Our Renovation Project in France
So where have we been and what have we been doing for the last year or more. Well the simple answer is that we have been selling our lovely old watermill in the Aude department and have bought a new house in the Pyrenees Orientales in a lovely little village called Laroque des Alberes. Our new renovation project!
Effectively we have swapped country life for village life.
But as ever nothing is completely straightforward. Our main business in our lovely old watermill was to offer holiday accommodation. This is something we wanted to do again, but this time in a village where you could easily walk to the shops, restaurants and bars. Plus ideally there would be a local market.
We ticked all those boxes, no problem. Although there was one slight hiccup, the house we bought didn’t have any rentable space. It did on the other hand have a large basement with plenty of scope to renovate. So the planning application was submitted and we waited patiently for it to be approved. Our new renovation project was underway
It took a little while, but in the end it arrived and we were able to get cracking. Only thing is, when they say how long is it going to take, you have to chose a number, double it and then build in your learning curve factor. Plus to really make it possible, in true Dick and Angel style, you have to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.
So not so much ‘Escape to the Chateau’ as ‘Escape to the Maison’, but the process is much the same.
Queue photos of before and after.
Before, well actually it is more during really.
After, it’s a bit different now.
So as you can see there has been a little bit of a transformation, but if I am honest it took quite a bit longer than first anticipated, about 6 months longer actually.
In true builder style, accompanied with a sharp intake of breath, there were reasons. For example we didn’t originally plan to add a pool, we are only 15 minutes from the Mediterranean after all and thought that’s not a bad place for a swim.
Plus I hadn’t anticipated having to completley renovate the upstairs bathroom so that we could make the most of downstairs i.e. lots of pipes to move to less conspicuous locations.
Also we did quickly realise that employing people to do everything is really quite expensive and that the only way it was realistically going to happen was if yours truly and his wife did most of the work.That is Brian and Angela, not Dick and Angel but close on one half of the partnership.
Then of course there was that pool we hadn’t really planned, but very quickly had to plan. This actually turned out to be a really good idea, because most of the summer of 2018 temperatures were around 36C. Not great when you are renovating, but so nice to be able to walk outside and jump into the pool to cool down.
It still isn’t quite finished but it is very very close, which you can see if you visit our accommodation page for even more photos of what is now a really lovely apartment. We should be all done by the end of next week and of course we are already marketing for the summer.
So if you fancy a little holiday in Laroque des Alberes you can get in touch via our contact page.