House and Job news

It's been a month since I last wrote. I was waiting for some proper news to share, which I kept thinking was just about to happen and then it didn't. So last time I wrote about how Dan had just been made redundant and that meant we couldn't get a mortgage on the house we were about to offer on. Since then it looked very likely that he would get a new job with a solar panel company. He had a phone call that he said, "could not have gone better" then he went to an interview which also went very well. The job would be very similar to what he was already doing for the swimming pool company (web marketing), except he would be the only one doing it. He came up with several ideas for them and they seemed very impressed by him and were calling him an expert. They also loved that he is bilingual because they actually are focusing on getting English speaking customers. 

They asked him to write a proposal of everything that he would do for them, like a marketing strategy for the year, including what he would like to be paid. No one else was interviewed for this job or asked to do this. He spent a lot of time on it and sent it in, he asked for a bit more money that what he was on before but still less than he has been paid in a previous job. And he was ready to negotiate on the money, they said they might initially take him on a self employed basis, which was fine. 

We didn't hear back for a week, and then they said "no thanks." They said they were doing well as a company without a web marketer. It was pretty confusing, because it seemed like it was pretty much certain apart from the pay which he though was all negotiable. He would have been happy to do it part time or for less money, but they just said "no" and we're wondering if they're just taking all his ideas and doing them without him.

This was all happening at the same time as we put in a lowish offer on a house. We can no longer get a French mortgage but thanks to remortgaging our old house and borrowing a big chunk from family, we can get something on a smaller budget than we were looking at before. We both agreed that we'd rather go for a cheaper house so we don't have to do another winter in this weird house that was meant for just 3 months but has already been over a year.

So our dream village of Thuir seems out of the question, but Millas where Percy is at school is much more affordable and would mean the kids wouldn't have to change schools. And me and my new English friend Robyn have a plan to gentrify it. She might start a nice brunch cafe, and I did shake on going there every weekend if she did it in Millas. So there's a house I've loved for a long time that is very beautiful from the outside and has a lot of potential, but has a lot of issues on the inside. Like most of us in our early 20's. We saw a few more houses including one that we saw this week that had a little less potential but didn't need much work, it made a lot of logical sense. But I just really love the other one and they're very near to each other so if we got the less pretty one, I'd have to still walk past the beautiful one a lot. I really wish I hadn't made the analogy that the beautiful house that needs work was like someone in their early 20's, because now I feel like a superficial pervert. You should see it from behind though, it has such a gorgeous behind (back garden).

 

Anyway we went in low. It's been on the market ages, and hasn't had any offers or even any other viewings. It was on for 220k euros, we said 195K, then they said they'd take 210K we said ok 200K and at the time I didn't think I'd go up from that. But then I just kept thinking about it, and cycling past its beautiful behind. So we did the maths on if we could go up to 210K and we just about can but it doesn't leave much for any work and it needs a rewire, and ideally a new kitchen, a new bathroom and double glazing, and all the 70's wall paper removing. So we've offered 208K and just this evening we heard that they have accepted! But they want to wait another month until officially accepting and starting the process of selling it, because he has some health problems and is going to a lot of medical appointments. Dan thought I'd be very happy when I found out they accepted, but I just don't feel 100% sure it will happen. I think they could still say, "sorry I'm too ill to go through the hassle of selling a house right now." We'll see. (Once they sign they have to actually do it or pay us compensation. It's not like the UK where you can just drop out any time you like with no consequence.)

Job wise Dan has a side job he can do more on and there's something else part time that I'm not sure if I'm able to share yet, because it's not official. I annoyingly don't have work over the summer. but I am enjoying doing more art.

I did this series "attic to chateau" where I showed my art from my weird old attic bedroom surrounded by boxes. And someone who owns a chateau reached out and said, "would I like to have an exhibition in their chateau?" Of course I said yes! I've been working on some new works for that exhibition, which will hopefully be near the end of August. Here's some photos of when we went to visit the chateau on an art market day.

 

 

 

 

I've also just done a lino printing workshop, which I loved doing so much! I really miss doing art workshops, but doing it with 6 adults was so chilled compared to doing it with 30 kids! So I hope to do more of that. If anyone is looking for an arty gift please check out my website, my newest thing is embroidery hoops and I can do custom ones if you send me a photo you like. 

this one was made with the photo above.

