Up until now, Robin has been doing all of the renovation to standard building codes (he has done some serious homework and seems to be the only person around here actually following the rules). We knew we would always need a little help with one thing – knocking down the …

In three weeks today, we will be heading down to Provence, ready to sign the final documents needed to complete our house purchase, which, as you can imagine, is something we’re really looking forward to (to say the least!) To be honest, we’d originally thought that just one of us …

Replacing the steep, narrow and dangerous staircase in our house with a space-effective spiral staircase was always part of our renovation plan. We looked online at beautiful industrial era staircases from Britain and compared those to the rickety plastic structures available at the local DIY stores. As always, it was …

Contributor blog post by Vaucluse Dreamer: As those who have been following my blog for the past year will know – our big dream has been to own a home in the Vaucluse, an area we have been visiting for the last 25 years and which already feels like a …

When I left home to go house hunting, my hubby’s final words were, ‘It’s not going to be a holiday, you know.’ After my experiences over the last couple of days, he was spot-on. It’s fair to say that this trip has been planned like a military operation and has …

Contributor blog post by Vaucluse Dreamer: When our first efforts at buying a house in France fell apart, just before signing the Compromis de Vente, we were absolutely gutted and it would have been very easy to just give up and walk away. We felt though, that we had no other option, …

French estate agents (agents immobiliers) are permitted by law to draw up the compromis de vente or promesse de vente  (here both are referred to as compromis), two different versions of the initial contract of sale in France. But that does not mean they actually should draft the agreement. Most estate agents …

Contributor blog post by Vaucluse Dreamer: We’ve now stopped ranting about what happened last week with the French house purchase and dusted ourselves down a bit. We’re still very disappointed with what the Agents described as process that was far from ‘correcte’ on the part of the vendor, but as we …

Our Renovation: More Ceiling Surprises So we’re still stripping back to try to get to the bare bones or our new tiny house. During the past few days we’ve gone back upstairs to take down the ceiling that consisted of fake wood made of styrofoam and 2 layers of wonky …

Our Renovation in Provence: The Demolition Continues! You’re going to have to brace yourselves for a little hideousness- but we’ve started taring down the wood panels downstairs. This panelling so popular in the 70s is a form of cache misère which basically translates into hiding misery. When our real estate …