Anton Redman

Until Le Monde gives up having odd bits of Classical Greek on its front page,just to put the plebs in their place, I am not going to read it. With the exceptions of the Independant, Guardian and FT every English daily newspaper now seems to have a reading age of under 12.

Why anyone would want to keep a right hand drive car and live in France beats me! What is the problem - If you want to overtake anything other than a VSP or a tractor in safety you either break the speed limit or spend far too much time on the wrong side of the road. Both the 306 - now 280,000 miles up and the X type - only 45,000 miles were at least €8,000 less after allowing import costs than a similar French registered car.

Stakeing - broadly you walk away down the lnb line so the are looks like it is pointing at you

Suggest try these people. http://www.rabotin.eu/ They are on the road between St Andre de Cubsac and Blaye

The sports car for the menage a trois ? That was meant to have the Matra model in it - edit

You are receiving your signals from four satellites which move in a cluster inside a large cube in space. If you have a friend with UK TV the first thing I would do is to try your receiver on their dish and their receiver on your dish. If you receiver shows the same problems at your friends and their receiver works perfectly at your house then the receiver probably needs replacing. Either another cheap receiver from a French supermarket or better still a cheap UK freesat receiver from UK. You may still find you need to upgrade the dish size. If you receiver is OK at their house then you probably have an alignment problem. Try the menus on the remote control till you find one that displays sighnal strength and quality. Fine tuning the dish alignment. Before you start moving any thing. Mark the elevation on the dish with a paint line or scratch so that you can recover the same position if every thing goes wrong. Walk down the garden at least 10 metres and hammer a stake into the ground so you can find the exact angle if anything goes wrong. Wait for a dry day if possible and take your receiver and a small portable TV outside so that you can see them as you move the dish by minute amounts. Maximise the signal strength then quality a channel: Move the dish up and down and left to right by minute amounts first maximising strength then quality. Lock the position then move the LNB clockwise or anticlockwise and also in and out again concentrating on quality One other thing you can try is to google ‘Lyngsat’ and see if there is anything that is common about the channels you can and cannot receiver. If they are all ‘Horizontal’ and none are ‘Vertical’ then either the LNB or receiver has a problem. Ditto if they are all high or low frequencies. If H & V is the problem if you turn the LNB through 90 degrees you should swop the channels you can and cannot receive.

Recent say 12 months ago new UK purchased HP asked for both country and language on start up. Has autosensing for both keyboard and spell / grammer checking. Key board sensing is a pain as I prefer a Canada as the keyboard for typing in French.

Why not use cable ties adjacent to exisitng fixings ?

Hard to tell if the problem is getting worse or we are simply hearing more about it but nothing is safe unless locked.

I am suggesting an annotated list,probably best done with a spreadsheet of houses for sale that should allow you to at least find out if properties are selling. My experience of trying to extract real information from estate agents is that it is hard work and not very rewarding,

Val - Do they expect to cover their costs or do they blunder into it using their preconceptions from the UK ?

Agree with Val - the moment you start paying a third party who in turn is paying taxes and cotisations it is very hard to make renovation pay. Possibly if you turn the thing on its head and run it as a business. I have just been through the diagnostiques on our maison secondaire for electricity and broadly it is far less onerous than a CONSUEL inspection and if a property did not pass I would not want to live in it.