We unfortunately cancelled our plans to do a big Italy road trip over the summer, but we have instead bought a tent and did our first recce two weeks ago. It was French mothers day and I requested a camping trip that I didn't have to pack for. My sisters said, "that's risky you might have nothing you need" and yeah if I hadn't intervened we wouldn't have had a mallet for the pegs or plates or a washing up bowl, or pillows. I think that's just about survivable though. Anyway we had a great time, the weather was perfect, there was a lovely pool, and we just hung out without screens and played card games, it was nice to be away from our no natural light or garden house. Apart from being woken up by noisy wild boar at night, that was mad.

We've got two more trips planned: a weekend to the place we go for skiing which I've never been to in the summer, and one to the Gorge du Verdon where we've been to before. I'm not someone who normally likes to go back to the same place but this place was so good, it's my top recommendation if you go to France. Don't tell anyone else though, it's currently a beautifully unspoilt by tourists spot.

 Night. x

Surprise!

 Since I last wrote Dan has entered his 40s and Eric also celebrated being 9. Dan is a very different person to me, and he didn't feel the need to invite everyone he has ever known to attach wheels to their feet in a warehouse in Wigan to celebrate becoming 40. He decided that as it was the school holidays we should all go away to Spain and we choose to go Valencia which is 6 hours south from us. Normally when we go to Spain we just cross the border to buy cheap milk and fuel and jelly and decaf teabags (did you know you can't buy jelly or decaf teabags in France?), occasionally we go to Girona or Barcelona but we've never been down further than Barcelona since living here.

But before his actual birthday I did want him to celebrate with more people, it's been a really difficult time for him and I wanted him to know that people do care about him. So I messaged one of his friends from work and asked her to invite the people he liked, and not the new boss that has recently made him redundant. I also invited a few other people. It was very easy to organise because I just told him we were going out for a meal and got a babysitter and then everyone just turned up there before us. I planned it in a food hall thing in Thuir, because when I started planning it we were about to offer on a house in Thuir, and I was just really into Thuir, and it's not far from us and I'm lazy. But since the beginning of the planning of this party and now a lot has changed. 

After finding out that Dan had lost his job and we therefore can't get a mortgage and offer on this house we liked, we started looking into what we could do with about half of the original budget. We had this idea about doing up a wreck of a house, because Dan will get paid some benefits for a while and he would have the time to do something. So we went to see a house in Thuir that needed work. In 20 years from now I can imagine my kids telling a therapist about this day. So we arrived at this house, and Eric says "it looks like a prison" it's in the old town, which are little tiny streets made before cars that you would never want to drive down. This house you can't see from the street, you can just see a wide alleyway that's gated off the house is behind the two next door neighbours so it's kind of worse than a terrace. You go through the ally and you end up in a court yard which is very overlooked by the balcony of one of the houses you can see from the street. 

The house had 3 floors but the whole first floor had no windows and no working electrics so it was just completely black. The other two floors were a wreck too, no one had lived there for a long time there was no electricity, everything was dark and dusty and broken. We straight away realised we could not live here, even if you could imagine it all done up the space was weird. The boys had only seen nice houses up until this point, so it was a bit of a shock. Percy started getting angry saying "why has someone left rubbish here? If someone is going to look round a house at least clean it up!" at the end the estate agent went to shake all of our hands but Percy refused. The poor woman was only doing her job, but Percy seemed to be blaming her for everything that had gone wrong. Poor lady!

So it was probably for the best that we left that boys at home with a babysitter on Dan's birthday, as they were probably fed up with any mention of Thuir. Along with Dan's work colleagues our board game friends who we used to see every week but have since moved to Montpellier kindly made the trip over to celebrate Dan. They also stayed over at ours after but Dan didn't know that was going to happen and was actually impressed that I was changing the duvet cover on the sofa bed, when he thought it was for no reason and I'm just a tidy person.

I did imagine the surprise when he walked in to be a bit more of a big moment when he realised that in amongst all the self doubt and turmoil that he was loved by so many people. But it was a bit anti-climatic he just said "oh there are my colleagues" hopefully he was happy about it. I think he had a good time, it was nice to meet some of his colleagues that I haven't met, although the table did dive quite quickly into a French speaking end an and English speaking end with Dan in the middle.  It was a nice relaxed semi outdoor food hall place where you just go up and order your own stuff, which I really like because then you don't have to do a awkward bill split at the end.

 

A little later in the night our friend Flick arrived who had driven 9 hours from Paris that day! (not specifically for the party but still I'm impressed she could do anything after driving that far) Her 9 year old daughter sat down at the English end of the table and got right in with the adult conversations asking funny questions and bringing a fun perspective to the discussions. Dan's colleague Charlotte had gone all out and made people sign a book for him filled with photos and memories. It was a lovely night.

