The truth about renovating in France

How often have you watched programmes about someone moving to France? Do you ever wonder if that’s reality or made up for the telly?

Well I’ve not been on telly with my renovation experience, though I have written books about it. And I can tell you that after more than 20 years of renovating – I’m still not finished. But – it’s just me and my partner Mark doing everything, by hand, and learning as we go along. Watching YouTube tutorials, learning from books, and making some things up as we go.

Where did it start?

I guess it all started with watching TV shows about people moving to France and renovating – or at least it planted a little seed somewhere in our heads. We lived in London, in a suburban semi-detached house. We didn’t have pots of money, had busy jobs and 5 kids between us. One weekend we went to the Cotswolds and decided we loved the countryside and that led me to persuade Mark to take a week long holiday in southwest France. He’d been adamant he didn’t like France, couldn’t speak the language etc. But – he fell in love with it, playing petanque with friendly locals, the fabulous street markets and boulangeries, the laid back way of life.

We loved our time there but it still didn’t occur to us to move there and life goes on.

Finding the house

Several years later, in 2004, we went with my dad on a day trip to buy wine in Calais. And then we went for lunch in a little town about an hour inland. And then we looked at a few houses for sale as we had spare time and it was cold and wet. And then I bought one. There and then. It was a hovel. A big hovel with an acre of land.

We gave up our gym memberships, holidays, eating out and any other sort of fun so that we could afford the mortgage (£55,000 and we paid a deposit of £10,000). We visited as often as we could and tried to make it water tight and habitable but it’s a sprawling farmhouse, had missing windows, holes in the roof, it was home to rats and birds, and one end of the house was held up by a pole. After several years of fighting a losing battle, Mark proposed we sell our house in the UK and move to France, renovate the house and one of us would work from home where we could and commute to London for office visits. It was a tough decision, a huge risk, we had no idea if it would work out but after a bit of persuading (he threatened to go without me). We sold up, and moved to France.

The reality of renovating

We can’t afford help so we’re doing it all ourselves. And the reality is that it takes a lot of time when you’re doing it that way. We had to learn how to renovate for starters. The house was a wreck. Some rooms had dirt floors, every window and door needed replacing, we had to build walls that would hold it all up, it needed plumbing, rewiring – everything you can think of, this house needed it. Mark said it would have been quicker to knock it down and start again. He’s probably right but it’s an old house, parts of it go back 400 years and I wanted to preserve as much of its past as I could.

There’s no mains drainage in our village so we had to renovate the septic tank and that was our first job as it exploded at the start of our renovation journey. We’ve had electric shocks, accidents, cut ourselves, broken bones.

Frankly it’s not been all fun. Even if you get on well with someone, there’s sure to be disagreements over the direction the renovation goes in.

We’ve learned the hard way that you can’t rush a renovation when you’re doing it yourself. And that it costs more than you think it will. And takes longer than you think it will.

But we’ve also created a home we’re proud of. Rooms that are ‘us.’ Our pantry has a cupboard made from the old stairs of the house, the new stairs are made from wood we salvaged from a skip in London. We built all the cupboards in the kitchen from scratch, in fact almost the only furniture we haven’t built ourselves are the sofas and beds. We’ve replaced 37 windows and 13 doors. We’ve lost count of how many tons of concrete we’ve laid. We have a largely leak-proof house (the flat roof on the extension was a mistake that we need to rectify), that’s insulated so well we have only one fire to heat all the rooms.

And we’re still renovating – and after more than 20 years, I’m starting to think it will never be completely finished.

If you’re hoping to do a renovation – it can be scary, you don’t know what you’re capable of until you face the challenge, and if it doesn’t work out straight away, you’ll find a way through it with a little luck and a lot of hard work.

Janine Marsh is the author of several best-selling books about France. Find all books on her website janinemarsh.com