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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: house hunting

La vie en magnolia

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by sallynex in France

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bordeaux, France, house hunting, magnolias, Medoc, wine

france1

Sadly, this one right on the banks of the Gironde wasn’t for sale – but the architecture (and garden) were very typical of the area

Just back from a little sojourn in France, where I was helping my mum look for a little pied á terre – nothing too fancy, just somewhere we can all go and have a nice time without having to break the bank.

france2

A little out of our budget…

We were looking in the Médoc area, just to the north-west of Bordeaux on either side of the Gironde (the confluence of the Dordogne and the Garonne – its estuary hits the Atlantic just below the Charentes Maritimes. You can see it on even quite big maps of France as a kind of cut-out triangle a little over halfway down on the left hand side).

france3

…but the views across the river from the front door were amazing

House hunting is exciting at the best of times, but even better when done in a foreign country. Especially one where they have grands crus wines of international repute and restaurants that cook food so sublime you remember the meals for years after. It is not as reliably thus everywhere in France as it once was: which is why it was so lovely to find a little corner that was still untainted (mostly) by the worst bits of modern life.

france4

A typical town house, right against the old city walls in Bourg

They’re keen gardeners in these parts, too. Garden centres a go-go (unusual for France, where they tend to be a bit sparse and mostly confined to a corner of the monster DIY sheds), and lots of beautifully tended gardens too. The magnolias were out everywhere: they can grow olives outdoors here, though not to such spectacularly gnarly effect as further South, and they clearly do get frosts as the bananas and palms were carefully wrapped in several layers of fleece. But you can obviously be a little more daring than you can in the UK.

france5

Even the wine store was tucked into a hole in the ancient stonework

The local housing style is very charming, though a bit tricky for the combination of three-bed house and small-but-useable garden we were after. Lots of old sandstone maisons à deux étages in the towns, but with barely any outdoor space; and out in the country there were maisons médocains, on the face of it a bungalow, but that is to do them a disservice. These little single-storey dwellings sit on their own small plots and are made of the same sandstone as the larger houses, under a little ruffle of old clay tiles.

I think it may be one of these we end up with, much to our surprise as we’d never really considered a single-storey. But a town house with no garden is out of the question: you can’t have a house in the heart of the Médoc without somewhere to sit outside on sunny days and sip the wine.

Most of the really up-together houses are way out of our budget, so I’m thinking we may have some serious DIY ahead of us… but then I can’t help feeling we’d be letting the British side down a bit if we didn’t go for something à rénover. After all, we have a reputation to maintain: the Brits are famous in France for buying the kind of ruins any sensible Frenchman (or woman) wouldn’t touch with a bargepole and then breaking their backs and bank accounts doing them up again.

france6

Very typical single-storey Medoc style house, with a charm all its own

It was a wonderful four or five days in which we got to explore a whole new bit of France. We’ve hit on the exact area – around the town of Macau on the west bank of the Gironde – and now Mum just has to pick a house when she goes back (without me, sadly) in a few weeks’ time. Watch this space!

Moving matters #4: Things ain’t what they used to be

06 Saturday Mar 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

house hunting, moving house

Just got back from my first proper day of house-hunting.

Things are getting a little panicky at home as we’ve started getting people offering actual money for our house and this has made us realise that when you sell the house from under your feet you aren’t allowed to live in it any more.

This means you have to find another house to live in. Quite quickly.

So I began my odyssey around the south-east of England – more specifically, my home county of West Sussex – to work my way through the “hmmm…. maybe” houses we’ve gathered in our long, long spell of whimsical drifting around internet house-hunting sites. Mostly drive-bys to check out gardens + locations, though I did go inside a couple of them.

This made me realise that houses, and more to the point gardens, have shrunk in the eight years since I last did this. And West Sussex is all but unrecognisable from my admittedly nostalgia-tinged memories of a rather idyllic childhood spent riding ponies around the South Downs.

First, most of the area from Arundel to Petworth to Chichester to Rowland’s Castle – that’s much of the south-east of England – has been paved over while I wasn’t looking.

Second, the bits that are not paved over are eye-wateringly expensive.

So here’s what house-hunting is like in our credit-crunched topsy-turvy times:

House 1 was right on the high street of an extremely busy (but quite pleasant, if you didn’t have to open your front door onto it every day) country town. Didn’t stop long enough to see the garden or I would have caused a traffic jam right in the middle of the Saturday shopping crowd.

House 2 was said on the estate agent’s particulars to be “a plot of 0.7 acres”. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Until you realise that a) the estate agent clearly has his acres confused with square metres, and b) about 0.6 of the 0.7 is house.

House 3 was the only one I saw all day which was in a location I would have lived in. Stunning views across the countryside, pretty village, primary school, nice neighbours…. The garden was quite manicured in an uptight sort of way (pampas grass, trimmed euonymus, spiky things in tubs) but not too unpleasant – only trouble was the estate agents’ blurb hinted there was much more of it than appeared to be the case. Though I might have got the boundaries wrong. Another major setback was that the house was more akin to a beach hut.

House 4: in such a nightmare location I couldn’t stop without causing a pile-up (I was going 50mph at the time like the three lanes of traffic beside me and only just glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye).

House 5 was a pretty little bungalow – normally I’m very biased against bungalows but this one was gorgeous, all hung with creeper and cottage garden. Like many streets where bungalows are found the neighbours scored quite high in the blue rinse stakes but at least it was peaceful. Quite keen on this one until I got home and found it had already been sold.

House 6 had a fantastic garden with quite the biggest greenhouse I’ve ever seen in a domestic setting. It stretched from one side of the garden to the other – that’s about 40 feet – and there was a second (more normal-sized) greenhouse as well. If I tell you that even with both greenhouses and a summer house there was still loads of garden left you’ll realise what a covetable space it was. Only trouble was that you’d have an audience for every spadeful you dug: there were no fewer than five houses backing onto one side, and two backing onto the end. Talk about gardening in a goldfish bowl.

House 7: why do people choose to live in places where you get mashed to a pulp by speeding motorcars on taking more than two steps from your front door?

House 8: the chavs over the road were doing something so complicated to their souped-up car (spoilers plus decals) that they had to play VERY LOUD MUSIC to get the screws to loosen off. I’d have my screws loose living opposite that lot for long. It was a shame really as this one had a huge garden with a pony paddock in the bottom too: mind you the chav music was almost – but not quite – drowned out by the relentless howl of combustion engines from the not-very-far-away A3.

Conclusion from the day: we can’t afford to live here.

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