The holiday was fun too, we first stopped in Montserrat Abby which is a monastery place you can get to by cable car. Once you get up there's a whole village to explore, with a cathedral and gallery/museum. Unfortunately we didn't explore them because we didn't want to pay extra for them. I just feel like you should have to pay to go in a religious building or a gallery, but if you have to I'm more on board with paying to go to a gallery. The cable car was fun though and the views from the top were great. 

 

 

We stayed one night in Tarragona/ Salou in a fairly budget hotel where we really got our money's worth by using the pool and using the buffet breakfast to the max. There was every kind of breakfast you can imagine and some others that you can't imagine, like a thing that looked liked white jelly and was possibly cheese. Who knows what that was. but there was a man that cooked pancakes and omelettes to order and there was a churro machine! The kids were delighted to eat churros for breakfast.

In Valencia we stayed in a air bnb apartment. We went to a massive science/ space museum and we went kayaking in the sea on the morning of Dan's actual birthday. The city was really nice and we found possibly the coolest play park we had ever been to. We went to this park which was based on the story guliver's world. there was just a giant man lying down that the kids could climb all over. an adult would maybe be the size of his nose. There were lots of bits you could slide down and climb up, it was great for big kids, ours are a bit old for parks now aged 11 and 9 but this was perfect. The drive back was a bit less fun because we did it all in one day and it took 6 hours. 

coolest map image ever

We had one day to get the house sorted before Eric's 9th birthday. He had 4 friends over for party food we made a pick a mix station so they could choose a bag of sweets and then we all went to the cinema to watch the new Mario film. I drove 6 kids in our big car and Dan followed behind on his motobike. Eric had a lovely day he is a massive mario fan so finding out he could see the film as his birthday treat was very exciting for him. Almost all his gifts were either Pokemon or Mario themed. 

It was his second birthday in this house and it was a little sad because pervious birthdays in the old house have been so much easier because we had outdoor space. I also feel a bit weird about it because people we don't know well don't know the whole story of how we ended up in this weird house, and a few times people have been a bit confused as to why we live in a worst house than before. But hopefully we will get to leave this house this year, there's been a few interesting developments which I will share when they have developed further.

Thanks if you've been watching my "attic to chateau" series, (videos where I show my art from my weird attic bedroom)  a few interesting things have come out of that too, and I will share that soon. 

Thanks for reading! 

A Trip to Paris

 Thanks for all your responses to my last blog, there were a lot of comments, several people phoned us to see how we are doing, and a lot of people offered advice.

We knew April was going to be a crazy month but not this kind of crazy, we had already planned two trips to spain (one to see family and one for Dan's birthday) and in between those trips I went to Paris. The trips have been a nice distraction from crazy life stuff. One way that me and Dan have both changed since moving to France and everything has gone wrong, is that we can't just wait around to enjoy ourselves. We didn't do enough enjoying ourselves in our first year here when everything was going well, and we had enough money. So this stuff was already booked in and we weren't going to change it.

Dan's parents and his youngest sister and her daughter were staying in northern spain, so we joined them for the weekend. It was really nice to see them and just get away from normal life and our weird house. We were staying in Empuriabrava which is a cool place only just over an hour from us where they have a network of canals like in Venice. If I was a billionaire, I'd buy up all the houses and give them to my friends and make everyone get pedalos and do games on them every Saturday.  I'd make that the condition, you get a free house, but you must join in with my pedalo wide game events every week.

Anyway seeing as I'm not a billionaire I just had to make do with wondering around the streets and looking at the cool stuff. It was very nice to see my little niece Ada. She's adorable, I really miss all the little people that I don't get to see a lot of.

This weekend I went to Paris on my own.  My friend Joy who is normally in America was in town. I've known Joy for 20 years now, she was part of the original Liverpool crew that I met Dan in. About 2 weeks before me and Dan got together me and Joy decided to have "a day of hippy fun" in the park. She already had green hair then, but I wore a green clown wig to match, then we went to Tesco to buy parsley and rizla papers and attempted to smoke it, while also playing some little musical instruments I had like a thumb piano. I never do that kind of stuff anymore! 

 

The boys in our gang had decided to meet up and play board games, they wanted to play a serious man board game and the girls were not invited. This is what promoted our girls day out I think. But the whether was nice and the boys gave up on their boring game and came to find us and water bomb us. They really failed at jumping out on us because they couldn't find us and had to phone us several times to work out where we were. After the water bomb attack we got our revenge by making this poster which we taped to nearby bus stops. Dan saw one on his street and ripped it down and a woman said "so you're one of them are you?" 

