Nearly Retired (I am now)

We got our computer-to-French-phone-socket lead in LeClerc - I think any biggish supermarket will be OK for that. It's a while since we got connected to dial-up in France but I remember the advice was NOT to get any discs but just to log onto the ISP site when you are still in England and set up a new Pay As You Go Account. We selected tiscali.fr and all went well. I vaguely remember only getting so far until I needed to put in the phone number I'd be using - not knowing it, I think I then printed off the rest of the instructions and finished the job in France. I think the trouble with loading a disc is that the new ISP takes over your machine with stuff you don't want and so making it difficult for you to change back. 

I work from home and am even doing less of it every year. The french house is not rented out and we could be there maybe 300 out of 365 days a year if we wanted. But, and I don't know why, something always crops here in England letting us only make last minute dashes for a few days or so. I suppose we get from S England to 17 around 5 to 7 times a year for visits ranging from as short as 5 to as long as15 or so days. The 5 day trips are a challenge though - 12 hours to get there, 3 days to recover and 12 hours back. Most of the visits seem to be in the winter too - strange. The last time in November we planned to go for a week and then came back. Two days later the roofers told us they could start and we went back again for 3 days. I don't think the car engine even cooled down for the fortnight.  We're back again in a couple of weeks.

[:(] Even though I started the thread I haven't got one yet. It's good to know they are good enough for the job. One day I'll get one, but at the moment 'her indoors' won't let me and tells me to get the petrol one going. 

When we were looking to buy a holiday home in France we logged on to this site and a couple of others that I won't name but are easy enough to find with a bit of googling. We spent maybe two years reading posts and following threads - we soon became pretty expert (in a theoretical sort of way anyway). We became familiar with a lot of things through a sort of osmosis I suppose. So when we actually started the physical searching in France and then had to deal with all the buying procedure we had a very good idea of what we were doing. I would imagine a continuation of this process would give a good grounding for actually living in France too.  

Here, http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1998271,00.html

I'm not too far from Cognac - you could park your van at our place.

I suspect you have combined two totally incompatible expressions in the one sentence: "french mobile" and "free / cheaper".

Update to this story. I sent an email to Speedferries complaining that they had broken their contract with me and had denied me one free return and one free single crossing. In reply (only 12 hours and overnight) they say the drydocking was originally planned for February (this still would have been a problem with non-availability), but they found that more work was needed to be done to Speed 1 and the only free slot in the shipyard for a longer time was 1st - 28th March. They have also now extended the use of my free crossing tickets until 31st May 2007. Not a perfect ending as I'm still paying for another operator to get me back from France in March. But nevertheless, something of a result bearing in mind this offer has come from a low cost operator. "Don't you just love them. I still do..."    

Speedferries - don't you just love them. I still do - their prices, use them or not, have served us all well. I've tried to use one of my two "free" mid-week return crossings (gained by doing a couple of returns in November) but even though they're valid until 29 March, there is no Speedferries service from 1st to 28th March.............grrrr,........dry dock again! So it's Speedferries out in late February (wave height permitting) and tunnel back in March.  

For us, owning a second home in France is something of a challenge which at the moment we enjoy. There's always something to worry about if you are the worrying kind - have the pipes frozen, will the boiler light, how tall will the weeds be, has it been burgled, did it lose its roof in that storm last night (yes, daily internet peeks at the local weather) ? ? etc. etc. It needs constant work when we're there - paint the shutters, cut the grass, fix that socket and so on. So far it's good fun, and we spend a lot of our time in England planning / shopping for our next trip Often it can be a problem being there at the the right time to get any third party to do their thing - maintain the gas tank,  quote for this or that. I actually seem to like this sort of thing and can cope quite well. Some might find it hell. We've not gone down the renting route because as said before, I too don't think we'll ever get it up to standard and if we do I don't want some scum wrecking it! Renting would need a reliable person on site / close to site to deal with the day to day problems and changeovers. All for what? Maybe 10 weeks @ £500 less costs. Say £4000 per year less tax. We then wouldn't be able to go at the drop of the proverbial hat and would have to sit at home in UK. No. For us renting it out is just not an option. When to take the plunge? We only did it when we had paid off the UK mortgage and could buy in France by cash. It's a big enough hassle on its own without having to worry if you can pay for it.     

I can't comment about going TO France, but when we entered UK at Dover in early December there were several big blue wheely dustbins marked "Forbidden Imported Poultry" or some such words on display to arrivals.

The key issue here is ....are the cracks actually getting wider or longer?. Any professional will need to properly monitor for a period to confirm the case. In the meantime to assist in the diagnosis  - I suggest some small local sample filling of the cracks with an exterior filler and when dry/set, making a note of the date in pencil on the filler in the crack. It'll cost nothing and will be very helpful in the future. Trust me, been there, done that and I've got the T shirt.

