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Renting while house hunting


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We plan to sell our house in England and move to a rented house in France while we house hunt.  Any observations would be welcome, but in particular I wonder what's best to do with all our stuff!  Some could be sold, some accommodated in the rented house, but we will probably have to pay for storage of a lot of our favourite furniture etc. (we live in a 4 bed house, no kids but all the rooms are full....). Would it be best to do this in France do you reckon?

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[quote user="Saintly Tim"]  We plan to sell our house in England and move to a rented house in France while we house hunt.  [/quote]

We did just this ... sold our house and either sold or gave away 99% of our possessions, then we put the remaining 1% in store. We planned to travel Europe in a camper van for a number of years but our plans got subdiverted by failing health of my OH's parents. So we ended up renting a furnished gite in France in winter (freezing it was too) whilst we decided what to do with our lives. This plan (?) is not for the faint-hearted but we were determined our lives needed to change anyway.

We then rented long-term an empty house near the coast and bought furniture and whatever we needed.

Now we have bought our own home.

Perhaps, if we had had more money, we might have thought of keeping a small bolt-hole in the UK. But, as we only had enough to buy one house and a bit more to keep us going until pensions kicked in, that was never an option.

We survived happily and are still in France 7.5 years later; perhaps we were fortunate.

Sue

Edit: Storage, in either country, can be expensive. Better to prune now than pay out a (small) fortune.

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Just before we left France four years odd ago, I looked into storage in both countries. It was far more expensive in France than it was in my part of NE England. So we got the removal people to put everything in storage in the UK until we found the property we wanted.

When we had left for France, we did a deal whereby Pickfords, put all our stuff into storage in the UK and subsequently delivered it to our french appt a couple or three months later.

So when we went to France, we used UK storage and rented and when we moved back we put stuff into storage too. In fact we still have stuff in storage, which hopefully will be got out, before winter.

We rented when we got to France because we didn't know whether we would want to stay and actually rented for over 2 years. I'm glad we did.

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  • 3 weeks later...
We purchased a house a long time ago with a view to getting onto the French property ladder early, thereby having somewhere to move to directly when we retired. As such, we offered that house for rent : basically, as the agent at that time was good [since gone right downhill] everything worked out well. However, you should perhaps bear in mind that there will be a substantial amount to pay when you "register" for the house, a deposit and sometimes three months rental in advance but once that it paid, all the legalities are on the side of the person renting, not the owner. We had one disastrous tenant [British - all the rest who were good were French but that's just fate] whom we had eventually to take to court because he did so much damage, but we feel this is extreme. If you need any further information, please don't hesitate to contact us.

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Some of the best things about renting while you look around are,

You get to experience all the seasons, not just the sunny days

You can come across some real bargins being sold privately and avoid massive agents fees being rolled into the price. We did !

You can make your mind up about committing to this "new life"

Best luck in whatever you decide to do

JB

 

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We also got rid of most of our U.K. furniture before we left, just kept a few favourite bits, because many people told us U.K.furniture doesn't suit old French houses, which I think is true on the whole.. I asked on (another) French forum re. storage in the Limousin and got offered the use of a secure barn. We came over with a caravan to live in which we used for 2 months, then ended up renting a gite for 8 months before finally getting our house.
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