The History

How come we ended up buying a house in the South West of France?  Well, back in late 2007, we came into a small bit of money, and decided to do something with it.  We both enjoyed going to France on holiday, and had talked a lot about retiring there.  We had fallen in love with a lovely village called Venasque in Provence, where we had been on holiday at Easter that year, however, prices there were very high.

We started looking in the Bordeaux region, using a property website selling French properties to the English, and focused on two specific areas - Blaye, just to the north of Bordeaux on the banks of the Gironde estuary, and south of St Foy, near the Dordogne river.

We went for a long weekend in October 2007 (actually the weekend that England beat Australia and France beat New Zealand in the Rugby World Cup quarter finals) and went to visit properties.  We started in Blaye, and happened to also notice some properties with an estate agent that we hadn't arranged to meet.  On the first day, we visited three properties which we had already identified.  One of these was really nice, the others needed a significant amount of work.  We made arrangements to come back to Blaye on the Saturday afternoon (we were originally going to stay near Duras for two nights), and visit a further three properties.  None of the additional properties were good enough.

Before heading back to Blaye,we visited three properties around Duras.  One of these had been refurbished although still required some work; it also had a swimming pool.  One other one was also in good condition, but was much smaller, and had no pool.  The third needed an entire refurbishment and was a semi-detatched house.

Therefore the choice was between the one in Blaye and one near Duras.