Living in the Moment

I don't know about you, but I've been glued to the Olympics for the past couple of weeks. What with that and desultory house-hunting it's been pretty quiet around here... until the boys came home and then all untidiness and noise broke loose.

Still, we're off to the UK tomorrow for a couple of weeks of coolness and drizzle, and thankful to be leaving 35°C and no pool. We arrive just in time to watch the closing ceremony which will round off things nicely. Then we are going to be out and about in Essex and Kent visiting for the most part military museums, castles, a steam train at Ongar and so on. That's the plan, anyway.

I'm gutted that the Olympic Park will be closed to visitors. I was really hoping to pop along and see the site of so much excitement, the flowers and the red squiggly thing.

I'm happy to forget house-hunting for the time being, forget the dingy interiors and exteriors, forget the deflating effect of going inside the houses for sale built in the 1970s and 80s and seemingly not redecorated or modernised since.

Some people can visit a place and see the potential of what it could be like. I go into a place and see the wreck that it is and can't go beyond that. Luckily my DB is not like me; he has an eye for potential, but also expensive tastes in restoration.

Actually, if I'm honest, I'd like to have the money to throw at a finished house where all I have to do is put my bags down, my furniture inside and feet under the table. Some people love the challenge of redecorating or restoration, putting their stamp on their surroundings and feeling they've achieved something when they finally finish. I'm not like that. Pity really considering my financial situation is not in harmony with my aspirations.

Never mind, we've got Mo Farrah going for Gold to look forward to tonight and for the moment, everything's right with the world.

Living in the Sticks

It was swelteringly hot yesterday. Our original plan had been to go on a motorbike ride up towards Mont Aigoual in search of a cool breeze, but the thought of donning a leather jacket, trousers and gloves was not a pleasant one.

After much dithering we decided to take the car. I mooched down into the village to buy some picnic goodies, essentially cheese and tomatoes. The tomatoes looked lovely, and so they should have. Four cost me over €4! Admittedly they were quite big (only 'quite', not 'very'), but at that price they would not go on the picnic with us. They required suitably appropriate preparation which I don't count as being slung into a plastic box and shaken about.

The cheese man was on form having found a wallet and was offering 'tasters' (like he does for cheese) - anyone for a bit of carte bleu? He didn't know whose it was as he hadn't dared to open it. He was waiting for the municipal police officer to take control when he would be able to say with complete honesty that he didn't know what was inside and therefore could not be accused of nicking the cash. I gave a passing thought to the type of person who loses his wallet, retrieves it thanks to an honest stall-holder and then promptly accuses him of theft even though no money has actually been stolen.

The most interesting cheese the fromager had on offer was dark green which sounds a bit dodgy. I tried it. It was made of cow's milk with pesto and basil, and was delicious so I bought a chunk along with some Saint Nectaire fermier. I turned them into sandwiches with some nice fresh Festive baguette and sweet onion.

We put the air con on and drove north towards Ganges. Then we carried on to Sumène and on a bit more up to the col beyond St Martial which is a cute village of stone houses crammed together on the hillside. My reaction to villages like this is usually 1) how do the residents live? 2) what do they do for a living? 3) how do their kids go to school (especially collège/lycée)?

Spot the tiny hamlets

This subject is foremost in my mind at the moment because we are looking to buy a house. It's a frustrating process because in relation to my work, for the same price, I can either have small and crappy but close, or bigger and nicer but far.

My DB tells me that lots of people have to travel a long distance to work, and their kids too to go to school, especially lycées which tend to be concentrated in large towns. Still, when you have been used to travelling 7mins to get to work and have schools on your doorstep, the thought of giving all that up to spend €170 on petrol per month driving 35mins each way just to get to and from work, plus having the boys change schools and sending one on an hour's trip to Nimes, just to have more space for a reasonable price is difficult to swallow.

I rent (expensively), but I have organised my life to be as practical and pleasant as possible. The penalty of wanting to invest and secure my future is living in a minable crappy little house as so many are in Languedoc (built badly in the 80s with no taste or coherent design), or completely disrupting my cosy lifestyle and that of the boys by moving away. As I'm greatly affected by my surroundings, a crappy house will depress me so there's no point, in my opinion, buying something for the sake of it.

So maybe I should take this opportunity to shake up my life, and that of the boys, but moving teenage boys away from a city is likely to go down badly. Conundrums, frustration and irritation - life has got very annoying just when I thought I had it taped.