All this to say, times had changed and we were now both married mums who hadn't illegally used the Merseyside police logo on a comedy sign for ages. Joy had married an American and had lived in LA and New York for several years. Her husband Philip is a performer specialising in tap dancing, and he had landed the lead role in a big musical that was going to be touring England and Paris for a year. So the family had taken this opportunity to base themselves in Liverpool for their kid's school/nursery and travel round a bit so they could spend more time together as a four. 

After researching the cheapest ways to get to Paris I went up on the night train and came back on the night bus. The train was pretty fun, there were 2 triple bunk beds in each room. It was a squeeze! There wasn't enough space to sit up fully in the bed. I got chatting to this guy who was British but had lived in Spain since the 80s. We were chatting while both sitting on my bottom bunk with out head poking out into the middle gap between the two triple bunk beds, and then a French guy stood between us in the gap and pulled his trousers down. This guy got on the train wearing a shirt, a cravat and suit trousers and then after he had pulled his trousers down he just went to bed in his shirt, cravat and boxers. he also farted a lot all through the night. 

I don't know if it's normal to wear pyjamas but I did, and then at around 6am I got up and changed and did my teeth etc and we got off the train in central Paris just before 7. I wondered around a bit, because 7 is too early to arrive anywhere, and then worked out the metro system to get to Joy's hotel. I couldn't find the normal entrance and so I managed to enter through the fireman's entrance. A guy buzzed me into the lift and then I magically arrived in the buffet breakfast area without going past the check in desk, and saw Joy and her kids eating breakfast.

I've never met her boys before but they were very adorable, they are 6 and 3, and I do miss those ages but not enough to put myself through 0, 1 and 2 again. The 6 year old was into drawing and reading, which is lovely until you're trying to get him off the metro while he's still got his head in a book. The 3 year old is a drumming prodigy, Joy carries chop sticks when they're out in case he ever wants to drum on anything. He's got his own instagram account if you want to check it out @thekidinthepocket. We went to Montmartre on the first day and me and the 6 year old did some sketching.

On the Saturday Joy's husband got us free tickets to the matinee performance of his show Top Hat. It was a musical set in the Jazz hands era. The storyline was a little odd. There's a miss-understanding of the identity of two people who fancy each other, and for most of the show the woman thinks the man she likes is married, and then SURPRISE! he's not married and they snog guilt free. Except in real life he is actually married to my friend. All the tap dancing and the singing was incredible, and it was very cool to see Philp in the starring role. The kids had seen it a few times and napped for most of the show.

I also got to see my friend Flick while I was in Paris, she's my mad artist friend who paints with a mop, that I know from Perpignan. She might not love that introduction as she does also paint with paintbrushes, but I've made "paints with a mop" her whole personality. She's moving back to the south in the summer and we are planning all kind of fun things. Starting with organising some sunrise games of rounders at the beach. I saw her at their house, and then on the Sunday me and Joy and the kids went to Flick's English speaking church with her 9 year old and then to the park by the Louve. On the way we stopped to get a sandwich but unfortunately we were in the equivalent of Mayfair and the sandwich shop was like an art gallery. A lady said to us "shall I explain to you the concept of the store?" and the concept was "its 3 times the price of a meal deal for one sandwich and us commoners were not allowed to touch the sandwiches" she had to get them out of a golden glass case for us. 

The dessert options in the incredibly posh shop

In the park we were joined by Flick's husband Todd and her good friend Jade. It was a cool mix of people with quite a lot in common, we had all moved countries Flick and Jade had lived in several different countries, and we all (except Jade) had kids that had been in more than one education system. And all except me had lived in America, so we had some really interesting chats. 

I got the night bus back because I could find a cheap night train or flight. So I was just googling where exactly I needed to go, when I found the review page for the bus station. It has 28 reviews 2 said it was bad and 26 said it was terrible. The most recent review said they were there 20 minutes early but still didn't catch the bus because the information didn't show up on the screen. So I was naturally a little nervous. Its was a 12 hour bus to Perpignan via Toulouse and Carcassone and then it continued to Barcelona. When I got on the bus the guy next to me asked me if I'd seen any headphones, and I helped him look. He then said they must have been stolen, he had left them on the seat for a minute. He asked around everyone but everyone said they didn't know. It was horrible to know we were on a bus with a thief. No wonder this bus station had 26 terrible reviews. We set off and the guy said "I don't want to be racist but..." and then speculated about who had stolen his headphones. The bus had no toilet so we had to keep stopping at the first stop we all got off and guess what HE FOUND THE HEADPHONES. They were wedged down the side of my seat. He was happy but he also felt really bad about what he said to me about the suspects.

