Cultural handgrenade.

There were plenty of warnings from locals, expats, internet forums etc. Always make sure you employ local craftsmen to work on the house if you want to be accepted by the French speaking community, they told us.  This turned out to be true but not for reasons you might expect.

Late last year I spent a few weeks at the house (yes, totally ignoring warnings but a 3 month waiting list for an outrageously expensive artisan wasn't an option) with a friend/builder who was to help me build a bathroom at the house.  Building rather than fitting is the correct term here as we had to knock through to the barn and construct the walls, floor, ceiling etc.

All well and good, although knocking doorways through 3 foot thick stone walls was never going to be straightforward and so it proved.  The walls are held together with a combination of mud, gravity and light footsteps and comprise of two outer layers of meaty boulders filled with vast quantities of little stones, chaff and walnut shells. An interesting take on cavity wall insulation I presume.

During the course of these few weeks my builder managed to upset or offend pretty much every contact or friend we made since we bought the house. I have now heard 5 or 6 different plans of how the local residents plan to dispose of him from burial under patios to magic tricks gone horribly wrong. It seems no fate is bad enough and frankly, given that half of what he did is falling apart, I'm considering joining the queue!

Ultimately some good has come from the whole thing because the community seem to be pulling together in their mutual dislike of our Rhinestone Builder and no blame has been attached to us.

Hard to pick the moral out of that one but the cliché is easy, all's well that ends well.

Electric eccentric!

The standard for electrical installation in France is have armoured conduit threaded with individual wires for positive, neutral and occasionally earth. This is all good and well until one of two problems occurs.

Firstly where several connections have been made you can have upwards of 10 individual wires running through a single conduit. This makes making changes to the system very difficult because (even when correctly coloured) 4 blue wires will look exactly the same at either end.

Secondly it seems to encourage the amateur, have a go, electrician to, well... have a go! This time you can guarantee that no wire remains the same colour on its way into or out of a junction box. Wiring up a light with yellow and green wire for the positive gives you a distinctly uneasy feeling and becomes a journey into the unknown.

stop, Stop, STOP!!!

On the whole the French are very good at driving and seem to have a similar driving culture to that which I'm used to in the UK. This similarity however, seems to accentuate the differences which, while subtle, are still significant and interesting so please forgive my little bit of train spotting here. Alternatively skip to the next post, I'm sure it'll be out of my system by then.

Firstly, there's signalling on French Autoroutes. There is definitely a system but I'll de damned if I can work out what it is. here's what I do know (you may beg to differ, I'll take no offence!). Overtaking with a constant signal seems to mean "I'm staying out to overtake the next car also". If you are behind the overtaking car then constant signalling seems to mean "I don't want you to overtake the next car, I want you to get out of the way now". Not signalling when overtaking is a definite sign of weakness therefore you have no authority in the fast lane whatsoever so pull over sharpish. I have asked a Frenchman to explain these manoeuvres in detail but I (and he) ended up more confused than when we started.

Secondly there are the "STOP" signs everywhere which are apparently taken very seriously by the local Gendarmes (A tautology, I know!). This makes any accustomed driver hare towards the signs and slam the brakes on to come to a full stop before bothering to look and pull out. The effect is rather like a formula 1 pit-stop. The most disturbing result of this is trying to drive along the road which has the right of way and having the sensation that every car joining from the right is about to hit you.

Lastly (Not that this is a comprehensive list but still) there is the more "French" attitude towards health and safety on the roads. On one of our trips over we saw an autoroute sign saying incident in 12 km so we counted down the distance and sure enough approached blue flashing lights and a Gendarme waving us through in the slow lane. What he was waving us past however was a car in the fast lane fully ablaze! So we played the Gendarmerie's exploding car roulette, fortunately we found an empty chamber!

Buckle up and safe journey!!

Actually buying a house in France!

Perhaps this should have been my first post but maybe I've been trying to forget the wholr tortuous process. Seriously it really does seem to take forever.  Considering we were first time buyers, buying a house with no chain, I'd have to say that 8 months between agreeing the price and actually owning the house is a little excessive.  It only took Henry V 6 months to take Rouen by siege (Although 5 months of that could have been taken up by trying to work out the road system!).


For the entirity of this process we had only the most tenuious grasp on exactly what was happening.  I won't bore you with details but I do feel the need to say that between my wife and I we had to provide nearly 1000 signatures!  That's one each for every piece of paper in the contract (twice as there was an ammendment) and every page of the surveyors report!


Ultimately what we have is, or at least will be, amazing.  There are 2 houses around a courtyard-garden and an enormous barn space that we have no idea what to do with but will provide sumptuous accomodation for Monti (Our little 1972 Fiat 500), not that he requires much in the way of space.   All this for less than the cost of our 3 bed semi in provincial England.

How did we get here?

So it came to pass that after a couple of holidays in remote European villages. We decided we would like to move to France.

Long story short, we bought a house last year are now just a month out from moving in, our house in the UK having sold to the only bidder. This means we have reached the point of no return.

It might be considered a rash decision for all of us: me, my wife, our 18 month old baby girl with premature terrible twos and a cat with a closed door complex but decision made so here we go!

Anyway, so much has happened just owning the house in France and popping over when we can to try to decorate, repair or build bits of it that I'm just going to throw in random topics for my first few entries. This should (I make it sound like there's a plan!) get the background sorted before I do anything chronological. That said if it's happening now I'll let you know.