Blogging has stopped for a few weeks. It’s been a crazy busy time for us. Completing final paperwork for properties which have to follow French strict timetables and rubber stamping. It takes forever but when you finally get that little bunch of keys, well you don’t care. In a flash of a paintchart, the waiting is forgotten as your brain switches onto swatches, layouts and how on earth could anyone installed stairs like those!

On the 10th we sign for our final investment…our little mountain house. Typically it’s got extra land. The French add land in strange and obscurely shaped arrangements, sometimes a few roads apart, tucked behind a barn or as this time round, somewhere. The agent can’t seem to find it either but assures us it’s real and part of the purchase. So we are excited. It could be a field, a small dilapidated barn or even a forest. Will let you know.

The cadastra…the plan of the property and boundaries will also be obscure. Maybe too much wine for lunch ..the document is rarely accurate. My husband has made it his mission to find the little round plastic markers – bonarges – that show the extremities of your land. They are overgrown mostly, usually with a vicious bramble or two; but it is illegal to move them. They are gold if you find them. A proper declaration of ownership!

The farmhouse has been signed for and we have run round it’s rooms and gardens like two love struck teenagers. But then this is really our first home together. Neither of us has ever lived in a finished home. Our erratic lives and relationships left us homeless just 3 years ago. Now we have 4 properties and land and the happy realization that what we always dreamed of can now become real.

Our renovation plans are ambitious. Middle age means we don’t wish to hang about pontificating about what went before. Juggling all the buildings is a logistic confusion sometimes. This week we lost a day. Wednesday just dissapeared. The French electrician turned up and we were, well not where he was. Luckily the French don’t seem to expect us Brits to be organised. They work to very slow deadlines and really nothing is deemed urgent. A lost day…thats life.

So loosing our heads on a weekly basis (not via a guillotine I may add) means copious notes stuck everywhere. Endless to-do lists. I am collecting a file of torn out magazine pages for inspiration and the rooms are filling with Brocante finds. Troc the auction house, is invaluable. The staff get quite excited when we visit…I am a serious bargain hunter and the prices here are very reasonable. It’s going to be an absolute joy renovating all the characterful pieces.

So apologies if the posts are erratic and as confusingly ordered as our to-do lists but on the agenda an update about my new car, making fertilizer, brocantes, sewing, chicken maths and ducks. It’s all go here in rural France!

Views en-route to the Farmhouse. Just beautiful.