Neither materials purchased by you or work done by you is allowed against tax. My first action would be to start a list using say ‘Selonger’ you need a column for each of Count, Ref, House Area , Price, Pieces, Bedsrooms , Land if any, Per MQ, Grade ,Notes, Agency, Price Cut. Count is simply how far up or down the list the property is. I use five marks for Grade 1 = Disgusting, 2 = How can people live like that, 3 = Just about OK, 4 = Fine but dated, 5 = As good as it gets. Per square metre is a reasonable indication of value for money. Notes contain enough description to identify the house such as ‘Very Pink’ or ‘Home Cinema’. Reference is the number of the house when it was first listed and will show how long the house was for sale. You need to use price and area to keep the list to a manageable size. Sometimes postcode work for others a specific town. When you first prepare the list you will be amazed at how many houses change size, number of rooms and price as they move between agents. You then update the list each week and move to a separate list those houses which have either been withdrawn from the market or sold. After a couple of months you will have some idea of : Which local agents are actually selling houses and what type of houses. What kind of price you can hope to ask. There is a huge gap in France between the cost to the purchaser and what the vender walks away with even ignoring tax. Say € 120,000 from a total cost to purchaser of € 138,000. Also under the current rules every € 100 you spend on materials will mean € 29 of the added value disappears as tax, if you recover the costs from enhanced value of the property. Without knowing the size, condition, what you hope to achieve and local of the property I cannot form a view of the € 6,000 budget. However unless it already has main electricity, water and sewage you will probably need to double that figure.

If you self move from say Bordeaux to London you save one day's hire and about 900 kilometres in fuel and mileage. Return the van to Lille or If you are very lucky Calais. Drop car off at their depot on the way North. Depends on how much you have but if we ever move to Uk we will probably downsize and so 3.5 van will do us.

No way should the purchaser pay a UK solicitors fees for drafting a C de V. The Notaires fees are mainly French equivalent of stamp duty

Last time I searched in 2004 I could find no companies offering one way rental. Some of the majors now seem to offer a limited service. For instance Eurocar will allow you to hire a Renault Kangoo, but nothing larger, from Bordeaux and drop of in Calais. However if you persist on the internet in both French and English some do come up: http://www.rentacar.fr/trajet-simple.asp http://www.onewayvans.com/faqs.html http://www.oneway-vanhire.com/_uk/c_index.htm I have not checked any out and do not take this as a recommendation.

The only thing I would check is that the solicitor puts in an apprpriate method o making sure you have the benefit of the 7 day cooling off periosd and that there is evidence of this

Much better descrioption than mine

If the antenna is aimed in the right direecion a € 10 mast head amp may be a cheaper solution

It is not perfectly safe because the French / EDF take a pretty cavalier attitude to like versus neutral issues. In broad terms you will be beaten up on price when you sell it and may possibly have to sell it to French so get a quote for sorting it now

I started about 20 years a go on our maison secondaire. In three houses in France I have had more grief, pin hole leaks, fittings breaking etc than five UK homes.

Have a look at the tool shown http://www.bricodepot.fr/bordeaux/node/472067 Using soft copper pipe. You first fit a nut the pipe. You then flare the end of the pipe using the tool shown. This produces a flange. You then put a washer between the copper and the fitting and tighten up to produce a water tight joint. Or you find a T piece with a shoulder to take the olive. If you have hard straight copper pipe I think you have to heat and cool it before using the clamp on it.

Roughly where in France are you ?

Although the French call the fittings 12*17,15*21 and 20*27. They are actually UK 2/8, ½ and ¾ inch sizes. On page 98 of current Brico Depot catalogue the show three types of straight fittings : Raccords a Compression Droit Male which should enable you fit 16 mm to ½ inch. Or by fitting Mamelons Reduit Female Female reduce you from 12*21 to 12*17 so you can use compression on 12 mm pipe. Raccord a Compresion Droit female into which you can screw nmale adaptors Manchon Egal a Comresion which you used for joining length of multicoche. The three types of T are egal for all multicoche and either male or female for the other fitting.

My understanding is that the compression fittings used for multicouche are unique to multicouche. Unlike PER where only the nuts and compression part are unique. Therefore If you want one leg of copper from pipe which starts in MC you need to purchase a special part for instance : Basically you use a ‘T’ as below and a nut and olive the correct size for the copper you have purchased separately. http://www.bricodepot.fr/bordeaux/node/472119 Where you want to switch from multicouche to copper also with nut and olive purchased separately http://www.bricodepot.fr/bordeaux/node/479298 Bricodepot used for illustration only.