France: It's getting real!

And then everything started moving at pace….

Just one day into viewings, our neighbour got an offer on her house, and a day later she’d accepted. This made us start to rethink our timeline to try and find a way to close the gap between her sale and our move.

After a bit of a sleepless night a solution came to me; I could actually finish work a month earlier so that our July expedition to do property viewing could shift forward a full month.

Property searching

While our resident Relocation Director has been doing a sterling job checking out property possibilities, we always knew that we’d need some experts to help us land the right place.

We’d settled on Ibanista some time ago, but now it was time to put things in motion with them, having resolved where we wanted to be and the financial requirements position.

Ben sent through a link to Smart Garant for us to get to work on. As we don’t have relatives in France to provide assurance on us paying the rent, services like this provide a proxy version to reassure French landlords, plus open a door to more property search prospects for Ibanista.

Initially we were overwhelmed by the form we needed to complete and the information we needed to supply, but in a few days we had everything together and made the application. 24hrs later we’d been approved!

Next up was a form from Ibanista to get us to be really specific about ourselves, our must-haves and red lines. Really, it was a chance to set out how and where we wanted to live, and have someone else do the work to get us there.

We have twice-weekly listing updates for us to consider and feed back on, and a dedicated assistant (Natalie) helping us with remote viewings if we choose to look at any in more detail. Question is, what do we do if we want to see one in person? Tricky….

Selling off the surplus

I’d managed to make a good start in selling off some of the larger items we wouldn’t be taking with us.

I waved farewell to my Beringer monitors I’d bought in late 2024, which (in all honesty) I’d not really used.

Next, the Mitre Saw and Stand went, followed by my Bosch Garden Shredder. And just yesterday the monitor stands were snapped up too.

I won’t pretend we made much from this sell-off, but it’s starting to clear the decks a bit. Next up, Rachel will starting the Great Clothes Clearance….

Getting the house in order

Although technically we don’t need to do some of the things we’ve done in the past few weeks, there is always the possibility that our sale to our neighbour could fall through, so they’d need to be done if the house did go on the market.

We’ve been trying to arrange for a full electrical test for some time, and it finally got done. The mystery wire in our middle bedroom turned out to be a 12v supply for an alarm system sensor that must have been removed before we moved in. But we found our smoke alarms were 15 years out of date so they are getting replaced.

We also arranged for a new EPC - something an estate agent normally organises. But after our efforts to make the house warmer and more economical I was keen to see how far we shifted from our original D rating.

The answer was ‘not that far’. We managed to get a C rating which was a bit disappointing but the best we could achieve without a huge capital layout.

And finally, we replaced the crappy door to our garage that we had to kick every time to open it properly, while it continued to rot away day-by-day. Good riddance.