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Summer has certainly arrived in Southwest France. I’m so glad we got the ‘heavy lifting’ to get our B&B ready during the winter and early spring because it has been sooo hot for the last few weeks that by early afternoon it is just too much to work outside. It’s been great for our guests though, the pool has warmed up nicely so people have been enjoying that and we’ve able to serve breakfast on the terrace as well as in our dining room. We’ve come such a long way since we arrived in France last July, it is quite difficult to take it all in sometimes.

I was a project manager at BT and in Openreach for a long time, with a focus on risk management, so having made up our minds to move out here, it wasn’t long until we had a plan in place and were getting into the detail of what was going to be involved with visas, customs, taxes etc

Looking back at my plan now it started in 2020, but it really ‘kicked-in’ at the start of 2021 with some scary milestones like handing in our notices at work, putting the house on the market and booking a one-way ferry from Dover to Calais. This was against a backdrop of COVID lockdowns, travel bans and the BREXIT withdrawal agreement.

We toyed with the idea of rushing things through to get an address in France before the end of 2020 to avoid some of the biggest BREXIT impacts, but I was being cautious as usual, so we set a date of 22^nd July 2021 to make the move.

The key ‘boxes to tick’ moving towards that date (I’ll write a post on each over the coming weeks) were: 

• Post BREXIT visas needed to stay in the EU more than 90 consecutive days and more than 180 days per year.
• COVID vaccinations – it was clear we were going to need two jabs each before we could enter the EU.
• Private health insurance needed until we could join the French healthcare system.
• A French bank account.
• Importing (or selling) our cars/motorhome as part of the move and getting them insured, ‘MOT’ equivalent and registered with French number plates.
• Selling our house in the UK and finding somewhere to rent in France.
• Moving all our furniture and belongings into storage and subsequently arranging shipment to France along with all the necessary customs declarations.
• Unpicking our accounts and services in the UK under the new post-BREXIT financial laws.
• Significantly improving my grasp of the language.

In 2020 I was running the office at a high school, part of the Seckford Education Trust, and Tom was a Maths teacher at another high school in Suffolk. We struck it lucky in summer 2020 with COVID restrictions lifting in time for us to spend 6 weeks in France in the MoHo with, for the first time, a plan in place to move over. We lingered around Villeneuve Sur Lot and Pujols for quite a while as this was the region we were most interested in moving to. In fact, we are now a little further north just across the border in Dordogne, but that is another story to pick up in future posts. We returned from France just in time for the 2^nd big COVID wave more convinced than ever that we were doing the right thing so over the winter COVID lockdowns, our plans firmed up. I think I told my boss in November 2020 that I would be leaving in February 2021 so she could start planning for my replacement and so it would feel more real to me. It was also beginning sink in with family and friends that we were really going to go through with it this time.

We signed the acte de vente and picked up the keys for our new house on 8^th December 2021 and from 1^st May 2022 we are open for business. It has been a lot of hard work but hugely rewarding and we are really excited to start welcoming guests for Bed and Breakfast as we start the next chapter in our lives.

This time last year, Tom was still a maths teacher and I had not long quit my job as a school administrator.

Time permitting I’ll be updating this blog on a weekly basis looking back over the last year on how we got to where we are today, and, moving forward, reflecting on life running a Chambres d’Hôtes in south west France.