Tag Archives: buying houses for rent

Friday 5th February 2010 – Well, we’ve done it now!

This afternoon we signed the compromis for these houses in Montaigut. Mind you, it’s not all plain sailing as you might imagine with anything involving me. Firstly the houses are situated in a historic area (in fact,just round the corner is the blacksmith’s where Joan of Arc had her spurs made) and so the town has the right to match any offer made on any property in that area. Mind you the town is flat broke so that’s unlikely to happen but I bet they’ll soon find the money if they get to hear that there might be a possibility that I might be moving in there.

Secondly the properties have already been sold elsewhere. However the guy can’t get a loan (and looking at them, it’s no surprise) and so he has renounced his offer, but nevertheless he needs to give his formal agreement.

Nothing is ever straightforward, is it?

Completion is set to be the end of April so the major plan currently is
1) finish Terry and Liz’s kitchen on rainy days
2) point the outside wall of their house on dry days
3) change my barn roof
4) go to Brussels and have a blitz on my apartment in Jette and put it on the market.
5) come back and start on these houses

So that’s the plan for the next three months anyway. You can see what I mean about being busy.

les guis virlet puy de dome franceTalking of being busy though, I’ve finished insulating this cupboard space, put the horizontals in and now I’ve started to plasterboard it. It won’t take at all long to finish now and when I’ve done that I can put some shelves in there to store anything that needs to be kept clean and tidy.

And whule we are on the subject, Terry and I have been discussing my lighting. Terry is refusing to get involved in my electricity ( well, he is an electrician and he does have his professional pride) and he is quite impressed with these 12-volt LEDs that I’m using (and they had a few more on sale in LIDL today). So much so that he agrees with me that a mains (230-volt) lighting circuit is pretty redundant. So what am I now going to do with all these light bulbs that I’ve been collecting? But I’m not all that bothered. It’s saved me a lot of work and it is rather unnecessary.

And who was Joan of Arc? Why of course, she was the wife of Noah.

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Wednesday 3rd February 2010 – The really big problem …

… with making offers on properties that are for sale is that when the offer is accepted unconditionally, you always wonder just how low you could have gone. And this was what happened today. So I am now a half-owner of two more houses in the local area – or at least I will be on Friday when the signing takes place. Normally when you sign for a house here you pay a compromis – or deposit and it’s almost always 10%. The estate agents want us to sign on Friday but it’ll take a few days to round up all of the dosh so we suggested we delay the signing for a few days. But ohhh no –
“Could you manage 5%?“
Clearly they aren’t intending to wait until we sober up. It’s either a case of if we wait until Monday to sign, the houses might fall down over the weekend or else the people at the estate agency need to eat this weekend.

Rhys was wondering, with all this talk about letting them, whether we were going to let out the rooms by the hour. I said that if we were to do that he could come and be the receptionist. We would supply the high heels, fishnets and basque but he would have to supply his own whip. There would also be the question of taking the sheep for a walk every morning.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had another really good day of electricity and so I had the electric heater on for three hours. It increased the temperature by 4 degrees and with it being an oil-bath radiator it was still keeping the room something like warm even at 18:00 – three hours after I’d switched it off.

lining wall space blanket insulation les guis virlet puy de dome franceI’ve finished lining the walls of this cupboard place with the insulation blanket stuff and I’ve started to fit the plasterboard. Another day would see that all finished but I’m going to be a tiler’s labourer tomorrow. Terry is tiling his kitchen floor and needs to complete one half of it so that he can move the gas oven over. Liz is going out so I got the short straw. What with all of this moving for Claude, signing for houses, preparation for this radio programme we are doing and all of this our plans have become somewhat shaken up.

And if that wasn’t enough I hear on the grapevine that there might be a chauffeur’s job coming up for a couple of months. It’s enough to drive you to drink.

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Tuesday 2nd February 2010 – I’ve had another one of these days …

… where I haven’t done very much. Life seems to be conspiring against me right now.

I was awake long before the alarm went off – in fact I had to crawl out of bed to go for a Gipsy’s but it was far too cold to stay up so I went back to bed until the alarm went off. At least, that was the plan but for some reason or another it was 10:04 when I came to my senses (such as they are).

I didn’t have time to have my breakfast either for while the kettle was boiling the phone rang. It was the Mairie ringing up – could the woman doing the census come round and take my details? So she and her minder came round (they’ve clearly heard all about me) and took down my particulars. It was a good job I had put clean ones on. But the French census is a lark – they just want to know your age, place of birth, profession, education standard and your employment as well as something about the conditions in which you live. Vastly different from the UK where they want to know more about you than you know about yourself.

