So, you want to build your own house?

By Maureen Twitchen

We bought in Brittany some twelve years ago but didn't move here permanently until 1977 and then did the normal Brit thing!! Having bought a small cottage, we then started the renovation, adding a veranda, three bedrooms, kitchen, new sanitation, roof etc. over a period of five years with my husband doing a lot of the work himself. The cottage was rural but only 1k from Plumelec a small market town. During this time we also bought a small town house, derelict but, with the thought that when we became older and decrepit we could move up into the town. Now that really was a ruin!! But we bought for a song and renovated yet again! and in fact did quite well letting it as a gite for three years. A year last April, we had a friend staying there looking herself for property to buy and after ten days,she told me nothing was suitable except perhaps for my little house…. well, to cut a long story short , she made us an offer we couldn't refuse, so we sold our long term retirement home to her.

At about the same time another friend rang me to say they were selling up in Tunbridge Wells and could I look around for a house for them, the criteria was: not old, no exposed beams, granite walls or ancient wells, a nice piece of land and somewhere they could just move in to. They had spent the last ten years sailing in the Mediterranean so were worldly wise. As luck would have it, a fairly new house came on the market close by, it was well built, with a mature garden of 2000m². I phoned Joyce, my friend, and a few days later, they arrived to view. Joyce took one look at the outside and said “I'll have that' - its just what we had hoped for'' and two months later, contracts were signed and in they moved . End of story? Not by a long way!

My husband, for some reason, took a fancy to the idea of a new house; his comments being, low maintenance, easy care, no chopping wood every day, no painting the windows every other year, no checking for leaks in the roof etc. and closer to the town which was our long term plan anyway. Well, I ignored it for a while because, quite honestly, I was just beginning to enjoy the tranquillity of my life, my garden was looking good, just coming to maturity, the house was as I wanted it, I give English lessons two evenings a week to a local group which keeps my brain alive (!) and my social life was better than it had ever been in the UK, AND my dog and two cats were happy so why rock the boat??

The summer ended and, as the nights drew in, the subject of a new house and a move became the main topic and I was gradually coming round to the idea that maybe it’s what we should do; so we started to look around . I, for one, did not want to move away from Plumelec - it’s a delightful town in an area of outstanding beauty, only 20k from the coast and surrounded by beautiful countryside. So we felt a bit restricted and for the next six weeks or so, spent a lot of time trying to find what we wanted but without success. We did find one that could have been a possibility and at that point obtained a valuation for our cottage from the local notaire. It was within the figure that we had come up with and so decided to market it , with a view to making an offer for the house seen in Plumelec. Well, that was not to be: there were people fighting over the town house and we could not better our offer because there was quite a bit of improvement work to do and it would mean going well over our budget.

We left our cottage for sale but with little enthusiasm, and although we had a few people looking, decided to shelve the idea and stay where we were.

Then, calamity!! I fell on our narrow staircase, breaking my ankle, and that became the deciding factor. It was not the first time I had fallen. With a chronic back condition, I had suffered two bad falls in the past five years and could at times be very unstable on my feet. We did not have a bedroom on the ground floor, there were steps from the lounge to dining area, front door entrance, patio and veranda, each of them being lethal for me at times!

A few days later, my devious, slow-thinking husband came up with the ultimate ''why don't we buy a piece of land and build a single storey villa?". At that time my pain level was such that I would have agreed to anything (!) but I have to admit, it sounded like a good idea and so a new adventure started.

But where and how do you start? Neither of us had had experience with building new and if we were to stay in our locality, how did we find land? Back to the notaire and luckily he had a few plots. There are different ways to buy land here in France which we quickly found out. The first is to buy a plot from the Mairie called a lottissement: this is a small housing estate whereby the town buys a large piece of land (say 5 acres), puts in the main services and each individual buys a plot within, paying towards those services. In general the price per square metre is less than if you buy an individual plot, and it would normally have mains water, waste drainage and street lighting with a lot of them having good communal landscaped areas within the estate, but of course its not everyone’s ideal. Personally, I feel it’s good for young families and starter homes because the children grow with their peers and a good sense of community can develop. Sometimes these small estates are made up of a mixture of private houses and council owned rented homes. We two, being of the 'third generation', decided that this was not for us; besides which the plots were a bit small with the maximum available being 800m².

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