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Jan

How to procure construction work in south of France

First of all – French craftsmen are as good as any other in Europe – they might be different to what we are used to though. The worst thing you can do to get the wrong start in France is not to use local craftsmen or not buying local construction material. Our experience is that village people in France welcome anyone to be a part of the community if you are willing to contribute. The best way of contributing is to give opportunities for people to make some money. In most of the regions, where we foreigners love to spend our holidays, the level of unemployment is high so everything is welcomed.
I admit that there might be a language problem, but you can get a long way by pointing, sketching and using your hands and body. If you get a problem, get some help from someone. It is worth it - I promise you!
Our experience from dealing with craftsmen is Sète is that they might be a bit unreliable in terms of not coming on time or at all sometimes. I have talked a lot with a friend and colleague who is from Algeria and have lived in France for long periods and is now Swedish since a few decades. He argues that the problem we have had with craftsmen is only our problem as Swedes, as we have totally other expectations than a Frenchman would have. For French people this is not a big problem because the habit of not doing what is agreed goes both ways, so nobody really takes offence or get irritated.
Knowing this we contacted a number of construction companies to get their offers on the major job to redo the entire roof of our house in the Corbières. We got three offers and they did not differ a lot in prize. One company was from the village, one from the nearest big city with an office in the village and the third was from a neighbour village. Off course everybody in the village knew everything about our project, they followed it closely and every progress was carefully reported to anybody in the village grocery shop. We soon found out that the local guy had a very good reputation for doing a very good job. He also was the kind of person who finished things before taking on new jobs, unlike the habit of most construction companies. Mostly they have many projects going and jump from one project to another, so you had to hunt them with a torch all the time to make them finish your job. We also felt that it would not be taken well by the people in the village if we did not follow their advice to choose the local guy as there was no real difference in price. If someone else got the job and we got into problems there would be a lot of “what did we tell you? Everybody would follow the progress of the work closely and if something went wrong or the work wouldn’t be up to our standard everybody would know. We realized this could work to our favour if we engaged the local company. We would have hundreds of quality controllers and the social reputation of the local guy would be damaged as everybody would feel a collective responsibility for his mistakes. It is also important to mention that we got a very good impression of the local contractor but the other competitors seemed very serious also. So, we signed a contract with this local guy and he agreed to do the job and we gave him the keys to the house and went back to Sweden.We also needed to change all the windows in the house as they were very old; some of them in bad condition and had only one glass. Our neighbour’s son owned the largest company in the area who sold factory made windows. We however were not happy with the detailing and the prize of the product he could offer. As the windows are the eyes of a house, and it is of major importance to the impression you get of the house, we wanted to make the new windows as close in style to the old as possible, only with double glazing. We asked our contractor for advice and he happened to have a brother who was an “ebeniste” which is both a carpenter and a furniture maker. He could do both the windows and a new staircase from the attic to the terrace. This guy turned out to have a very good reputation, had a reasonable prizing and was also a very nice person. Nowadays we regard him and his wife to be among our best friends in the village. So now we have engaged two brothers in the project. The good thing is that we get the co-ordination of the construction work for free. If they, as many craftsmen do, make things difficult for each other or get into co-ordination problems, they can deal with it within the family. This was of course a great advantage for us, being in Sweden most of the time.
Later it turned out that the little brother in the family did plumbing, electricity and some interior building work so we engaged the third person in the same family for all the small details inside. The lady next door, with the son in the window business, turned out to be the aunt of these brothers so we contacted the cousin to deliver the glass house to protect the landing of the staircase on the terrace. And the whole project was co-ordinated by the main contractor we first engaged. Great!
There are some peculiarities about construction contracts in France that we are not used to from Sweden. First, if you have an old house there is a VAT reduction so you only pay 5%. Small one-man companies under a certain annual turnover are regarded micro companies and do not have to pay VAT at all on labour, which makes it all less costly. Another very strange thing with our contractors is that the prize in the offer is the actual prize you pay in the end. Even if we have made many changes on the way and even made it more difficult for them, they do not change the prize unless you add substantial amount of work. In Sweden the habit is that the final prize is around 40% higher than the offer and the contractor charges you for every little change even if it does not cost more and adds your own telephone number to the total in the end.
I think the philosophy might be that dealing with an old building you can never know if something goes wrong or if you discover something that causes extra work so, calculating these risks is a part of the professional skills and misjudgements should not be taken out on the customer.
By the time we have engaged these three brothers in other parts of the renovation. Most of the work is now finished and we are very happy with the way everything has worked out. We have been a little worried from time to time, being so far away from the site, but it has always been satisfactory in the end.
The people in the village are very happy that we are happy with their “local sons”. From time to time they have however been worried when they have seen a stop in the construction work for a period and always reported to us on the phone. So we have had a strong social quality control of the building project.
One thing that makes people so engaged is off course that many families have a relation to this building and are very happy we do something about it. Many of them can however not understand why we insist on having these old fashioned materials like wooden windows when there are so beautiful new plastic windows that you never need to paint or anything. A house from 1762 is obviously not a big deal to many pragmatic people in the village.
Again a final piece of advice! There are a lot of negative stories about British people buying property and transporting both building materials and craftsmen from their home country. The French are not only insulted by this, they also think they do not get any economic benefit from being a place there people from other countries likes to settle down. I will soon be back again, maybe with some thought about the lovely wine in Languedoc.

