goose

...make sure your notaire is familiar with the peculiarities of English people buying French houses because French inheritance and taxation law is applied differently to us. We thought ours was all under control and then at the signing / paying day he pulled a blank face on us and denied knowing anything about communitie universel. Its still not sorted out. An english/french speaking lawyer might have helped. (or might not of course)

I know that caravans in France are registered in their own right with their own number plate seperate to the car but thats it I'm afraid. Good luck.

If you are actually unemployed already and claiming benefits in the UK then you can transfer your claim to France and continue to receive job seekers allowance locally. Speak to your UK job centre. (be prepared for them to initially deny all knowledge of this - its not a commonly known or used facility) There is plenty of info on the DSS website on it. Once equipped with the appropriate paperwork signing in France is really easy, you can do it once a month via the web. Its limited to about 3 months but it keeps the wolves from the door at least for a bit longer. Trying to sign on in France from scratch might be considerably more difficult!  

Simple answer is you just buy a wireless router from your local PC shop and plug it in....most modern laptops will scan and find it themselves...but...you need to think about how you're going to have paying guests linking up to it, security issues, payment issues etc. If paying guest come over when you've advertised a wireless internet connection are they going to grumble if its not working? Will you help them when they come to your house with questions about how to get their laptops connected? How will you stop them downloading tons of dutch porn each night? I'm on a wireless network as I type and 30m would be too far for the signal I would think. Wireless networks only work really well with clear line of sight (yes they are radio waves but they still don't like brick walls!) or being very close. Put in too much distance and too many obstacles and it just won't work. You can install repeaters nearer the Gites to boost the signal though. The effect on your own access would depend on the bandwidth you have available. I know thats a "how long is a piece of string" answer but if you've got the biggest ADSL you will be okay, if you've only got 1 meg you might see some performance degradation but not much unless you've got 10 gites all downloading together! Hope that helps a bit but I think you need to get an expert in to suss it out whether your building is suitable and give you some quotes.

..okay let me retract my last message then and suffer the humiliation that results from not having realised I'd had only read the first page of this thread before opening my big mouth....!

I don't thinks its strictly illegal but any cash transaction over a certain figure has to be reported to the police...its a european wide law to try and stop drug related money laundering. Consequently most people wont handle cash of that amount and hide behind the excuse of it being the law. Try depositing £6k at Barclays at home and see how long it takes before the flying squad come running in through the door! We found our bank (populaire) very easy to deal with, just pop in and they just raise a "cheque de banque" which is like a UK bankers draught.  

We've just bought on the Limousin/Lot borders. Plenty of towns, lots of attractions, lovely scenery and the dordogne river 3 miles from our front door. Really pretty towns already gone up in price but yes, there are some apparent bargains to be had in the area. One word of warning though, you are right on the edge of the massif central there and unless you view in the winter (as we did) you could be in for a shock if you buy the cheaper stuff up in the hills. It all looks lovely in the sunshine but this year - admittedly an exceptionally cold one - some of the houses we looked at had impassable roads and we're very very isolated indeed. Bear in mind that the £50k bargains may not be habitable and renovations in France are very expensive compared to UK DIY shop prices. EG ordinary white emulsion paint €66/5litres. The word habitable to a french estate agent doesn't mean the same as it does to us Brits. We saw some shockers that were claimed to be habitable but didn't have bathrooms, kitchens, sewage systems etc. In French, habitable just means the roof is mostly ok, sometimes not even that. Having said that we completed this summer on a 2 bedroom habitable (by UK standards!) stone built house with a second derelict house attached, stone built barn and a large garden (not a small holding!) for £65k so we're well happy. Good luck!  

Thanks Will, I've had all sorts of problems with the forum and IE recently and only just got access back. Being the conscientious type I rather naively applied all the microsoft security updates recently and then spent the last 2 weeks repairing, reloading and restoring my laptop. Grrr. Thank you Microsoft. Hopefully now I can read and send PMs! re: the Van, we tried a number of people and they were all hideously expensive as soon as I mentioned going to France. The trailer people were reasonably cost effective but couldn't provide insurance cover for Europe so we have to sort out our own. ho hum. Life's never easy is it? Havng done the sums re ferries, diesel, vans, storage units etc we've now decided that we're going next week with the seats in the trusty estate down and the roof piled high. All our friends with estate cars are going to get an invite soon and a couple of boxes each to bring!

Ron, I've had similar, but not quite the same, problems and have only just fixed it so I can login at all. James at LF sent me a link to an earlier article of his which I guess you've read as you mentioned it earlier and although its largely about Norton and I'm on IE I started to fiddle about with my internet security options based on his advice to Norton users. In the end it seems that there is "something" to do with pop-ups and cookies that IE doesn't like about this forum. I keep my laptop bang up to date with the microsoft updates and consequently (thank you Bill Gates) I keep getting these blasted security "fixes" that burger up my settings. Anyway, back to the point, I went into tools; internet options; privacy and added livingfrance.com as a specified website and "allowed" cookies and popups, restarted IE and all was fine. Try that.  

