What are we aiming to do?

Over the coming years we are aiming to be as self sufficient as possible - it is a concept known as self-sufficient"ish" (or ishness/good life!)  It is a process that will take at least 5 years to approach anything like self sufficiency and in saying that, we do not aim to produce our own clothes and all of our own food but the majority would be nice. We have a sewing machine – is that allowed?!

Why? Well for a number of reasons -

The kids – we feel the kids are at the right age to make the move i.e. before they get totally involved in clubs, activities and friends in Chamonix. To leave it any longer or to procrastinate would probably have meant we never moved on (we have met people in Chamonix who want to relocate for various reasons but feel they can't because their kids are now totally attached to their lives here).

The idea of growing up on a working small holding seems so idyllic for kids that it is an opportunity we couldn't pass up.  Friends who grew up on farms often talk about the wonderful experience it was (not all admittedly, but most!) 

Perhaps most importantly, we have realised over the past few years that Al's relationship with the kids has become much stronger since he stopped working for his previous employer. He was suddenly at home virtually every time the kids came home from school.  They are already 3 and 4 years old and we have witnessed how time flies and don’t want to miss out on any more of their early childhood. We simply do not wish to miss this precious time with our beloved sprogs!

Health – organic produce – we don’t want to support polluting the countryside with chemicals, powerful supermarkets, poorly-treated livestock, the huge distances our food is transported (often decreasing proportionally in quality & taste the further it travels). It seems like a win win situation to produce it on our doorstep on our land in our own way.  We will never be able to produce all our own food but we hope to exchange our surpluses with neighbours and buy whatever we cannot produce from local producers or organic shops. We are not naïve – this is going to be a big challenge!

Finance - most people who know us would hopefully agree that our lives have never been ruled by materialistic goals in the never ending search for "happiness". If we had been, it is doubtful we would have settled in Chamonix (a low- wage resort town albeit very beautiful) and we settled here (admittedly more through luck than judgment) as we originally sought quality of life over high-flying careers. We do have a weakness for those vide greniers but hope that doesn’t count against us!

Having said all that, we feel incredibly lucky that we invested in property when we did and as a result we have been able to profit from rising property values to create ourselves a reasonable worth from a few projects over the last 13 years. Equally over the last few years we have felt more and more pressurised by large mortgages and the high cost of living in our locality to the extent that we might as well have been living a high pressure life in London.  Part of the reason for making the move towards self sufficiency is to clear our debts and live mortgage free (well almost).

Chamonix is cold! Life in a ski resort like Chamonix is quite tough - what with snow clearing, minus 10 to minus 20 degrees for long periods and very short summers, we are ready to move to a warmer climate and a longer growing season.

Finally, having built new houses in the past, we have always wanted to renovate an old house. The idea of a water mill renovation is just too tempting to ignore!

Le Moulin de Faget

To cut a long story short, we sold our house in Chamonix in record time (considering the current market) and then purchased the mill all within a month in February 2011 and the date for completion was set at the latest 10th June 2011.

We are heading down to stay in a gite near the mill tomorrow for a week during the Easter holidays.  The kids are unaware of our imminent move but we want to tell them while we are at the mill and also show them their school at the same time.

The kids will have the final 3 weeks of the summer term at the village school in Castelnau-Barbarens (8kms away) as we hope they will adapt easier with a few weeks to make friends while they are still in the same classroom (they are 1 school year apart and there are 2 school years in each class).  From September, they will be in different classes. We are hoping they will meet some local kids before the summer holidays and that we can grill their parents on the locality!

So what have we actually bought;

The mill house; 

The house is not huge - it is a typical double fronted Gascony farmhouse with two rooms downstairs and 2 rooms upstairs - totalling around 150sqm.  The difference with our mill is that one of the front rooms has a couple of 6 foot diametre mill wheels taking up a third of the floorspace but they will eventually make a beautiful feature in a living room we hope to create.  Off the mill room is a threshing room which will create a second part of the living area (both these areas are not live able currently) 

The main living space is the kitchen which is very basic but useable.  In June we hope to make some major changes with the addition of a wood burning stove/boiler and new (second hand recycled) kitchen and floor.  Also downstairs is a WC, bathroom and cloakroom.

Upstairs the owner had made some changes to suit his late mother - there are 2 large bedrooms, a smaller double bedroom and a shower room with WC.

This is just the right size for us because we hope to live a sustainably as possible and therefore avoid heating/lighting unused space.  Also attached to the house is a pig shed (under the threshing room) and a chicken coop (we are hoping to improve on our currently-poor poultry-keeping statistics!)

The house is generally in a liveable condition but needs modernising.  As we said before, we would rather buy cheap than pay top whack for someone else's taste that we would end up re-doing anyway.

The Barn

The barn is a monster - around 15m x 5m.  Described as a Dutch barn being open on all sides except the west side.  Generally in Gascony, farms are built with the house facing south and the barn attached to the house on the west side to protect the house from the worst of the Atlantic winds.  This mill is no different.

On the ground floor of the barn are some rooms, namely the original bread oven (last used circa 1920), the stables (all original and ready to home cows/horses) and a store room on the northern end.

