20/02/2022
We are getting close to selling Le Clos du Verger early this summer. We shall miss it enormously but we shall not be far away. Our next adventure in France has already begun and we'd love you to follow us on the new page The Number 9 adventure. Click on the Number 9 title below to get the full experience.
The new owners will be continuing to rent out our two holiday homes, and we'll be telling you more about that. Stay tuned in!
Cet été Le Clos du Verger aura de nouveaux propriétaires. Et Martin et moi ? Notre vie ici en Dordogne continue ! Je vous invite à suivre nos aventures et notre nouveau page Facebook que nous avons créé pour nos familles et nos amis en Angleterre (c'est pour ça que c'est tout en anglais, mais les photos racontent bien notre folie !).
Nous avons toujours tout le printemps pour nous régaler au Clos du Verger et les gîtes restent ouverts. Les nouveaux propriétaires vont continuer à louer aux vacanciers. J'aurai le plaisir de vous les présenter plus t**d. Ne nous quittez pas !
The beginning of the story.
Last summer we bought our downsizing home in a non tourist village in the Dordogne, France. We both knew as soon as we saw it, that this could make a charming home. Welcome to Number 9!
It is a stone house, mostly single storey, in the village centre but not hemmed in. It has a solid well built core but a leaking roof and it is completely, totally unmodernised. One of the wooden floors had completely rotted leaving just the earth floor below, but the rest are tiled. It has a quirky twisty staircase up to the extensive attic, where buckets catch the drips from the leaking roof and parts are still wired along the rafters from the days in the 1930s when the to***co harvest was dried up there. The gaps under the floor boards were stuffed full of old mice nests and many aged maize husks. Oh, there is one mod con - it does have a bathroom of sorts, and a hot water tank, and mains drainage.
So evidence suggests that number 9 was a smallholding in an early stage of its life. One outhouse has stalls for a cow, goat or donkey. As we take off the layers added over time I begin to sense that the place is probably about 150 years old, maybe 200. This page is about us putting the house back on track for another good length of time, and turning it into our home.
Our total budget for our new home is 100,000 euros, of which half was taken up by the purchase cost. Then add estate agency and notaire fees of 6000 euros. So with what is left we have to allow for purchasing a bit of land behind the house, correcting the ravages of time, and putting in the wherewithal to make it a well functioning home for later in 2022.
The work will include replacing the condemned electrics using a qualified electrician, putting in a heating system, removing one chimney, stabilising and insulating the roof, reshaping the bedroom end with a new corridor, creating a bathroom out of an adjoining outhouse and turning the existing very very basic bathroom into a utility room, insulating and plasterboarding most of the walls, replacing all thé original draughty single glazed doors and windows.
Our current home is for sale and, until that is sorted, our cash-flow is extremely tight. So of necessity we have to tackle much of the renovation of number 9 ourselves, at the same time as keeping our current home and grounds in good condition and our gite lettings on track.
We are in our early 70s, used to an active and hardworking life, with a fair scattering of well honed building skills, but also with a great deal of arthritic pain for the man of the house. We aren't sensible enough to avoid this sort of challenge.
