Picking up the timeline from when we arrived at our first rental property just under a year ago, as well as working through the admin I have been writing about, we also set about the daunting but much more fun task of choosing where we would like to live and looking at potential houses to buy.
We had a short-list of towns / villages that we wanted to check out and we visited 2 or 3 in a day, wandering around the place, getting a feel for ‘vibe’, registering with estate agents, picking up details of potential houses, stopping for lunch or a coffee or a beer and then on to the next location. Back at home later in the day, we would make some notes about our likes and dislikes and potential properties for sale nearby.
After a few weeks we had a much shorter short-list of villages (which was actually very different from what we had in mind before we came to France), and our property selection criteria were pretty clear to us by then. High on our list of villages was Eymet, which we hadn’t previously considered at all. One of the property must-haves, which wasn’t on the list when we set out, was the ability to generate some income and keep us busy.
We looked at 3 properties in Eymet that were or could be set up as a B&B. Either of the 2 great houses we looked at in the centre of the Bastide could have worked for us, but neither had the outdoor space or the flexibility inside that we wanted. The 3rd which was just outside the Bastide but still only a 5-minute walk away, had both but had other compromises that we had to think long and hard about.
Long story short, our offer on the 3rd house was accepted in late summer and with the rest of the ‘moving to France’ admin well in hand by then, there wasn’t a lot more we could do other than relax and enjoy living in France with a lot of spare time on our hands 🙂
I did a lot of running (on the not so hot days), Tom had a week back in the UK, we used the bikes for exploring closer to home, played tennis on the municipal courts, did some end-of-season grape picking, had a long weekend in Paris and really enjoyed the warm autumn days starting to plan our Chambres d’Hôtes.
It has been a very wet few days here over the weekend. Such a shame for the wedding events that our guests were attending, but it has been a welcome relief after last weekend’s heatwave, great for the garden and for my weekly longer run which was deliciously cool this week. The sunflowers in the fields are out now and the grapes, figs, walnuts etc are all swelling nicely.