How we decided where we wanted to live!
We’d already tried living in France for 3 months back in 2011, we loved the place, we loved the climate, the people, the chilledness (not sure if that’s a word!!) of rural France, and we wanted more. After reading about Poitou Charentes in a French magazine in the Autumn of 2013, we decided that we had to take our plan to the next level. We needed to see the place we could hopefully one day call home and decide if it fitted the bill.
It didn’t!!
We took a holiday, I forget exactly where, but suffice to say it was approx 2 hours north of where we are living now. It was France and rural and in Poitou Charentes, but the region itself is huge (approx 350 km top to bottom) and at the time we were in a part of it where the land is flat and can be somewhat uninspiring (at least for our tastes anyway).
The holiday itself was fine, we had a laugh, did a few cool trips out, met some nice people and I got some bike rides in, but the location just wasn’t right for us.
We needed to be further south, where the land was greener, more trees and forests, and more hills. More like Yorkshire in other words!!
We wanted Yorkshire countryside, but in France. Not picky are we!
We arrived back home after the holiday and decided that a town we’d heard of called Chalais would be a decent base for us to live. It seemed to be a bit of a hub, being only 1 hour by car from Bordeaux, Bergerac, (both with airports) Angouleme and Cognac, and about 1 and a half hours from the coast. It had schools, restaurants, shops, bars, and a train station. It would do, it was where we were headed.
And really the decision on where to live was made that easy. We liked what we saw of Poitou-Charentes, we didn’t quite like the area we’d stayed on holiday but we knew the area further to the south was hillier, greener, and generally more inspiring and exciting. We’d had a few drives out for the day, seen a bunch of pictures, read a bunch of website and magazine articles, and that was enough for us.
Next step, go to Chalais itself, check it out, make a decision!
Before we actually moved to live full time in Chalais, we had 3 mini trips there to check the place out. Homework time on the ground, so to speak!
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TOP TIP
It’s often a good idea to visit a place for a while before you decide to live there, and certainly before you decide to buy there. We’ve met a few people in our time here who just bought a house without having previously spent any time living in the town itself. They got lucky, and fair play to them, but they are I think the exceptions rather than the rule. We decided to rent in Chalais for 3 years before buying. It took us that long to get a feel for France, the local area, the people, culture etc. Also the winter here only lasts from the end of December to mid-Feb, but it gets very cold, and the summer only really lasts for the last half of July and most of August, but it gets very, very hot (spring goes on forever, Autumn also goes on forever). Live through this, experience real-life, not tourist life, and only then, commit to making that place your home. At least, this is the case if you have a young family anyway. Maybe for a couple with no kids or a higher risk appetite than we have, it’s slightly different!
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The first time we visited Chalais it was just me and my wife, for a long weekend. We stayed at a gite we’d found in town, owned by a local English couple, who we have since become good friends with, and had a whirlwind tour of the local area! We visited the school and met the headmistress and had a nice chat to her, all in French (which was a struggle) about the school, found out a little about what the kids would get up to, what class sizes they had etc, and what paperwork we had to fill out in order to secure a place.
French bureaucracy is famous for being vast and complex. It didn’t disappoint.
Before we could secure a school place we had to have a permanent address. Before we could get a permanent address we needed to find a house, secure a rental agreement on the place, fill out more forms, subject ourselves to more checks, more paperwork, more time, and then the local mayor (Mairie) had to stamp an official form saying we were now living at a house and could therefore secure places in the local school for our 2 children.
In France the Mairie controls a lot of power locally. He controls the budget which pays for the school places, the road works, the Christmas decorations, even the summer village gala! He also has a say on who lives where, who can buy which house, or not as the case may be, so getting his approval was really key to the whole thing.
Anyway, I digress. On our weekend break in Chalais we met the local estate agent (immobilier). Another local (also English, or actually, Welsh, as she often reminds us!) who would also become a friend to us and help us out a great deal. We were finding out quickly just how welcoming, friendly and helpful the locals of Chalais could be. So it was that we saw some houses, went to look at a couple and decided on one that we would quite like to rent for a year.
Our new maison was big by the standards of what we were used to. It had a huge garden, slightly more than 1 acre of grass filled with mature trees, thick, high hedges and topped off with a stunning view of the local chateau. The house was a 5 minute walk into town and had plenty of privacy, that is apart from the relatively busy, in rural French terms, main road which meant trucks, cars and tractors passed right outside the front!!. It had all the bedrooms we needed, loads of storage space, a veranda outside the front where we could eat and entertain, and a huge driveway for our cars and those of any guests. Rent was cheap, we just needed to persuade the French landlord that we were suitably responsible and financially stable people to rent his parents old house, which he now owned and was trying to sell or rent.
After meeting the headmistress, the gite owners, the secretary to the Mairie, had a tour of a few houses, ate some local pizza and had a wander around the town, we went home to England, and had some decisions to make.
First thing was to show pictures of the house to the kids. When they saw the garden they were excited at how huge it was, but they were both a bit reluctant on moving to France (more of that later), so their excitement was somewhat subdued.
In the end though my wife and I made the decision, it felt like the right place for us, we were going to go for it. We rented the house we’d seen with the huge garden and view of the chateau, and we started the ball rolling with our new Welsh immobilier friend and helper, to put pen to paper on our future French home for the next 12 months.
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I’ve missed a couple of weeks due to personal travel, hopefully back onto a weekly cadence again now, so there will be more from me next week. Thanks for reading, Phil.
