House next door

[ViVienne]

has anybody knocked 2 houses into 1, how hard was it to get the water, electricity and taxes sorted?

[nomoss]

We made 4 into 3 in England in 1970, lived in one and rented the others. It took years to properly sort them out for Taxes and utility bills.

Things were not helped by the local council, which deemed that what had been "****** Lane Cottages" should become numbers 1, 2, and 3 ****** Lane, but shortly afterwards re-numbered all the houses in the street following a completely different logic (I use the word "logic" very loosely), so that 1,2 & 3 became 6, 6A, & 6B.

Curiously, numbers 2 and 4 were the back gates of neighbours with their addresses on the parallel road.

We found the electricity meters were wrongly assigned some 2 years or so later, and there was a "ghost" meter, with no house.

The only reliable service was the mail; the postman continued to deliver ours even when we moved to another village nearby.

There was still confusion, which I had to clear up from memory, when the final house still in the family was sold in 2002, as the Land Registry information was incomplete and incorrect.

Couldn't possibly be worse in France!

[nomoss]

Sorry Vivienne, my reply is not much help for France.

We purchased our present house together with a remise across the street, but received separate bills for both Foncières and Habitation. This was not important until we wished to claim reductions in our taxes. A simple letter to the Centre d'Impots, with a copy of the Acte de Vente, resolved this, and the two properties are now treated as one.

I think you should inform your Mairie of your intention to join the two houses. They will advise if any official documentation, maybe a Déclaration Préalable, is necessary.

For the electricity and water, all you should need to do is ask the supplier to remove one of each meter and then have the two systems connected together.

[ViVienne]

thanks, we are only thinking about it at the moment but I am looking at all the costs involved to see if we can manage it