Nearly Retired (I am now)

As someone just said - sheet glass for windows. I have brought some over a few times ( more than strictly necessary to be honest, due to mis-measurement unfortunately). I have never seen it for sale in France. Every UK town has its glass shop or two - I have yet to see one in France. What do you do when you want your glass fixed?

A tried and much used method is as follows: Leaving Calais in the morning by car, turn right and keep driving as long as you reasonably can that day. Stop and buy house. Easy.

Poppy, Correct - no insulation and no plasterboard as it's only a barn. We wondered about adding some sort of fancy underfelt and half regretted not doing it on the main house we had done in December. But having endured the most vicious winds and rain from the West since then and not seeing the merest drop of water come through, I'm happy we did the right thing by missing it out.

It's probably of not much use to you, but I am about to go ahead in Charente Maritime with re-roofing 77.4m2 of barn roman tiles. All the timber, except the beams is being renewed -  €9170. Pro-rata that's €5331 for your 45m2 roof + €6669 for your  Beams + Frames + Wall. 

Because it's only a maison secondaire I buy most of my stuff in UK and bring it down when needed. If I have a small project lined up it's so much more convenient to buy the bits in UK as and when I can and then hit the ground running in France. That means MDF, cut timber, screws, paint, sand paper, glue, filler etc. Otherwise, after the one hour time difference, we lose the morning opening of the shops on the first day and find ourselves there around 3pm. After getting back around 5pm who wants to start work? That's a whole day lost out of maybe 5 or 6. However, I bought a 7.5m high scaffold in France last year on promo in Mr Bricolage in Saintes. From memory I paid around €375 compared with £500+ in England. After trouble (not really trouble, just slow drilling in hard masonry) with my UK sourced battery powered hammer drill I treated myself on Sunday to a new 750w mains hammer drill from Aldi in UK for £9.95. This one will now live in France - I can't imagine picking one up anywhere in France for €15 !

takaerao, I can't comment much about rates France as I do it myself, but can add my twopennyworth if it helps. In England using a proper contractor, for a simple regular house the following rates in Pounds are not too far wrong: Paint interior wall £8 per m2, ceiling £10 per m2, exterior wall £14 per m2. Of course this a general picture as site circumstances can vary a lot - but it's a start. So a house with 4 external walls 10m x 6m and 8 rooms (4m x 4m) might cost in the order of £800 - £900 for each external wall and say £500 per room. No painting of wood work is included here.  Taking a guess at say 4 outside walls and 8 rooms you get maybe £3300 outside and £4000 inside. Add £1000 for your deck and doors gives £8300. Say €12,500. (Twelve Thousand Five Hundred Euros). Now add in the french factor - how much? Guess 1.5 times for the usual higher taxes etc. call it €19,000 then.    

You say you need 7 cubic metres of concrete. If my memory serves me correctly it's about 2.4 tonnes for each cubic metre, so you'll need to be mixing a weight of water, sand, aggregate and cement weighing in total around 16 - 17 tonnes. In England ( I don't know French camion sizes) you would almost certainly need 2 ready-mixed concrete trucks. I respectfully suggest that as it appears you don't mix concrete too often, please, please be prepared with a lot of friends.

Maybe in not so much detail as above, but we've costed the conversion of our barn into accommodation and whichever way we look at - even DIY for all the easy bits, it works out more cost efficient, i.e. cheaper, to just go and buy another small house. The trouble is we can't then transport it back to our garden. Our conversion plans are on-hold indefinitely.

Thanks - I'll start looking. "..and yes - they usually have a switch on them.." Can't wait for the "buzz" when I switch it on for the first time just after a shower when I'm dripping wet and standing on the tiled floor with my bare wet feet. I still don't understand.

OK, OK...there seems to be a body of opinion developing here. I will take a look in France too, but before I do.....er,...what's an electric heated towel rail in French please?

The trouble is, shimble, it saves me so much time to buy stuff in England and then to take it out with me on my next trip. I simply sit at the computer browsing the web and/or wander around the shops in my own time getting the best spec. and best prices. But, when in France I have say a only week or ten days to do so many jobs and I can fit a towel rail in maybe 2 hours and get on with other stuff. If I'm supposed to find one, buy it and get it back to the house then it's maybe 2 days gone (out of 7) and it'll be a compromise because that's all that's available locally at the time. That's why I'm hoping someone here can help.I won't leave the electrical books behind next time either! But they'll probably be no use then because I'll need to be buying plumbing gear or some such thing!!!

I'm in England just now and have left my 2 French electrics book at the house in France and I'm not sure on the way forward with my next little project. In France we have an electric wall heater mounted on the wall about 100mm off the floor and say 1.5m away from the bath (the other side of the door opening plus a bit). It's on the same wall as the basin and about 1m away, but lower. It looks 100 years old, we've never used it but know it works. So the simple plan is to replace it with an electric towel rail (400w to 700w, don't know yet). It is much easier for me to buy one in England now and fit it later. The trouble is that here they say a 5 amp fused spur is needed with the switch outside the room. In France we have no switch at all and the switch is actually on the old heater itself. Can I still fit a UK sourced towel rail with no switch and rely on the thermostat? Do they have switches on them and is the permissable? I emphasise "UK sourced" because the heated towel rail I'm thinking of getting is from Italy. I really don't won't the bother of fitting a switch outside of the room and drilling through 700mm of rubble fill to do it. I really get confused with what's OK or not with electrics in a bathroom. We've already got a socket on the wall just above and to the side of the basin - surely this can't be right?

