#france

A personal diary of a young English family's ambition to make the French dream a reality - renovating the home of their dreams and experiencing living the French rural lifestyle.

Join us on our journey and learn and share the actuality and reality of living and renovating in France. From concept to construction; documenting not only the progress of work and giving tips and advice from our experiences, but giving a real insight into exactly what is involved, decisions we have made, the emotional impact and how we are adapting as a family.

The blog was an idea I had after completing our first project, the gite. I am currently focusing on the here and now and the progress of our barn project. When I can, I will also be going back in time to document the process of the gite renovation.

I hope that by doing this blog, it will not only enable our friends and family to follow us, but other people who may have the same ideas may be able to use it as a resource and also something to relate to. I do not claim to know everything about the moving process and the rules and regulations - far from it, but am learning more and more every day and have been able to provide information and tips which we have learnt through first hand experience. If there was a website which had all the information I needed in one place when we first moved here and on numerous occasions after that, it would have saved us bags of time instead of constantly spending hours trawling through heaps and heaps of information in both languages, trying to piece it all together and find the right answer.

If thinking of making the move, but unsure for any reason - I hope that this may be a good source of information for you, but please know that France is a very big, diverse country, which has lots of different things to offer. You can live the buzzy city life in France, but being country bumpkins at heart, we chose rural France (very rural!), so our experiences will be relevant to that. Wherever it is you live, or whatever it is you choose to do, everyone's experience is totally different - this is just our personal story.

Please have a read of my feature stories. If you have any comments or would like to share your own stories, tips or advice with us, we would love to hear from you on our Facebook page on the link below. If you could give us a "like" while you are there, we would really appreciate it. Thank you. :o)

https://www.facebook.com/BuildingTheDreamInFrance

Happy reading! :o)

Getting The Ball Rolling; The Start of a New Venture - Many a Hoop To Jump From Here On In!

Wow! Just thinking back to this time makes me feel a little queasy! So much happened in such a short amount of time! In April 2012, just 2 months before our wedding, after finding a bank through the estate agent who were offering an unbelievably good deal we made the dash to France to view the house ourselves, meet with the agent and bank and do all the paperwork. We had finally bitten the bullet and the ball was set in motion! We spent 4 days in France, exploring the surro

Why Move to France?

Why Move To France? Having holidayed regularly in the Vendée region of France, Pays De La Loire for the past decade, visiting my mother, who made the jump over here 10 years ago, we had no idea we were going to fall quite so deeply in love with the place! With such beautiful sites, the ever changing landscapes, the climate, the food, culture and slower pace of life, it is hard not to let it get under your skin - and once it is, it cannot be extracted! At first, I believed it