Finding an old house in France

Our first vacation home in Sète was quite small but had the most marvellous view of the Mediterranean. We and all our friends loved it. One reason we bought it was to see how we liked coming back to the same place every year. We were planning to get something more permanent by the time, but were not sure in what area or what kind of location we were looking for. We will share some of our experiences with you today.
Sète is lovely – one of the favourite places for French people to go on vacation. It has fantastic seafood, one of the best beaches in France and a lot of atmosphere and culture. And maybe the best, there are relatively few Scandinavians, Germans, Englishmen or Dutch people that has found Sète. It is very genuinely French unlike some places on Côte d’Azur. It is not that we do not meet people from other countries, but never in such masses that they dominate the culture. On the contrary, there are more and more tourists coming to Sète and we enjoy meeting, talking with them. Sometimes it is nice to talk to someone who understands every word you say. We will invite you to a tour of Sète later.
Coming down for a few weeks to relax from work is perfect. We experienced a lot of things in a short time, we always had people around us – summer and winter – and it was always something going on. We were really on vacation!
We became however more aware of the fact that living in such a place all year around would be different. It was very easy to go to a restaurant instead of making your own meals. It was more attractive to take a walk along the beach than reading a good book. Shopping was always an attractive option if nothing else showed up. We felt that we would like to live in a place there we would not be on vacation all the time. I should however not be too far away from all these fantastic attractions we got used to. So, whenever we visited places around in Languedoc we kept our eyes opened and asked ourselves: How would it be to live in a place like this? We knew we were looking for an old house and we were not afraid of doing some renovation on it. We rather preferred that than a house someone else redone in away we did not like. It took us 12 years to find our house!
We were lucky to become very good friends with three most lovely cousins that owned the local restaurant, ice cream café and delicatessen shop in our neighbourhood. These three ladies had a lovely old house in a little village in the Corbières Mountains. Their house was a part of the oldest part of the village that was built on the remains of a medieval castle in turn built on the same ground as a Roman fortification.
Their neighbour house was the oldest in the village and also empty since a few years. Unfortunately in a condition that worried some of the neighbours. We were quite shocked when they suggested we should buy that building and renovate it. No way! An old building, Yes! But that was too much.
Next summer we visited our friend again and they announced on the phone beforehand that they had managed to get the keys to the building next door. All the way down to our friends we convinced ourselves NOT to by that house. We knew tat we needed all our talents to justify our lack of interest in the house to them.
It did not work out quite the way we had planned! When we entered the house it was love a first sight! We had a very good old lady friend with us from Sweden and the women were running up and down the stairs totally charmed by the lovely rooms, the old staircase, the original terracotta tiles from 18th century and how reasonably well everything was kept despite being empty for some years. I, being an architect, was more concerned about the condition of the floors, walls, roofing, plumbing and electricity.
To make a long story short – we bought the house and we will continue our story soon.

Tip of the day: If you are looking for a house for retirement. Do not rush, take your time, travel around and find out where and how you want to live and try to get French friends. It makes things much easier and nicer! They know so many things that you can never find out yourself. The way we did it, to get something small for a start, worked very well. And above all – have an open mind!

Buying property in France

The first experience we will share with you is how we bought our first property in France. Having experiences from Sweden we found that the French system was very much in favour of the buyer. Unlike Sweden the real estate agent has a very minor role in France. They merely find the objects and connect the buyer with the seller. In Sweden they also do all the legal stuff, which, due to a quite bad reputation among some of them, is not very safe for the buyer – or the seller. In France everything are taken care of by “le notaire” who is a trusted legal advisor without any stake in the transaction. “Le notaire” checks that everything is correct legally, like ownership, mortgages and debts. “Le notaire” also initiates certain controls of the property, which depend on the area and the age of the house. (When we bought our second French home in Corbières it was mandatory to check for lead in the construction and fittings and for termites). Off course “le notaire” charges for this service, but it is a set percentage of the prize and it depends on the age of the building. An older building means more work for “le notaire”. Our first home was a little studio with a fantastic view of the Mediterranean – it was just a fair drive from the balcony (golf drive). This was in 1991 and we went down to look at a different object that we did not like and found this new building just at the old fishing harbour, facing the pier with the light house and the guest harbour – lovely! The rules were that we could make a small deposit and reserve the studio until we had checked our financial resources with the bank. We got a few weeks to think it over and if we had not decided to buy or had got problems with the financing we could have pulled out, only loosing the interest on the deposit. They said this was the French way of dealing with the problem of people signing contracts on property without really thinking it over properly. Maybe the sun, the good feeling of being on vacation or a very smooth talking salesperson makes us a little irresponsible. This had resulted in quite a lot of legal and personal problems when the buyer “wakes up” and find themselves owner of a property they can not afford or do not like. This might not be the only possible procedure for buying. You can find more information on http://www.french-property.com/ which was the website we later used to sell our studio in Sète.
Anyway, we bought the studio, loved it and had many fine summers. Our friends and children spent time there with us (cramped) or by themselves and everybody came to love the fantastic city of Sète. I will come back with more information on Sète later. We really bought the little flat just to see how we would like to be in the same place every summer and also try out if we would like to move to the area permanently after retirement. We kept the flat in Sète for ten years and through friends we found our house in Corbières. We sold our flat (we got over 60 answers on our web add) and the money covered the prize for our house.

Presentation

[Photo]For the last 15 years we have spent every summer in our little studio in Sète in south of France. We have now bought a fantastic house in Corbière from 1762 that we are renovating.During these years we have learned a lot about how to get the most out of life in another country. We will talk about food, wine, culture, outings, golf, shopping and good friends. We will also share a few tips and tricks about moving to France, the bureaucracy, how to find good crafts-men and much more.