If its any consolation, its been bucketing down in Essex almost every day since we came back from the Lot. We're going out of our minds! Just booked a ferry for next week so we'll probably bring the rain down with us. Re: the "yellow" waste, my gramdmother tells me that during the war they used to save their wee and use it (watered down obviously) on the garden and they had the greenest lawn on their estate.

..depends also how much french you speak of course, the initial exchange of contracts SHOULD be a straightforward event, in this instance it sounds like an army of lawyers are required though!!

Yes you're right, thinking about it, isn't there some definition of max weight of a "small" trailer and over that it has to be independently braked too?

Apparently the river that runs through the centre of town floods although I don't know if its happened recently. We looked at a house that overlooked the river nr the campsite and the agent warned us that the garden was considered to be at flood risk. According to the Tourist Office, the area used to flood regularly in days of yore and some clever Dutch engineer built a series of canals (now hidden beneath paving) to releive the flood waters. As long as you're not on the banks of the river itself it should be ok I would have though. The fete de musiques, June 21st-ish, are good fun too, We got to the Biars and also Bretenoux ones this year. Apparently the St Cere one was rainy?

When you get your mainframe installed let me know so I can come round and check my email at sensible speeds please........

ha ha, how quickly you guys forget how us "uk bound" plebs still suffer......he says from the luxury of his mates house with broadband rather than his own with 45k, YES ONLY 45k!!

I dont think so, normally towed vehicles are rated at about 10 mph lower, same as in the UK. Certainly on French motorways towed vehicles like caravans are lower and in fact on some strethces they have specific limits that are greater than the 10mph lower figure. (big sign showing car and caravan plus limit!)

You can sign a compromise de vente if the immobilier is registered to do so, you dont need the notaire at this stage.

Iceni, where are you based? We can't get the PMs to work! We're back in UK now but next time we're back near bretenoux we'd love to say hello. rgds Goose & Tracie.

ah - ha, who? (tried PMs cant get it to work from here!)

That looks like a good site and a horrendous story for the author. Have you sussed the horseflies yet? After years of being scared to death because I suffer from allergies, ergo, I assumed I might have a reaction, I found that wasps actually don't really affect me badly, just a sting and small red spot. (still*****e scared of hornets!) But my wife suffers really badly from what we THINK is horseflies, they bite her and the whole area swells and then turns septic. In Thailand the pharmacist prescribed an antihistamine/antibiotic cream that works reasonably well but it still takes 10 days to a fortnight to heal. They don't touch me though. I have oily skin, dark hair. She is pale, fair and dry. Any ideas? She found vitamin B1 (from holland and barrett)stops the mossie bites.

Thanks, we're in SE England and seeking to move 350 cu ft of stuff!

Get away!! You've got some soft hornets down your way - ours wear big boots! Of course their sting is worse than Wasps and anyone in any doubt that they might be getting anaplylactic shock should go straight to hospital. Even the website you quote says see a doctor if it swells. What yucky pictures of people with wasps on their noses. Are these "hornet lovers" for real or is it a spoof website?

Sue, We've just bought in this area and we're very pleased. We're about 10 miles from St Cere, in 46 but very close to the border with 19. We did look at a house in St Cere itself but it was right on the main road and too noisy for us. Parts of St Cere can flood, ask the agents if the property is "inondable" - (or just steer clear of the river banks!) We drove around SW France for 3 months this spring looking for an area and one of the things we really liked about this area is that it is alive all year round, not a dormitory like so much of SW France. Its also very pretty of course. Beware though, it isn't "a place in the sun" in the depths of winter! In St Cere high st there is an agency called tout immobilier with an english speaking agent called Matthew. He is very good at listening to what you want to view and only showing you stuff you want. We had previously viewed many unsuitable properties from other agents and he narrowed his selection down to 2 before we left the office, one of which we bought. Can't recommend better than that. Good luck Goose (yes really) and Tracie.

We're in the north east lot and have noticed that everybody grows leeks during the winter....

We transferred money to our french bank account using our normal bank. I had researched this first and yes, any specialist money brokers reading this will spit and hiss, but I'm afraid Barclays gave me a better rate than my brokers the 3 times I checked and so I went with them. They charged me £20 for fixing the rate admittedly which the brokers wouldn't have done. The money was received seemlessly it seemed by Banque Populaire who then simply wrote me a "cheque de banque" - which is the french equivalent of a UK bankers draft - and I turned up on the day with that for the notaire. NB you have to get the notaires RIB beforehand. Our immobilier gave it to us. We gave the notaire the cheque de banque, he gave the vendors a cheque, they gave us the keys. So simple.