Like most British people in Brittany, I am effectively a refugee fleeing from the horrors of the UK property market: I don’t have a quarter of a million pounds with which to buy a little house for myself, and even if I was prepared to work twelve hours per day for the next twenty-five years to pay for a loan to buy one of these houses, the credit-rating agencies would not view me as a good risk, so even a mortgage would be out of the question.
When I first came to Brittany, my first impression was ‘more of the same’: if I had had a hundred thousand euros, I could have bought quite a nice place, but if I had two hundred thousand euros, I could have bought an even better place, etc. The catch is that if I haven’t got any money, there is no way that I can earn it over here, so I cannot get a hundred thousand euros, and therefore I cannot have a house to live in.
A closer examination, however, shows that things might not be quite as bad as they appear: there are surprisingly few people living in the countryside, and there are thousands of old properties standing empty, or in ruins. This means that there are two, parallel, property markets, one for people with jobs and money, who can buy houses with all the mod-cons, and another where pieces of land with old buildings on them change hands for next to nothing.
With this understanding, I redefined my property search and set out to find a suitable ruin that I could restore whilst keeping within a budget which I can afford – i.e. next to nothing. The project has got off to a good start, and I have found and purchased the ruin for less than one thousand euros, which, while still expensive, seems fair in the modern context. I have also started to clean up the site.
Mains water runs in front of the property, and although the house has never been connected, the water authority has thoughtfully provided a manhole with stop tap just in case. The property was at one time connected to the electricity and an electric post, fed by electric from the grid is still there: drains and a septic tank may be more of a problem because the land slopes up behind the house, and is rocky, and a road runs in front of it, but that is a problem that can be dealt with in the future.
I estimate that the roof collapsed as least twenty or thirty years ago, and all the beams and roof timbers have rotted away, and the chimney has collapsed. Once the brambles had been cut back, I also discovered that the stones around the window and door had been removed, and most of the stones from one of the gable ends is also missing.
However, I believe that I have enough to get started with, and am looking forward to a few years of Slow Building, letting things develop as time and budget allow.
I intend to write Part 2 of this blog when a little more work has been done.
