Buying the land

Once upon a time I worked for a humongously large investment bank. Life was good, life was sweet. Without warning a tsunami of an economic downturn hit us and before I knew what was happening I was washed overboard. The company threw me a life ring in the form of a relatively substantial amount of money which I gratefully latched on to. To my great surprise I washed straight up into another job (though just a temp job) and it was like nothing had ever happened so I decided to use my windfall to change my life as I had grown tired of the incessant commuting to work and all day at a computer in an office, working for large corporations.

To this end I decided that I would buy land somewhere in the European Union as that was the most affordable. Croatia caught my eye as it is about to join the Union and has plenty of rural land at extremely affordable prices. I announced that Croatia would be our future home and my siblings had a few qualms. By the time I had soothed their qualms I had managed to pick up a few of my own and one fortuitous day, when I was following links to different Croatian land websites I mistakenly found myself on a French land website instead and that, as they say, was that!

Immediately a feeling of rightness settled over me, the sun shone, the angels sang and without even discussing it with anybody I started my search anew, this time in France.

Almost immediately I found a few parcels of land that would suit so I grabbed my youngest sister, Boo, informed her we were doing an impromptu flight to the South-West of France and off we set. For two and a half days we looked at various bits of land in the Charente and the Haute-Vienne. The original piece of land we went to see was beautiful, with most of what we wanted but it was relatively small and had a bog smack bang in the middle. 'Don't worry about it, build a pond' everybody told us but that would have left us with even less land so wasn't really a viable solution.

On the last day, just before we were about to head back to England, empty handed our real estate agent took us to see a big parcel of land (7+ acres) that might be available as the owner had decided he was too old to build and move to France.

While not perfect (there was no running water or trees on the land) it did have a lot of potential and a CU (French certificate stating the land could be built upon after an application is submitted) and it was HUGE! We got back home, discussed it with our other sister, Kimmy, and decided we would go for it. A short while later our offer was accepted and the wheels of French commerce started turning.