Amazing.....

[Pancake]

Not sure if this comes under the heading of culture but I have been house hunting on the net for well over nine months and have been amazed at the amount of one bedroom houses there are out there.It must be well over 50%.When the French couples married and had kids the bedroom must have been very cramped.I just cant see the point in having a one bedroom house.

[Dick Smith]

Are you looking at places for renovation? When we were looking we saw a couple of places with just one large room upstairs. We have now divided that up into three, as seems usual once renovation starts. In some there was a sleeping room downstairs as well.

Bigger houses and town/village houses all seemed to have at least two bedrooms.

[Tresco]

That is strange...unless you are searching at a certain price in a certain area and/or perhaps people are using the term 'house' loosely, (eg appartment/flat)?

Tell me what you think Pancake, because people are always asking me to look at houses they have seen, so I'm very used to it, but apart from very unusual properties (or properties in Paris)  I have never seen a 1 bedroomed house.

Can you give any examples?

[Pancake]

Tresco....The third one on this list is one....

http://www.cfps23.com/search_results.php?page=11&priceTo=80000&per_page=10

[Pancake]

Maybe its just the way I see them.But to be there seems to be a lot....maybe I'm just looking at it...errr....ummm....one eyed.[:D]

[cooperlola]

Both our house and the one opposite, plus the little fermette down the road owned by an English woman, all have (or had at originally) just one bedroom - and that is very common around here certainly.  Most have now had rooms added upstairs or had the rooms divided up as they are huge.

[Tresco]

That is a very sweet house Pancake!

Thinking about it, our own house had one bedroom too. It was also the kitchen and living room....[:)]

[Christine Animal]

Maybe those small houses weren't really for families, but for the farmhand, so with a living/kitchen area and a room to sleep.

The living area was also often sandwiched in between the animal/cattle parts for warmth.

 

[cooperlola]

I suspect it's much more likely that everybody just slept together in the main room where, normally, the warm fire was.  As ours has two large stone barns, I think it was probably the main farm house.

[Teamedup]

WOW talk about super cheap. I can't believe those prices.

[opas]

Crikey Tu, your comment made me take a look!  Ill have the 4 th one down.............to get something like that in our area would easily be a million and a half euros!

[Loiseau]

If it's little farmhouses you're looking at, I can well believe they only have one bedroom. 

When we bought our first Vendee house in 1969, it was two rooms, with lean-to at the back and a large grenier upstairs.  The next-door neighbours, who were still farmers, had something similar. They used one of the 5m square rooms as a living room - called it the cuisine.  It had the large fireplace (with smouldering embers that kept the pot of mogettes cooking all day while husband and wife toiled in the fields), a sink (water drawn from well opposite), a large modern fridge, a spartan table and chairs in front of the fire, and a dresser - oh and maybe a TV.  There were no beds in it.

The adjoining room (also 5m square) must have been where all the family slept.  In our day, there were the couple and two children, but there were two older siblings who were already married.  (In Brittany, old houses often had recesses in the wall for the parents' bed, with sliding doors for privacy from others who shared the room, and called a "lit clos", but I don't think anything as sophisticated as that reached the Vendee.)

Nobody would have considered sleeping in the grenier upstairs; that was for storing the grain, and had no glass in the window-openings, just wire-netting to keep the birds out.

There was a lean-to shed at the back, in which buckets would be clanked regularly by the neighbours.  I always assumed it was some sort of loo.  Our daughter, as a toddler, used to wander round, and even peep in - but as she was not able to talk at that age, she couldn't tell us what was inside!  And once she could talk, she'd forgotten!

Angela

[RumziGal]

[quote user="Teamedup"]WOW talk about super cheap. I can't believe those prices.[/quote]

Oh TU, you made me look!   Pocket money, man, pocket money!    Opas isn't kidding.   Multiply them by 5 and you'd be heading in the right direction for house prices in our area.

I'm getting used to house prices here in Englandshire.  In the sense that "merde, that's cheap".   [:)]  

Someone at work is selling an end terrace, 3 reasonable bedrooms, big garden, central heating, double glazing, off-road parking for 2 cars, etc, for £195k.

Along the road from us in France, someone is selling a small 3-bed "villa".   500m sq terrain, but it's en contrebas, which means the house is below the level of the road, but it's so close to the road that it's like living in a basement, and as you walk past you look down into the house.   Small place, and because it's contrebas there's no private parking, cars just sit out on the road.  Not centrally heated, not double glazed.  No pool.  Price?   340 000 euros.

[Hoddy]

I'm about to attempt that ridicule-defying feat

"Thread Splitting"

so that this thread can get back on topic.

Hoddy