A few weeks after moving into the flat we were finally contacted by the famous Fairy Godmother who said she would arrange for us to see some properties if we let her know when we could get over to France again. We immediately made a ferry booking and hired a tiny Gite (little self-contained dwelling with all the basics for self-catering) in St Sever, Calvados, for 5 days. Fairy Godmother said she would meet us there.
Over we went again, this time with a different ferry company and the difference was amazing. We found the French crew very happy, very nicely trained and very helpful. There were games to keep customers occupied during the trip and we decided then that once we were ‘property owners’ we would join this ferry’s ‘Home Owners’ club’ and just travel with them. We currently use a different, no frills, ferry service which runs from Le Havre, and find them good.
We arrived at the Gite and were met by the lady owner – who apparently spoke no English whatever (we found out later that she did know some English but wasn’t going to use it until we spoke French, which is common practice in France!). We managed to get ourselves understood and were given the keys to the gite, a really tiny house in the grounds of a huge mansion, with one main room with kitchen and bathroom off, and a bedroom on a ‘shelf’ up a small staircase. As we were being shown around the house and gardens Andy saw an apple tree and declared in his best French “Ah, pomme de terre!”
“No”, said the lady, “that is not a potato tree!” End of lesson two!
The septic tank at the gite was a bit ‘perfumed’, to say the least, and the flies were having a field day. We had taken fly spray with us and sprayed all around the gite. The flies died. Unfortunately, the spray also stunned the huge spiders, which had been hiding in the bedroom area, and they fell to the floor, staggered a bit and started running around. Thank goodness for heavy boots! Fly spray does not kill spiders, just puts them to sleep for a while. Some of the spiders in France are a bit on the large size, we tend to call them ‘horses’ but after a while we got used to them and just moved them out of our way. The smaller ones seem to be the most aggressive.
We settled into the gite and made a couple of quick trips to nearby villages and towns to look in windows of Immobilier and buy groceries. Most of the week came and went and we were worried about contacting Fairy Godmother. I had tried to call her on my mobile phone and got ‘call barred’ on the screen. I eventually telephoned the flat in the UK and got our youngest daughter, Helen, to phone Fairy Godmother from there and then message me back. No joy. On the Wednesday we were given a hastily written message from the owner of the gite, which said Fairy Godmother would be with us on Friday – one day before we left to go back to the UK! Almost a whole week wasted – we had mostly stayed in the Gite, not daring to stray far in case she came.
Fairy Godmother and her partner Jim arrived early in the morning on the Friday and we set off in our car, following theirs, as they had a large dog with them which completely filled the back seats. Again we had been told we would be driven around to view the properties. Being far more familiar with the area than we were, they kept disappearing from our view but we eventually stopped outside house number one. We knew this belonged to an Englishman who wanted to move to another location. What a mess! Paper peeling off with damp, piles and piles of clutter – real rubbish, old paper, old tatty books and junk everywhere and the smell was dreadful. We walked through the garden and saw that there was another piece of land further away which was part of the property. Even to the untrained eye we could see this was so waterlogged it sunk in the middle. Apparently a local farmer had grazed his cattle there for a while but I think even that idea was given up – I imagined the animals kept sinking!
There was a small ditch running through the garden with a little ornate bridge over it and we finally realised that a stream actually ran under the house, through the foundations! No wonder everything was damp. The outhouse, a few yards from the main house, held a bath and toilet, the only one on the property – none inside the house. We imagined running to the loo in the middle of winter. No thank you. What else can we view?
Andy and Jim got on really well and I liked Fairy Godmother. We asked if there was anything we could bring over for them on our next visit – all Jim wanted was some tins of corned beef. We took several tins over on a later trip but never saw Jim again.
The next house we were led to was in the Village Chardonnets in the Department of Orne. The village had no shops, no grocer, no baker, no butcher, no doctor etc, not even a pub. The house we were to see was next door to the village church and in a very quiet area.
The house was unlocked when we arrived so, after debating for a while, we all went inside. The previous owners had bought a small farm and had already moved out. We entered through the back door. The door stuck as we opened it and the two rear porches (it had originally been a shop and small house and had two back doors, each with a porch) were full of clutter. Inside the house, the first room we saw was a kitchen that had definitely not been put in by professionals. Most of the unit doors and drawer fronts had fallen off. A make-shift pantry was in the corner, made of chipboard with a curtain on a piece of string over the front of it. The eye-level oven was full of grease and muck and the hob was a total disaster area. We walked on into the house just as the owners, a young couple with three children, arrived. They said they did not think there were any keys to the house, as it had never been locked. This is something which would never happen in the UK.
We walked past the kitchen into the breakfast/dining room, which had a beautiful room divider made of oak with a shelf above it. A space in the divider led to a large lounge. There was an archway (actually, a very large jagged hole about eight foot square) into a smaller lounge and a separate door to what had been the original kitchen of the house part of the property. A large mural of a forest scene was on the wall and, although torn, it looked very nice and very French. There were odd nails stuck in the mural and one was on the branch of a tree in the picture. For several future visits we would hang our coats on the nail and it looked like they were hanging from the trees. The door panels of the door to the old kitchen contained sheets of mirror instead of panels – this was to enable light to reflect into both rooms.
