21) A new home in France

Spring flowers in the Quercy Blanc

Spring has arrived in the Quercy Blanc (the area just SW of Cahors, where we are staying).  Everywhere is a riot of wild flowers, cuckoos are cuckooing and we even saw a Hoopoe (Huppe in French) hoopoing.  That is to say Georgi saw a Hoopoe (twice), but I haven’t actually seen one yet (in order to be able to verify/substantiate this claim – though I did see a shooting star the other night which Georgi missed.)

La Borde Neuve, Cezac

Our main news, though, is that (having now seen a total of fifty one properties) we have bought a house! That is to say we made an offer, had it accepted, and on Friday 8^th April we signed the Compromis de Vente.  We now have seven days to change our minds, after which we are pretty much committed, unless something horrendous turns up in the Notaire’s searches.  There is a great deal we need to do to the house, so we have made it a condition that we get all the relevant permissions before we sign the final contract (there are thus still things that could go wrong).

The little un-restored farmhouse at La Borde Neuve

As well as the main house, La Borde Neuve (which means New Farm in old French) has another little house.  This is currently uninhabitable, having neither electricity nor water, and the two vaulted cellars at ground level are not connected to the two rooms above reached by the outside staircase.

View of the potential garden behind the house

It has a potentially nice garden, at both the back and the front (in fact everything is “potential” rather than “actual” at the moment)   We always said, after spending sixteen years doing up Gressingham, just to move out a few months after it was finally completed, we would never take on a major restoration project again.  C'est la vie............

View from the Pigeonnier over the front garden towards the hills beyond

On the SW corner of the main house, there is a tower (Pigeonnier) from which you get great views of the surrounding countryside.  Although these towers are known as Pigeonniers, they seem to have very little to do with pigeons.  They are very typical of this region and seem to be a sign of status rather than serving any particular purpose.  Various theories have been put forward to us about their origins.  Some say that they really were for keeping pigeons, and if you could afford to build a stone tower just for the pigeons, then it showed everybody you had more money than you needed.  Others say that pigeons were a delicacy, so if you could eat them regularly at meal times, this was a measure of your success and worth.  Another theory is that these towers were where the dung was kept (a very valuable commodity not long ago – and still considered so by several famers in the Lune valley).  It might, therefore, be thought of as an early form of slurry tank. We won’t use it for either pigeons or merde, it will simply be part of the house.

View from the terrace at the front down the valley

Outside both the kitchen and the salon, there is a terrace which runs along the whole length of the house.  As this faces south, we think it will need some sort of shade, and we may make it into a (covered) Bolet in due course.

The septic tank at the far end of the "annexe"

This is currently the barn, which is attached to the west side of the house.  We are not, however, referring to it as a barn, as this might mean planning permission would be needed for “change of use” to living accommodation.  The “annexe” houses (rather charmingly) the fosse septique (septic tank).  This is the distinctly dodgy concrete structure on the right of the picture.  We have had an “expert” from SPANC (Services Publics d’Assainissment Non Collectif) to check this out and, surprise surprise, they have declared it “Non Acceptable”.  However, we went to see the person in charge of sewage disposal at the Mayor’s office, and she was a charming young lady (somewhat embarrassed by the small size of her office – which, clearly, she felt didn’t do justice to the worth and importance of her position), who is now our best friend.

They obviously take matters very seriously when it comes to the disposal of human excrement (and we are delighted they do).  Most of France does not have mains drainage so there is potentially an awful lot of merde simply going into the soil by way of (often dodgy, out of date, clogged up or broken) fosses septiques.  We have another appointment on site with the lady from SPANC (a slightly weird sounding acronym, given the circumstances) on the 18^th.  Together, we are going to plan the ultimate system to deal with our projet, and we are looking forward to the meeting in a state of high excitement and anticipation.

The attic, which will become a studio, office and additional bedroom

The attic of the house is not quite finished, and this is where my studio is going to be.  It is a large space which reaches up to the ridge of the roof.  It is rather good, in a way, that it is not finished as it allows us to get things exactly as we want them.  Although the house looks old it is actually a kind of hybrid, a bit like Gressingham.  It is built from old Quercy stone on the foundation of some old stone barns (the walls of which still remain in places on the ground floor).

As several people have pointed out, space for animals was always considered more important than that needed for humans.  Often, therefore the houses are rather small and the barns and stables are much bigger.  We presume the little house was the original farm house then, about forty years ago, the present owner’s parents decided to re-build a bigger house on the site of the barns.  They only used part of the house and never bothered to do anything with the attics or the ground floor.  We won’t be able to do everything to start with, but we should be able to afford to get the two main floors finished and how we would want them, in the first phase.

Interior of the original farm house

The little house still has all its original features – Quercy stone floor (heavily cracked), open fireplace in the kitchen, stone sink with drain hole to the outside, and stone vaulted cellars.  This will be a project for some (unspecified) time in the future.

The main sitting room/dining area

The main living room or salon is fairly featureless at the moment but it does have a great big open stone fireplace.  It also has two French windows leading out on to the terrace and is a very good size, so can incorporate a dining area as well.  We were amused (but not surprised) to see also that, when they decided to wallpaper the walls, they didn’t bother to move the (presumably rather heavy) piece of furniture, but simply wallpapered round it.

The big ugly (but very useful) barn at the far end of the garden

About a hundred metres (luckily) from the house is what the French estate agents describe as a “hangar”.  Although supremely ugly at the moment, it is far enough away not to intrude unduly, and “one day” could be faced in stone and converted into something more desirable.  In the meantime, it might be useful for storage – and it even has an excellent series of chicken coops (and a run) at the side.  I am rather keen on the idea of chickens, but Georgi seems very much against the idea (“Who’s going to end up looking after the clucking things whilst you’re in your studio painting?  And are YOU really going to wring their necks or cut their [bloody] throats? etc, etc.”).  Watch this space...........

Our virtual swimming pool

For the past week the temperatures here have reached into the mid eighties (it’s still only early April), and we shall definitely need a pool.  This has, though, started to exercise our resolve as we investigate the regulations relating to pools and the different designations of land.  At La Borde Neuve we have twenty one and a half acres, in four parcels of land as shown on the official Cadastre.  Each of these has a different description – Sol, Terre, Tallis/Terre, and Tallis/Lande.  Quite what these all mean, I don’t exactly know (and I suspect no one really does – or cares).  It seems, though, that the designation affects the rate of local tax you pay (farmland, for instance, attracts a higher rate than woodland apparently).

 However, just to make things even more complicated, half the land has an overall category as farmland, whilst the other half is in a special category “N” zone (a sort of French equivalent of the English conservation areas).  We are still delving into the whys and wherefores of what you can do in terms of pools, but they don’t seem to stop them, they just try to determine how far away from the house they should be, and what colour you can have them.  It has been decided by minds much more elevated than mine, that blue is an unnatural colour (even though more than half the world is covered by [often blue] oceans, and the whole of the world is covered by [often blue] skies).

A rare orchid before being destroyed by Monsieur MacGreggor

On our last but one visit to the house, we were thrilled to find lots of orchids in the garden (apparently this region is well known for its orchids, several varieties of which are unique to the Qercy Blanc).  Sadly, on our next visit a few days later we found the lawn had been mowed, and most of the orchids had been decimated (I think some of the rural French are a little less sentimental than we are).  Hopefully they will come up again next year, and we will no doubt cause great amusement amongst the locals as we create strange patterns on the lawn in an effort to mow round them.

Another thing the area is known for is black truffles and one of the biggest truffle markets is just about twenty miles to the east.  We have several acres of oak wood and I am determined to discover truffles - all we need is a pig.