After our picnic, we went for a short walk towards another col through a lovely shady wood made up of chestnut trees and pines, with bracken and pink heather.

Having exerted ourselves nicely, we drove back via Ganges, St Hippolyte du Fort, Sauve and Quissac. There are some lovely villages and small towns along the D999 which skirts the foot of the Cevennes hills. At Quissac we turned towards Montpellier, and a good half an hour later arrived at Prades le Lez. An extra 5 mins and that would be my daily drive to work if I lived there. Hmmm.

For Sale Clefs en Main

 

Does this house look nice? How much do you think it costs? 

Of course there's no way you could give an answer on price until you knew where it was located. If I said it was just outside Nice, you'd be looking at over €1m - the 'demeure' is set on 1750m² of land, has 4 bedrooms, and outbuildings, totally renovated and is ready to move into 'clefs en main' as they say here (keys in hand).

In Montpellier, it wouldn't cost an awful lot less actually - under €1m for sure because it doesn't have a pool, which isn't surprising as it's actually located in Vendée, 20 mins from La Roche-sur-Yon where of course it rains a lot. 

It belongs to friends of mine who are trying to sell it. They have been relocated back down south, to my joy as they are now 1 hour up the road instead of 7, and are selling this beautiful house as they won't be going back.

So, knowing that it is in Vendée how much do you think it's worth? Well, it's on sale at €383,250 including agency fees. Amazing, compared with prices down here. If I wanted to spend that here I'd get something like this - 980m² land, 91m² habitable, 4 bedrooms with horrible old tiles and kitchen. It does have a pool though, which, being down south, is a cool thing to have.

One pays a high price for sunshine and proximity to the Mediterranean. Even the prices here have not suffered too much during the recession and people selling their crappy 30-yr old ugly dumps smile smugly and tell you that you are buying their wonderful house which needs nothing doing to it in a much sought-after area so of course that's why the prices are so high. When you look around, all you want to do is pull the whole lot down and start again, which is what one guy near here did, but at a price, natch.

Anyway, if you know of anyone looking for a beautiful stone mas near the Atlantic coast who does not want to renovate, but move straight in, pass on the word about my friends' place. Local village colour guaranteed!

Erratum: Apparently south Vendée does NOT rain all the time, it's got a nifty little micro-climate which guarantees similar weather to the Riviera! I didn't know that either! Read all about it here!

Maisons de Crap

Yesterday I went to visit a house for sale. I knew it would be hopeless before I set foot in the place because I know what I want, and I knew it wasn't going to be it.

What I want:
A new, contemporary house with clean lines, not a splodge of crépi in sight, and a coherent floor plan. I don't want a project, I don't want to do DIY, and I don't want to live in a building site full of dust and stress while work is being carried out. I want one of these, actually:

Maison Bodard

What we have a lot of around us is rubbish like this:

maison style Languedocienne

They were built in the 1970s and 80s without style or taste by people who didn't have the levels of financial comfort of those on the Cote d'Azur. Often, the living area is on the first floor 'to make the most of the (non-existent) view', so instead of stepping out of your salon into the garden, you have to negotiate stairs of some sort to get a snip of basil.

living area on first floor

My heart sinks most when I hear the phrase 'ils ont favourisé la couchage'. This means loads of poky places where they've shoved a bedroom or place to sleep. The house I visited yesterday was one of those. Even the garage had been converted into an ugly veranda. The family used the house as a holiday home, even renting it out when they didn't need it, and it showed.

The kitchen was not the usual disaster of heavy oak, but an equally disastrous cheap white, scuffed, muck. The windows had never been changed since the house was built in 1975, neither had the electrics, so the original sockets were still there, not earthed! The downstairs loo had an original wallpaper in violent turquoise with densely packed small pink flowers, including on the door.

There were good things however: 1) the view, 2) the pool. But the house needed renovating from top to bottom. 'Oh, it could be done for 100€K' said the agent gaily. I looked at her in astonishment because I know it would cost double that if you wanted to put in quality stuff and do a good job. As the house is already on the market at 519€K - a special 'low price' in view of all the work that needs doing, but not low enough by a long stretch in my opinion, you'd take it beyond its true market price if you spent what needs spending.

So I left, as usual, dispirited. Land is a ridiculous price here, so my contemporary Bodard house is almost certainly nothing more than a pipe dream. Of course, I could move to the sticks and drive 45mins to get to work, but that is not a quality of life that suits me, so it's back to the drawing board, and more visits of crap.

Good thing I'm not in a hurry!