We went up the stairs to see four bedrooms and an old, really tiny, bathroom – partly dismantled. In the old bathroom was another door which led to a staircase to the rooms in the loft. These were freshly decorated (badly – they had been papered over fresh plaster and the wallpaper was already coming off). We were told the roof had been blown off in the storms a few years before and the whole roof and the upper rooms had been rebuilt with the insurance money.
We later discovered that the roof had been destroyed by a fire, possibly by the children playing with candles in the attic, during a ‘camping’ game. Also, when the roof had the new guttering attached, they had run it the wrong way, but that’s another story.
Back down from the roof and a further door on the first floor opened onto the most gorgeous bathroom ever, a huge corner bath, large corner shower, bidet and ‘his and hers’ basins. There was also a large, walk-in linen cupboard. The bathroom had only just been completed when the roof went. Floor to ceiling tiles around the bathroom were in a Grecian style with sections of tiles showing pictures of Grecian scenes. We were hooked. This was the house for us. The bathroom swung it!
We saw about four more houses with Fairy Godmother and Jim but didn’t really take much in as I think we had already decided. I remember one property looking like it came straight from Steven King’s ‘Children of the Corn’ and it scared the pants off me. All the fields surrounding the property were cornfields and it was then I realized I had been watching too many horror films.
Once we had decided that the Village Chardonnets house was for us, we realised we had got the price slightly wrong, confusing Euros with francs (the currency had only recently changed) and would not be able to buy the place for cash. Fairy Godmother met with the sellers and negotiated a slightly lower price and we took out a small loan on our flat in Portsmouth.
We visited the property again on our own the next day before getting the ferry back to Portsmouth and agreed we were doing the right thing. Being on our own we examined the house and grounds more carefully. In the large barn, which used to be a forge of some sort, there was an old pool (billiards) table, but the sellers had told us they would be taking it with them – it took them a year to collect it, as you will see later. The garage contained the biggest photocopying machine I have ever seen, it half filled the garage but was not really any good to us, so we asked them to remove that also when they came for the pool table.
Billiards in French has the same spelling as English but when pronounced sounds like ‘beer’ and it took us two years to finally realise what it meant. We saw a sign in a café advertising the fact that they had billiards upstairs and by then we had discovered that double ‘l’ in most words is not pronounced at all, we already knew that French words contained so many letters that the ends of words were often dropped as well (like ‘filles’ (girls) – spoken as ‘fee’ – so why all the extra letters?)
We had seen in the garden that we had a huge grape-vine and several fruit trees. We later found raspberries, strawberries, apples, pears, rhubarb, cherries and lots of other fruit. As the seasons changed we also discovered many plants and bulbs which sprouted into life.
The annex on the side of the house had an earth floor and stone walls and had been previously used for storing potatoes, but the upstairs room was part of the roof renovation and was ready for use – except they had inserted a Velox window and forgotten the lead flashings, so the rain had poured in and destroyed most of the plasterboard ceiling. An easy job to put right in time.
We decided that these two rooms would be our museums, Andy would be upstairs with his radios and I would be downstairs with the perfume bottles. The lower room also contained the fuel tank for the central heating oil and the smell was like an old garage. The stairs to the upper room were way past their sell-by-date and would also have to be replaced.
In the far corner of the lower room we spotted a door at the bottom of a flight of three steps and when we looked, we discovered we had a wine cellar! Sadly the wine had all gone, but there were jars of preserved fruit, which had probably been there since around 1940. The shelves were also full of rot and worm so these were one of the first things we would have to remove. The cellar was also damp, and currently still is, probably because of an underground water supply. We had the village pump outside the house when we bought it, but this was later removed and replaced by a dummy well. The damp mould spoors had risen into the lounge above, and although we have cleaned up the lounge, we still have to sort out the cellar.
Once home again we started to make plans. We booked an appointment with the Notaire (Solicitor) in a nearby town and arranged to meet Fairy Godmother and the Notaire to complete all the formalities.
Fairy Godmother said we should buy the house as a couple, meaning that if one of us died the other would be able to live in the house but half of it would belong to our children. We argued that we wanted to buy as two separate people so that if one died the other had full ownership. As it turned out the Notaire had already thought of this and had prepared all his paperwork for both eventualities.
In November 2002, we finally became the owners of the house in the village centre of Village Chardonnets. Strangely, our Fairy Godmother disappeared almost as soon as the paperwork was done and I was a little worried when a lady outside the office called to Fairy Godmother who promptly disappeared back inside again leaving the lady outside. We had seen on TV agents who were not what they seemed and were worried that we may have been conned – after all, we did not know that much French.
No comments:
Post a Comment