I got less than 1 hour of sleep it was horrible. Dan picked me up on his way to work and then went to work and I drove the kids back for a day with a lot of screen time which they were thrilled about.

Next week it's Dan's 40th birthday so were going to try and make it really fun an special as he's having such a bad time at the mo. Lot's of surprises in store that I will write about next time. 

 

Bye bye! 

A very bad friday

My last blog was about all the houses we’ve viewed, back then my biggest dilemma was choosing the best house we could in an area we would like. Now unfortunately it feels like everything in my life is a massive mess, again! So we went to view a house in Thuir, I really loved it instantly, it had 4 bedrooms and a garden, it was quite like our house in Liverpool. Dan was a bit less sure, but he really likes Thuir as a place and agreed that logically this was the best house we could get with our money in this area. After the viewing we wondered down the street to Thuir centre and it was a Saturday so the market was on and everyone was out in the street eating croissants and having a lovely time. We decided we wanted to put in an offer but we said we just needed a bank meeting before we put in the offer. (In France when you put in an offer, it's kind of serious you sign a thing, you get a 10 day cooling off period and then if you back out you have to pay 10% of the purchase price.) 

The bank meeting was set for Easter Saturday, but the day before Good Friday (which is a work day in France) Dan got some very bad news. He works in marketing and writes google ads for a swimming pool company but a new boss has just come in and decided to “shake things up” she thinks that it would be better to outsources his job to an google ads expert. Which means this is the 4th time Dan has last his job since we moved to France.

If you want a little recap, when we moved he had a really good remote job the best paying job he’s ever had, but a year after they took him on the company were not doing that well, and since he was forced to go from a proper contract role to a freelancer for tax reasons after moving to France, it was very easy for them to fire him. Then he briefly worked in sales for PO life magazine who didn’t really give him a chance to learn sales and then fired him after a month and only paid him half of what they owed him for that work. Then after a long time of looking he got a job based in Toulouse which he mainly did remotely but at the end of the 3 month trial they said, “you’re just not quite the best fit" and "it’s annoying you’re not in Toulouse.” He said he would move to Toulouse for the job and they said “nah don’t worry about it” and then exactly a year ago we gave up on France and just as I was trying to teach Percy how to use a QWERTY keyboard for our move back to England Dan got this job. (And Percy has now happily settled into secondary school and is very much an AZERTY keyboard user)

My initial reaction to the news was kind of weird, at first I didn’t really think it was that bad compared to the other times, because it was a proper french contract you get some ok benefit money, not like the first time when we got zero because we hadn’t been here long enough. The big problem is the mortgage. We are quite far through the process of remortgaging our UK house to get a deposit for a house here. We’ve paid around 3 grand to do this and if we cancel it we won’t be able to get that money back but if we let it go through, we won’t have enough money to buy a nice house here without a french mortgage, and we can’t legally move back to our house in the UK because it’s a buy to let mortgage. The only way to do it would be to pay it all off straight away and then face an early repayment charge.

My first reaction was to say that the boys can’t wait any longer to have their own rooms. They’ve shared a room since Eric was 6 months old, and most of that time has been fine but now it’s really not going well, there a lot of conflict, because Percy likes things tidy and Eric doesn’t care and is just living his best happy little life never putting anything away. So we are in the process of rearranging the whole house to give then separate spaces. We have just moved our bedroom into the loft space, so we have no natural light and are surrounded by boxes. I don’t mind too much though, I’m mainly closing my eyes when I’m in this room.

We didn’t tell the kids straight away, we thought we’d let them enjoy Easter. On the Saturday I thought I should probably cry and some point, that would do me good. I had a little cry but then a big cry and then the next two days I was on the edge of tears. I started thinking about Liverpool and how much I miss everyone. It wasn’t really my choice to stay here, Dan got a job and it made sense to stay and I told myself if we get a house with a guest room so people can visit and if I keep trying at learning French and make some new friends then it will be ok. Going back wasn’t really an option (or it was kind of a psycho option) so I had to be ok with being in France, because if I move back I’m ruining the lives of my kids and Dan and the four people who live in my old house in Liverpool. The logistics of going back would be insane, like all of the stress of coming here but with none of the momentum of excitement.