There is also a carport for parking and storing machinery and 5.5 hectares of land.  Crucially on site is a natural spring, a well, the lake and the canals that supply the mill so we shouldn't run short of irrigation water.  As part of owning a mill we have learnt that we are responsible for the upkeep of not only the canals on our land but the entire water supply from the dam on the river that creates the flow of water into the canal, the 1000m of canals and the overflow/run off canal upstream from the mill. 

This is quite a scary proposition as we don't really know what it entails but it seems that we need to maintain the trees and greenery along the canal and that is about it for the short to medium term.  In the very long term, we might need to take on some repairs on the dam if it gets damaged but as it has been there for at least 2 centuries and the river flow is now controlled by an irrigation damn 10kms upstream, the chances of a major flood of water damaging the dam are quite low. We hope.

The Search for the perfect property

Ok so a perfect property does not exist - especially with the fairly unattainable criteria we set ourselves, but we were prepared to compromise in some areas.  In January 2011 Grandma  & Grandpa kindly looked after Ben and Scarlett for 4 days whilst we flew to Toulouse to check out around 12 of the most likely properties.  As usual (and Al should know) the estate agents were either a waste of time, mildly deaf or actually lying about the suitability of properties. However on day 2 we were met by Karl on behalf of his colleague Etta who turned out to be the epitome of a good agent.  They showed us the Moulin de Faget (an 18th century water mill with 5.5 hectares (13 acres) of land) which ticked all the boxes except the distance to school (who would soon be old enough to take the school bus) - but the property appeared perfect in every other way. NB if you Google the Moulin de Faget – we haven’t chosen the naturist colony with the same name!!

We went through the motions of the other visits for the next few days but our minds were already made up so we went back to the mill on the final day and spent another few hours with the intriguing owner (comically named Mr Boubee!).  We left the area with high hopes that our property in Chamonix would sell before the mill sold to someone else but we knew we had to steel ourselves for disappointment because we knew that the chances were that the mill would have sold before we could move on it. We always knew that our visit to the region was a little premature because we hadn't sold in Chamonix so we couldn't let ourselves get too attached to any individual place.

Here is a Google Earth image of the property.  You can make out the L-shaped millhouse and barn, man-made lake and land (brown with hay-bales).  The line of trees either side of the mill show the canals (commonly known as leats in the UK) that supply the mill with water for the mill wheels.  We are already trying to find a means of building a duck-house on the lake island – anyone know any MP’s with a decent expense account?

Lets start at the beginning

Around 5 years ago, we began talking about the idea of going self sufficient.  It was the subject of conversation many evenings and we got seriously into the idea; to the point where we mentioned it to family & friends.  Most were quite incredulous and thought we were mildly crazy and partially deluded - quite an accurate appraisal given we had an “idyllic” life already in Chamonix. It was not an easy decision – made all the more daunting at the thought of leaving the amazing friends we have made in the Alps over the years. Fortunately we received enough support and belief in our project to convince us to pursue the dream……although we decided that it was a project for the future, not for the immediate and that we needed to finish our projects in Chamonix first.

Our circumstances have changed dramatically over the last 18 months. Al's employers went bust hence he started a new business and got heavily involved in another.  It has been quite challenging so around 6 months ago we decided that life was too short for the stress and strain of meeting mortgage repayments. Selling up in Chamonix, clearing the mortgages and looking for a new rural way of life seemed a tangible reality.

Firstly we decided that we would stay in France - the UK was not a contender due to the weather and Spain and Italy meant a linguistic challenge too far (our Spanish is limited to waiter vocabulary and the Italian = Spanish with a different suffix). So we started looking at areas of France with affordable property and in November 2010 had a good look around the Creuse, Haute Vienne and the Dordogne departments. We visited some beautiful properties but came to the conclusion that we were looking too far north for warm and sunny weather and a most importantly a long growing season. Ben & Scarlett thought exploring derelict buildings was a great way to spend their half-term!

We returned home to start some proper research starting with climate statistics and quickly realised we needed to look further south but not too close to the Atlantic coast (less sunshine and more rain) or too close to the Pyrenees (harsh winters).  It emerged that the ideal property would be in a warm, sunny and relatively dry climate but with a water source on the land to irrigate if needed.  We therefore narrowed it down to around 10 departments from the Southern Dordogne down to the Haute Garonne on the edge of the Pyrenees.

Here is a link to a website with a clickable map of French departments;  http://flagspot.net/flags/fr(dep.html

Al started spending lots of time researching properties with the minimum criteria: 2+ hectares of land, a water source and a house that was at least livable albeit dated (we didn't want a property "renovated" to someone else's taste), in an area with relatively cheap real estate and came up with around 50 properties spread over around 300kms from the Bergerac to the Pyrenees.

In the meantime, Ben and Scarlett were getting quite into their skiing and we decided that a good way of narrowing our search area was to concentrate on properties within 2 hours drive of the ski resorts of the Pyrenees. This decision reduced the list of properties down to around 20 theoretically-suitable properties in the Gers and Haute Garonne departments (both south of Toulouse).

Ruth and Graham flew in to look after the kids and other animals to allow us to make a trip to the area for 4 days in January 2011 to see a shortlist of 12 properties; a trip which turned out to be very fruitful……..