A New Life in France - one year on

Being an old biddy, it has taken some time for me to get to grips with setting up a Blog - (never liked the name Blog)

Now we are reasonably settled en France I have more time to write details of our arrival, heartaches and our latest situation. The house we bought was not the house we wanted. The house we really wanted was in the same area but a beautiful old building which had been completely renovated and had loads of features and space. There were four bedrooms (we now have two). two kitchens, a large lounge with marble surround fireplace, loads of outside space including a large barn and plenty of room for my long dreamed of swimming pool.

Unfortunately just as we were about to sign we were gazummped (doesn't matter how you spell it it happened! The vendors were English too, so we can't blame the French.

We bought this one because we were hoodwinked by an English builder into believing that the existing property could be demolished and a new house built on the site. For various reasons this never happened and so now we live in our "log cabin" which is too small and the house I wanted with features like a large bathroom, beautiful garden, swimming pool and log burner is just an old dream. Ah well c'est la vie!!!

Since moving in we have managed to transfer some of the concrete jungle which was the "garden" into a lovely terrace area, the views are the best in the village which is the one good thing about the place, opened up the living space to provide a good sized kitchen and small lounge and bought some plants to try and make a garden out of nothing.