Thanks. I take that to mean a once off    8CV x 16€  =  128€.

I am happy to be corrected, but until then I can't see much of a problem with burning so called resinous softwoods such as pine. The Scandinavian countries and much of Eastern Europe (plus USA, Canada etc.) has swathes of pine forests which are regularly used to fuel log burners and fires. Am I missing something here?    

This half-price at 10 years rule is good news for me. The Peugeot 306 we will taking to France soon is over 9 years old now - I'll certainly wait until its 10th birthday before taking it and registering it. Any idea of the CV for a Peugeot 306 1.9D - non-turbo?. Dept 17.

Well there you go ! I felt sure I was daft in suggesting an electric one - especially as nobody here seems to talk about them. I thought maybe they were perceived as weak little things for wimps. Obviously not, which is great news. Now I'm of to research them and buy one..

And there was I thinking that the new mobile phone mast in the next village might be putting me into reach of a new 4th network ! I told you I didn't know much about this (any?) topic. Next time I'm in France I'll definitely try to manually select the best network and see how I get on. Thanks for the info. 

I share the opinion that french agents' No.1 priority seems to be hiding the location of the house. What a strange way to behave - in most markets the sellers want to supply as much information as possible about the product with which to sway the buyer, and as I said before the more information available at an early stage saves a helluva lot of time on 3 sides: buyer, vendor and agent. In the UK agents don't have a problem identifying the property and I understand they chase up and get very legal with those sellers who try and avoid paying the fee for the previously "introduced" buyer. Surely the agents can get equally litigious in France - or is it more diffcult there? It shouldn't be too hard to locate the buyer!

I can never seem to easily start a petrol mower or chainsaw. The time it takes for me to get the annual use of the chainsaw going for cutting logs might even rival the tree growth itself. It always ends up hurting something - my back, fingers, hand etc. My dodgy back prevents proper use of an axe for log splitting and a log splitter is a bit pricey for me. So, I've thought about an electric chainsaw. I hired one about 20 years ago for a specific job and it seemed up to the job then. Is it worth getting one in my circumstances? i.e. a power point in the barn and a need to cut say, 50 logs a year.  

It's not the fees that trouble me - you choose to pay or not pay - buy a house or don't. What irritates me is the apparent lack of effort used to describe the property. Typically we got a black and white multi-photocopied A4 sheet with a dodgy picture in the top half and maybe 4 lines of description below. When we were looking we really had little idea of what we'd get until we got to the house. We wasted a lot of our time and that of others.  It really is time the french agents got up to speed with what can be done. Most UK agents have comprehensive details on the web - floor plans, dimensions and maybe 5 or 6 pictures. They tell you the Council Tax etc. etc. It can't be that dificult to do and as houses seem to stick for longer in France then maybe the effort in presenting good details just the once wouldn't be too much of a burden. You can get colour photocopiers in France too! On the theme of agents only having cheap cars - it may be because they don't earn much, but don't be conned. In my business in UK I choose my work car very carefully to select the right image (i.e the one I want to project) for my clients.  

TP - the phone shows Orange F, Bouygues Télécom and FRA88. So maybe FRA88 is another way of showing SFR.

TempsPerdu it's a Nokia 3120 on Orange. It already shows Orange F when in range, so I'd be surprised if FRA88 was another way of showing Orange - but, I don't know much. The Nokia 3330 belonging to the better half is on 02 and it roams about a bit too. Getting text messages in reply to sent ones can cause problems because I presume the sending french network receives the UK reply, but if by then we've roamed to another network we don't get our text reply until we're back on the same network. Sometimes it can take several hours, days even. I'll certainly try the manual bit when we get back, which I don't suppose will be until late Feb / early March. The FRA88 on the screen really intrigues me though - there's nothing that a Google search shows up.  

I get FRA88 too - who are they?

As a UK resident who makes frequent trips to France the obvious choice is a UK mobile for me. But it occurs to me that as our maison secondaire is in a "dodgy" reception area and the UK phone roams between 3 french service providers in the same house/garden depending on where I'm standing (! !) then a french mobile fixed to one network might even be pretty useless for a proper signal throughout the whole property.  Our village is in a valley and signals just seem to come and go! So the precise service provider may be all important to some users.

Eventually we have our new roof. If it helps this query: For the ventilation outlets for the kitchen extractor fan and shower fan the roofers installed 2 "lanternes" (as they called them). Terracota lantern shaped things with vertical slots in the sides. Our roofers used mastic to properly hold the lanterne on to the the special tile with the hole and circular upstand. Otherwise it seemed to only be a simple push fit and a poor one at that. The diameter of the hole in ours is 140mm and I'm soon off to find a suitable pipe to connect to them.