but deep down they are different. Take French electrics. Very tricky. This leads to implications for safety, insurance, and imported electrical products. French plumbing is even more bizarre. Central heating, for instance, is driven by water pressure, not gravity. Pipe gauges and couplings are antediluvian – although a course in medieval architecture may just help.

Which takes us to the mystery of la fosse. We knew septic drainage was de riguer in rural France, but nothing of the etiquette associated with pumping out 3,000 litres of effluent. First, do not to rely on your neighbours’ noses to inform you the tank needs emptying, but do give them due warning when the man with the pump truck is coming. The aroma, as they say, wasn’t built in a day.

We estimated that the restoration, working alongside a local builder, would take three years. That was about the only thing we got completely right. And, as we could only afford to work on one area at a time, we had to prioritise. We decided that the kitchen came first, although that is not what happened at all.

Renovation does not come in discrete chunks. There is no point in digging up a floor for new cabling if three months later you are digging it up again to lay new water pipes. And, you don’t know you need new water pipes until you have shifted tons of earth and concrete. And inevitably, as the roof is a lower priority, it will start to leak just as you have fitted your new units.

All this challenged our sanity. But there was a massive satisfaction too. I became fairly competent as a plasterer, a tiler, breeze blocker, ditcher, glazier, concreter, and gardener. Doris rubbed down everything else and painted it. We saved a small fortune, but with a more reliable builder we would have saved a large one.

This, then, is the story of two people, old and wise enough to know better, who bought and restored their own mini-chateau in the middle of La belle France. It is also the story of La Maison D’Etre herself – a property whose own character reflects her colourful past. Yes, we love her to bits.

If I was to write those magazine catch lines they would be ‘Love at 16th sight’, ‘How we found our ruin’, and ‘Despite regrets and recriminations we would do it again’.

2 – A RENOVATION STORY

In December 2004 Justin Ryan and Colin McAllister of ‘The Million Pound Property Experiment’ said, ‘We are entering an interesting time in home improvements. As increasing numbers of Brits are choosing to pay for time off and a quality finish, it seems that the thirst for DIY may be drying up’.

At the same time Standard Life Bank also claimed that more British men were hanging up their hammers. Indeed, it was estimated that during the previous year householders had spent an average of £4,500 on tradesmen rather than tackling jobs themselves. A more startling statistic was that British men were prepared to pay out a fifth of their take home pay to tradesmen in order to buy more spare time. Builders, plasterers and window fitters appear to have benefited most from this new trend.

But whilst the DIY stores in the UK have found life tougher – and have diversified accordingly – profits from bricolage and builders’ merchants in France have never been greater. And yet there is no reason to believe that Frenchmen have suddenly begun to prefer DIY to football, rugby and la chasse (which sometimes may even include hunting). Indeed it is a phenomenon that the French themselves have not quite come to terms with, although there are clear indications that ‘immigration’ (which includes the 10,000 or so Brits who relocate to France every month) has something to do with it.

I believe this may be true. And with good reason. A lovely rural property surrounded by several green acres in, say, Brittany, can be purchased and renovated for a total of around €225,000 whilst a similar property and renovation in, for example, Oxfordshire, would cost at least three times as much – beyond most people’s means and dreams. Or put it another way: in France it is possible through a renovation project – which may well include some DIY – to build for a superior lifestyle in which the principal beneficiary is not the bank or building society. The incentive therefore, to invest time, money and imagination in a project is also greater.

As soon as I heard that my old friends David and Doris Johnson had purchased La Maison D’Etre I was convinced that the unfolding story would be fascinating. I had worked with David before in bringing to publication his cycling adventures in a book that was to become ‘Cycle Trails of the Yorkshire Dales’. This time the idea of ‘Renovating a Property in France’ seemed to sit naturally alongside titles I had already written for How To Books – ‘Buying a Property in France’ and ‘Buying to Let in France’.

But we wanted to break away from the constraints of a fact-based manual. We wanted to help tell the unfolding story, as it happened, with the narrative method that we had developed for ‘Cycle Trails’. This meant, as far as possible, using David’s own rhythm of words and anecdotal style. And for this to really work it had to be about much more than the process of restoration. We wanted to reach towards the soul of the property and the community in which it stood. Here there was history, tradition, a way of doing things, and even a way of thinking that is quintessentially French, albeit viewed through the irascible eyes of a dyed-in-the-wool Yorkshireman.

And there were also the characters. In the beginning the villains – the dodgy estate agents and builders – were invariably British. Here their identities have been as masked and shady as they are. Later though, perhaps when things were at their worst, it was the British community who rallied round to help complete the renovation of La Maison D’Etre. The French also have a pivotal role in the story. Here we see them as gregarious, elusive, infuriating, introverted, intriguing, beguiling, and most frequently charming.

I thank David for his massive efforts in working towards these aims. I also thank my wife, Maureen, for her contributions and suggestions. Most of all I thank Giles and Nikki of How To Books for committing to a project which stretches the boundaries of a publication style which has made How To the most trusted publisher of practical guides. I hope, in its own way, this title proves itself worthy to share the shelf space.

3 – A WORD ABOUT LANGUAGE

As a generalisation the French speak better English than the English speak French. In rural areas however the situation is more polarised. The French who speak English often do so to a high standard and like to practise it. There are some, however, particularly the older generation, who either have no English or simply refuse to use it.

When we have used speech in the narrative we have tried to reflect this. However, in order to make the language accessible to the reader we have generally limited French speech to well known phrases or those that will anyway be understood in context. Our primary aims have been to reveal character and to drive forward the narrative and the ‘default setting’ for speech, therefore, has necessarily been English.

That said, many of the conversations are not very far removed from their original framework. There are occasions, for instance, where you get ‘Franglais’ – the two languages mangled and improvised. This can occur for the best of reasons. Each person, out of respect perhaps, is trying to speak in the other’s tongue. This is understandable, although it is likely that communication would be improved if each stuck to his own.

Equally it is easy to be misunderstood or misinterpreted through invalid assumptions about linguistic competence. We have all rehearsed stock phrases before going into a shop which encourages the person responding to the enquiry to mistakenly believe that you can also easily cope with a torrent of fast flowing French. Equally, you can be misunderstood by relying on ‘false friends’. Words such as ‘demand’ and ‘parent’ have rather different meanings on opposite sides of the Channel.

Another problem is regional dialect. This is not specific to rural France but it is often in the rural areas where it is most influential and noticeable. In extreme cases it can be almost a patois which is only barely comprehensible even to native speakers of the French in the region. Imagine perhaps a Shetland fisherman talking to a Devon cattle farmer and you begin to get the idea.

It causes problems, but it is also the nature of linguistic diversity and we must celebrate it: it reflects culture, makes life itself more interesting, and is now and again the cause of great hilarity. Vive la difference!

The Authors