I'm in France now and using the slowest dial-up internet ever - hence the delay. Our 08.00 28th February Speedferry was cancelled due to the weather. They offered to "park" the sailing or wait for the 12 noon one. I'd heard the weather forecast (getting worse!) so we parked our sailing for a future date. We drove up to the tunnel and paid £127 for a single crossing which got us to France at about the expected time anyway. £127 hurt a lot, but taking into account the usual Speedferries deals and our 2 free crossings with them this year I'm not complaining overall. I guess our train (08.23) had say 30 cars on it at most. What a waste of a fantastic resource. If only the prices on the tunnel were a bit better.    

Ooops! Entirely wrong thing as far as "hidden" plugs go - but a useful source of cheapo adaptors to get you started.

QVS have about 11 / 12 shops in England. I paid maybe 72 p or so a couple of years a back fro my adaptors  - now 78p + VAT = 92p each. http://www.qvsdirect.com/search.php?mode=search&by_title=Y&by_shortdescr=Y&by_fulldescr=Y&by_productcode=Y&substring=QA%20B141&need_advanced_options=&sort_field=orderby&sort_direction=0

I bought loads of lights from IKEA in England (the tall uplighter ones) that came with the regular UK plug. I cut off all the plugs and bought and fitted french ones - it took ages. I then found out - TOO LATE - that IKEA and maybe others too (?) actually sometimes come with a continental plug hidden inside the UK one. Apparently you have to wreck the UK one in the process of finding it. I'll try it next time I bring something over.

I haven't made the move for full-time living in France and might never do. But something I read over and over again is the advantage of holding on to a UK address: mum's, aunt's, or that of a very good friend - whoever, just someone you can trust to handle post for you. You just might be glad of it for helping to get Sky, bank accounts, pensions etc etc. 

There's a programme on BBC2 tonight (7pm UK) about people commuting between France and England. I think it's made by the Money Programme crew so it may be a bit more informative / accurate than some other shows.

I have the utmost sympathy for your position - a job needs doing and nobody seems to want to do it or know anybody who can. In my frustrations I have turned to doing things myself and if you're physically able to dig a shallow footing, concrete it, lift blocks and lay a bit of mortar you could have a go yourself. You'll get plenty of advice on this forum once you get going. As for me, having tackled a block wall not long ago and now I'm now learning plumbing.  

OK - it's nothing as bad as I thought. I didn't know that the first €750000 was exempt, nor that an allowance for your home was made. In this case it really is a wealth tax which can't affect too many people. I've learnt something new and maybe others have too - that's the beauty of fora such as this. To regain some credibility, I re emphasise that my arithmetic was correct - the assumptions were wrong.

I take it that you two don't live in and have no knowledge of SE England in any place say 50 miles from London. Semis round my way go for £400k and are full of young families often with a non-working mum - and no, I don't know how they do it either. I have heard some have interest only mortgages and are relying on an inheritance to pay it all off in the end. PS I didn't know about the 20% reduction for the house you live in - but still stand by my arithmetic and it's still a lot of tax.  

If your family assets comprise a 3 bed semi in a posher part of Britain and you have a small pension fund or savings paying maybe £5-£10k income a year, i.e. say, a total of half a million quid, then you'd be paying close to £3000 wealth tax every year. That's an awful lot of tax for a very ordinary situation in South East England transported to a life in France.

It might be too late for you, but a tip I picked up a while ago was not to use plasterboard at all in a shower area. There are waterproof plywood panels going under the name of Aqua Panel (or something like that) with one side a shiny coloured finish. Some even have a mock tile effect. The advantage is that you just fix the boards to the walls where you plan to fit the shower and apart from the obvious sealing at the tray junction - that's it. The joint between the plasterboard on the walls and the panel in the shower is hidden by the shower cubicle frame.Waterproof and easy to clean. I've no idea where to get them or what they are called in France. In your case, if you don't plaster skim the boards first, remember you'll never get the tiles off again without wrecking the board. Well, that's the theory anyway - if I don't find a plumber in France (and I've been looking a while), I might never actually find out how this solution works.

I am confused. If you do not trade and all you want is to take the money in the most tax efficient way and eventually close the co. down - you could do it right now and forget about paperwork at every year-end time. I am no expert and do not rely on this advice, but I'd be tempted to talk to a UK accountant about taking it all as a capital gain while still UK resident. If you've both held the shares for a while you'll get business asset taper relief on any gain and maybe end up paying no tax at all. I repeat this is only an idea and I am not qualified in any way shape or form.

The longer the run the more cross sectional area you need and there will be limit to how far 2.5mm2 can go - I don't know how to calculate it. If it's any help, when we had electricity installed in the barn (35 metres) away, the electrician ran a chunky cable to a new "submains" box in the barn from where he distributed the power and lighting circuits.