After that, someone from the Conversation Group rang up with a chagrin d’amour. I suppose that I should be pleased that people feel comfortable in confiding their problems to me. It’s a pleasant change from being totally ingored – the usual state of affairs.

I managed an hour or two on the wall but it was then time to go off to Montaigut to look at these two houses. One is supposed to be livable in a certain fashion but the other one is merely four walls and a roof. We had a good poke around and as you might expect the “livable” one didn’t live up to expectations – damp penetration being one of the major problems. And from the corner of the roof that was supposed to have been fixed. But we had a good chat afterwards and some serious discussions took place, with the result that for better or for worse we placed an offer on the properties – suitably balanced to cover the cost of re-redoing the roof (I made sure that the estate agent was aware of the defect) and putting right the damage. The way we see it, the more time we spend discussing the situation the longer it’s going to take us to make a start. And all the time with inflation at 3% and bank interest at just 0.5% the longer you wait the more the real value of your savings melts away before your eyes. The quicker we can find something suitable and start to invest our labour into it the better.

After that, it was 17:00 when I came home and I didn’t feel like starting work again just for an hour – which was just as well as Claude came round for a chat and he was here for over an hour. I’m going to have to put in a good day tomorrow.

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Wednesday 27th January 2010 – I haven’t done much today.

I crawled out of bed this morning on time for a change and after a quick breakfast I piddled off to St Eloy to meet Liz and Terry for stage 2 of our househunting. First estate agent was on the phone all the time we were there and so we went to the second. Three people inside the office, two chatting to each other and the third on the phone.
“Ohh, she’ll see you. She won’t be a minute” said one of the chatting colleagues, indicating the one who was on the phone. So we waited and waited and waited while she carried on talking on the phone and the others carried on chatting to each other. 10 minutes of this and we piddled off elsewhere. Yes, don’t sell your property with ORPI of St Eloy – total waste of time and treat the customers with contempt.

At the third the estate agent selected three properties for us to have a look at and we wandered off to look at them. One was out of the question – although you can make 7 or 8 apartments in it, it’s expensive and needs a lot of money throwing at it. And there’s no way you could just do up one or two for starters – it all has to be done together. The other two are distinct possibilities and one particularly has fired our collective imaginations.

But why oh why is it that estate agents over here are so disorganised. When we looked around Pionsat the other day the estate agent forgot the keys and had to run back to the office to find them and here today the estate agent had “issues” with the keys. No sense of organisation, let alone “customer service”.

This afternoon I did even less. I’ve had a whole run of bad nights where I’ve had problems sleeping and it caught up with me this afternoon and I crashed out. But it’s no surprise. Minus 273 degrees C, or zero on the Kelvin scale, is when all molecular activity ceases. And while it hasn’t got that low yet it’s …. gulp …. minus 9 outside and my molecular activity has ceased. And I shan’t be doing much tomorrow if it doesn’t warm up any.

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Thursday 21st January 2010 – I’ve finished the verticals for the studded wall…

upright stud wall first floor les guis virlet puy de dome france… between the bedroom and the rest of the first floor. And you can get some kind of idea how the bathroom is going to look.

The end three verticals are going to be for the bathroom bit, and the gap between the third and the fourth (ie the first from the left) will be the door into the bedroom. From the third vertical across to the vertical by the shower base – that will be the door into the bathroom and the shower base will be between there and the wall. You can just about make out the sink – that will be on the diagonal in the angle in the bathroom and there will be another sink in the angle in the bedroom. The toilet is in the far corner underneath the window.

This afternoon Terry Liz and I went to see some houses. We’d heard of three cottages for sale at €27,000 for the three in a village near St Maurice and it was worth a look. Money in the bank is fetching nothing right now and three cottages in a small village have the potential to be three income-generating holiday homes. We don’t mind the hard work in repairing them and so on and realistically for the price we weren’t expecting much, but these three were right at the limit of what was achievable. Furthermore there was no land to go with them – not an inch – and there was no view. They really were right in the middle of a village.

The estate agent took advantage of our presence to show us a few more houses and there is one of them that has got us talking, but we’re going a-hunting over the next few days to see what else we can turn up. It’s all about income generation at the moment and cash in the bank with almost-negative interest rates and inflation at 3% isn’t working right now.

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