Okay, we’ve been back a week and already we’re planning our next trip with the Limousin in mind.

The houses we visited the first time we went were appalling and we wondered whether anything resembling our dream house was going to be possible this time.

Now we’re not rigid and will compromise, but there are limits and this time instead of finding a longere that had had Formica nailed over the outside to make it look freshly whitewashed or a house that looked fine in the pictures, but whose roof had collapsed due to an argument with a tractor, we hoped to find something closer to what we had imagined when looking at the pictures on the internet.

The first house was a shambles, with a toilet in the lounge, doors rotting off their hinges and spiders big enough to roll up their sleeves to show off their tattoos. The last straw wasn’t the toilet, but the fact that to go upstairs, you had to go outside on to the street first.

None of it was irreparable, but at what price?

Other houses we saw were just as bad. There was one that had huge cracks in the stone lintels above the windows, a network of woodworm holes in the beams with beetles selling tour guides.

Another had been part renovated by an English couple who had evidently run out of money. Too bad they hadn’t spent what they did a little more wisely and fixed the structure before spending a fortune on tiles for the hall, kitchen and lounge.

All of it would have had to come up–after the roof and several LARGE scale roof trusses had been replaced that was, at a cost of over €10,000. The floors were uneven, windows were on the piss and doors didn’t open or shut properly. I’ll grant you, it was cheap enough, but the description of habitable was a real stretch of the imagination, so, no; we didn’t put in an offer.

Finally and now in the Vendee, we found an immobilier who was not only English, but not a complete plank, who thought we were as thick as shit and could be sold a money pit or convinced that the large cracks in the stonework was “nothing to worry about”.

He showed us one house that was huge, habitable and could have been amazing, but we realised that it was miles from anywhere and whilst we are quite private people, we didn’t want to be that out of the way.

In addition, the rendering on the outside of the property, hadn’t been chipped off, but was falling away and shit-loads of repointing or re-rendering would have been required to fix it.

Finding houses was not the problem, but finding something that wasn’t a good deal on the face of it–until you totted up what it would cost to fix, that is–was.

Like I said, we’re now looking in a less expensive area of France–the Limousin. Yup, that’s the place where limousines were invented.

House prices are substantially lower there and whilst the weather isn’t as good as Poitou-Charente or the Vendee, we would be able to afford something that hopefully was vaguely habitable, didn’t cost the earth to fix and would give us what we want.

We already have nearly thirty houses in mind, but of course, having to wait until September to go, it’s a fair bet that at least half of those we actually want will be gone.

Still, it has only gone to reaffirm our belief that we will find that elusive house and we will move to France as each time we go, the love affair with the country, it’s people and the countryside deepens.

ဠBientá´t.