I would miss this view (sunrise from my village)

On Easter Monday we told the kids, Percy was upset  and was asking about if they would let him into secondary school in the UK because everyone has already got their places. Then Eric in his beautiful positive way said “better news would have been there’s a chateau for sale in Saint Feliu d’amont and it’s 4 euros” you’re right Eric that would be better news. Although to be honest I do want to live in Saint Feliu forever but it would be hard not to buy a chateau for 4 euros. Their responses remind me of their responses years ago when Dan first lost his job: Eric “what do you love to do daddy?” Percy: “it doesn’t matter what he loves to do, he has to get a new job so we don’t all perish”

So yeah it’s been a lot, Dan feels awful about everything and is still having to go into his weird workplace and keep working. We have a lot of options to discus but none of them seem good. One option we talked about is buying a wreck of a house with the remortgage money and then doing it up. It could work out and be a good option, but it feels pretty high risk. If I do come back after a bit more crying and possible therapy I think this whole story could all be a great Edinburgh stand up show.

And in pointless irrelevant news I’ve painted a new painting:

 and you can buy a print of it on my website or you can buy it on a bag. Bon weekend.

My new art website 

Goats on trampolines

Happy spring time, well done for making it through the worst bit of the year. Although I do get to live in a lovely weather place, my house has no heating and is still freezing and we've been making an average of 3 hot water bottles a day since November. We recently found a great new walk that reminds me of Cornwall though. There's still enough snow to ski, and it's only another month until the sea is warm enough to swim in if you're a Brit. If you're French you'll probably wait until June.

A new little walk we found

 

Last time I was writing we were about to go and see a house with almost a field that could host an epic Jonesfest. So we went to see that house and it was definitely interesting. It was very near Perpignan city centre, just 5 minutes drive north in quite a built up inner city area. But then you go down a little dead end street and take a little bumpy mud track for a while, which was not fun to drive on, and then you arrive at this house with a big bit of land. The land is agricultural land, so you can't build on it, or put a swimming pool or a permanent structure on it. But you could buy a goat and a yurt and a trampoline and a go-cart and have a lot of fun with that combination of things. I bet goats love trampolines. Or for a smaller budget you could host a monthly dinner and rounders day. Dan thought no one would want to come to my dinner and rounders day, but I immediately messaged my maddest friend in France, Flick, and of course she was up for it.

I don't know how much my phone is listening to me, but the week after I suggested dinner and rounders, I saw a tiktok from a woman in Liverpool saying she wanted to play rounders and thousands of people wanted to get involved. So maybe a rounders revolution is coming, just like its now trendy to sing the songs you sang in primary school assemblies at festivals. If you're not from the UK and you don't know what rounders is, its like cricket but you run in a square and the posts are always people's school jumpers. You play it in primary school but then it just stops existing as a sport after that, like the egg and spoon race. 

So the house attached to the field of fun was really nice, I could definitely live there. It was only around 10 minutes to Dan's work, and it seemed like a good compromise for Dan who wants to live in the countryside and me who prefers cities. I like the look of the countryside but (and this will offend half of my friends) I think on average people who live in cities are cooler. You get a better mix of nationalities, ages, and lifestyles in cities. Village people are a bit samey. Of course some of them are lovely, but if you've chosen to live in the same village all your life the chances are you are a bit dull.

The field house

 

There were some major downsides to this house and field though, it's not connected to mains gas or drains, it's got a septic tank that needs replacing in 5 years, and it had a massive gas tank in the garden. The garden was actually really ugly. It was separated by a giant bush from the other bit of land. So if you were upstairs (and all the living space was upstairs) you wouldn't really be able to see the kids well if they were playing on the bit of land, and the garden wasn't great for playing in, it was just full of gravel. I also really hated that you have to drive in on a bumpy track, and the kids would not like the location, because they would have to move schools. It has the potential to be epic, but given that it is the top end of our budget and I would want to spend money making it less ugly, and I think the bills would be a lot, it feels a bit too stressful. 

Last weekend we went to see another house in Llupia which is next to one of the places we would like to live -Thuir. The house had a great amount of space, it used to be a physiotherapists so it had the normal rooms, plus a massive space that after talking about lots of options we decided it would work best as our bedroom, with half of it being a normal bedroom and the other half being like a second lounge with a sofa and TV. We would also have space in that house for a guest room and a little gym in a outbuilding. There were good amenities you could walk to, but the downsides were: it's actually further from most things including Dan's work than where we currently are and there was a massive olive tree in the garden that took up most of the space and blocked a lot of light. It would be very hard to remove because there was no garden access except through the house and it was very big and thick.

the giant bedroom 

the giant tree

I still like a house we saw in our next door village of Millas. It had great light and a lovely garden, the kitchen was tiny but maybe it could be moved somewhere else. It's also Eric's preferred house and Percy wouldn't have to move school and hopefully Eric wouldn't either depending on if the mayors of both places agree he can stay. I don't know if you can just not update your address with the school and get away with it. 

This is Eric's current school. Commuting to his Liverpool school on busy roads in a bike trailer in the rain is a distant memory to him  

The house in Millas

Dan has always talked about owning a campsite and there's a dilapidated one near us which he has specifically mentioned buying a few times. So imagine his surprise when he saw a for sale sign. We know the site comes with a house and pool. The French are not good at websites, so there was just a number to call about buying the campsite, we had no idea what it was or what the price was. So he phoned up and they told him the price is "a million euros" which seemed a bit made up from the top of his head but Dan replied "OK thank you, I'll speak to my wife" I don't know why he was embarrassed to say that's out of our budget. If I did just have 1 million euros lying around I wouldn't spend it on that caravan graveyard which, I know for a fact, is home to some possibly not entirely legal immigrants.

Other than looking at houses, I have been building my website. I've almost fully accepted that I can't be a comedian any more and that comedy might just be a thing that I could do once, like the splits. But if I can't be an Olympic gymnast or famous comedian then it would be cool to be an artist. It's actually hard not to be an artist when you live somewhere this beautiful. So I'm selling small postable original artworks and prints of my larger paintings and I've got my art onto products like bags.

I was really happy to receive 3 orders when I launched, but less happy when I went to post a small piece of embroidery that weighed less than 100g to the UK and the post office wanted to charge me 18.99 and fill in a declaration form thanks to Brexit. Luckily I'm sneaky and managed to repackage it to look like a letter and go back to a different post office and send it for 11.65 without filling in a declaration. If I can get the packaging down by a few more grams then I can send it for less than 5 euros. A lot of the stuff on my website is print on demand though, so I don't have that problem. Please check it out: Artisthannahjones.com

my original painting next to my painting on a bag

hunting houses and skiing

Last time I wrote I said I'd write about the church skiing weekend. It was snowy. very very snowy apparently there was over two meters of snow on our local mountain.

The front garden of the house we stayed at.

We signed up to go not really know what it was, and I was added to a whatapp group with so many French messages going back and forth that I ignored them all. I was under the impression it was one nights stay over and two days of skiing, but it was actually two nights accommodation and one day of skiing. The major road was closed due to falling rocks so we had to go the very long way round which is two and a half hours drive (twice as long) so we didn't arrive until late. Once you get to the part where you're driving on snow you have to put snow chains on your car wheels for grip. There was about 30 of us in this big house, we had a shared room with two bunk beds in. 

In the morning we all set off early to ski, after digging our car out of yet more snow.  We went to a ski place called Pyrenees 2000. We'd never been to that one before as a family, we always went to another one called les Angles which I loved so much that I had no desire to try a different one. But it was actually amazing and maybe even better than les Angles in terms of choice of green runs you can do (the easier ski slopes) It was quite confusing at first, Eric had been there that week on his school ski trip and we couldn't find out how to get to the bit he recognised. In the end we worked out that you had to get two different ski lifts to get up to this big hill where there were about eight options of how to get down and a few of them took you down to the part he'd been to before.

 It was so fun skiing together, we're all the same level which is really nice because no one is being held back by anyone else. we tried some blue runs (a bit harder than green) for the first time and there was a very cool run where you could take optional side paths between the trees. There was also a obstacle course one with things you had to try and hit and some jumps to go over. That night we had raclette with everyone. yum. 

The next day most people were going to the hot baths, an outdoor pool that is the temperature of a bath. but we wanted to go skiing again because we had hired the kids ski stuff for the full weekend and we just thought we should make the most of being there, so we went by ourselves. Those might be the only days we go this winter, to go as a four is expensive, but what's nice is we can just do what we can afford each year and that might be just two days. However if we were in England you can't really do it like that. Percy went for another day with his school where he got to try biathlon, (skiing and shooting) snow shoeing (walking in snow with tennis rackets on your feet) cross country skiing and sledging. all that was for a very reasonable price of 35 euros.

Other than snow fun, we've been house hunting, we've started the process of remortgaging our house in Liverpool and that money that we will take out will be the deposit for buying a house here. So far we've seen seven houses. Our main criteria is loads of space, so the boys can have a room each, I can have a space for art/ teaching planning. Dan needs a work space, a room for guests would be amazing, also we got the boys a big football table for Christmas and that needs a space. So were looking at a minimum of four bedrooms. The other tricky thing is area, if we move even 10 minutes away the boys would have to change school. Unless you got special permission to stay which is not guaranteed. but we might move to an area with more going on, that is closer to Dan's work.

This is what we've seen so far: (our budget is around 260,000 euros/ 230 000 pounds)

1) next door, 6 beds! very nice garden with an above ground pool and a outdoor kitchen. sounds perfect right? but the garden is like a court yard so is very shady most of the day. Its 3 floors, so the downstairs is one room, then 3 bedrooms and another beds. There's not really enough room for a good size dinning area and a good sized lounge area. The only access to the garden (except through the house) is by a garage which she doesn't want to sell with it. So it's pretty weird for someone else to have access to your garden and not you.

spot the rabbit

 outdoor kitchen. and next to that behind the rabbit hutch is the garage that they don't want to sell.

2) A 4 bed house with a little garage in the village right by school. It's a bit tatty, I would want to completely renovate it. It was fine but not exciting, it was the cheapest one of the 7.

3) When we pulled up at this house, I thought "this is not going to be it." It was in a random village that was closer to town on the map but because it wasn't on the fast main road, time wise it would only be 2 minutes nearer town by car although significantly quicker by bike. The kids would both have to move school if we moved there. When we entered the house annoyingly it was incredible! big modern kitchen, lovely dinning space, joined with a cosy sitting room. All tastefully decorated in neutral tones, then upstairs there were 5 bedrooms! including one with an ensuite and one that was giant and actually used to be 2 rooms. There was a secret cupboard that went back really far and would make a perfect play house for a 2 year old. I don't currently own a 2 year old but if I made this tiny play house all the two year olds would want to be may friend.  (I mean like my nieces and nephew, I'm not going to just take kids of the street.) it also had a massive loft space which she said you could make into a roof terrace. The outside space wasn't massive, there was some space and it had an avocado tree! I would host so many Mexican dinner parties with guacamole if I had that house.

If it was just me I would like to offer on the avocado house but I feel bad to move the kids from one random village to another. The seller has since accepted an offer on this house but we told her if it falls through let us know, because were still interested.

outside with the avocado tree, the primary school playground is just over the wall so it would be the easiest school run ever.

inside - through the wooden door is a lovely big modern kitchen

4) This house was in an area near town (saint esteve) that I have decided would be good, it had 4 beds and a pool. Somehow it ticked all the boxes but nether me or Dan were excited about it. it was a bit tatty and the garden was quite overlooked. and first world problems but the pool did take up a lot of the garden so in the winter that is wasted space, but I don't know why, we both just didn't feel it.

 

5) In order to see this house the gatekeeper/ estate agent came round for a meeting to ask us everything we wanted from a house and then he said he find us houses. House number 5 was less than 5 minutes away from where we currently live in the next door village of Millas where Percy goes to school, so he wouldn't have to move schools and I would ask for permission for Eric to remain at his current school.

from the outside it was beautiful, very classic French with green shutters, it was a semi, with a really big garden. Inside the upstairs was entirely wallpapered in 70's wall paper. a weird bathroom with a bath directly behind a shower, but that stuff we can change, 4 beds one has a little balcony, very nice light and views. however it was only single glazed, I don't know if that's an issue we would need to fix. And the main issue was the kitchen was very small and I'm not sure if it would be possible to extend or attach two the other room because there was a toilet between the 2 rooms that I would want to join. Overall it had a lot of potential but might be a big project to make it how we wanted it. It was on the cheaper end of the scale though.

 

Do they know you can just put a shower in over a bath? who puts a bath directly behind a shower?

6) Then we had to see more houses that the gatekeeper of houses made us see. One that was a new build in a random village where Percy could stay in the same school but not Eric. 4 beds and a pool, Dan quite liked it. I didn't, the entrance looked like a doctors rather than a house.

7) And finally he took us to see a house that didn't match our criteria at all. Top end of the budget, and a 2 bed! He said you could convert the loft. I personally think he was just trying to show to those clients that he could get viewings. Thanks for wasting everyone's time. It wasn't even a nice house, it had a shower with a glass ceiling so if you were in the loft you could perve on someone in the shower. 

Let me know what you would pick so far. Were hopefully soon going to see one with a garden so big I could start my own farm/ put on a festival.