How: And the winner is. . .

But first—this humble substack passed 100 subscribers this weekend. Thank you to all of you have subscribed and welcome to our newest. I hope you find what you read here useful and most of all, that you enjoy reading.

And the Winner is:

House # 2

“Well,” John said after he read the property descriptions in last week’s “How.”“ I think you tipped your hand with #2.”

Good thing I don’t play poker. I tried to throw people off by pointing up the qualities of #1 and #3 but failed dismally. Most  people voted for #2 (thank you, Monica Miller, for not making me feel like a total failure in this regard). And you were right! Stacy Lom and Els Strickland each won a vintage French notebook I will deliver to them when I’m back in the states. Thanks everyone for playing.

Maybe this means you can all see why the house was perfect for us, and why we felt it almost immediately.

Honestly, as we drove into Quillian, I was so struck by the beauty of this little town that I turned to John and gushed, “Oh! I want to live in here.”

All the way through the house tour, I kept casting raised eyebrows at John. And he cast them right back back to me. Reader, we do not always agree initially on domestic spaces, so this was significant.

Next we saw the pleasant 4 bedroom with the 3 sets of vertiginous stairs and then the “commode house,” in nearby Axat.  After the “commode house,” John and I confabbed then told Dennelle.”We really liked that first house in Quillan. Like, really, really liked it.”

“Ok,” she said. “I’ll talk to Nathalie and see what other action they have going on with it.”

By the end of the day, we learned that there was another viewing of House #2 the next morning. That they’d already had two lowball offers and rejected them both. Dennelle asked us: “Do you want to put in an offer?”

We did. We offered what Dennelle suggested, which was definitely not lowball but just under the asking price. 

The next morning, we met Dennelle in Bize-Minervois and looked at the artsy, twisty-stair house there. What I did not mention about that house (see, I was really trying NOT to be so transparent)  was that no more than one person could fit on the twisty stairs at a time. So even though there were three bedrooms, at any given time, our guests would have to announce, “I’m coming down!” or, “I’m coming up! ” to ensure a clear path to where they were going. Not exactly something that inspires a community feeling. Plus the whole “dishwasher in the living room” situation. I liked a lot about that house, but I really could not see us there. 

Just before we went to see one more house, which was actually lovely, with reasonable stairs and a view to die for, but in a town with no life and commerce, Dennelle got word that our offer had been accepted. And we learned that the house we were about to see had also had just an offer on it accepted. We saw it anyway. It was a very nice house, recently well-remodeled. It would have been a bit of a stretch in our price range but also. . .the town was dead. I hate to put it that way but it was. Nothing in walking distance. A ghost town. And extremely hard to navigate. But like I said, it was never really on the table.

We canceled our visits for the rest of the afternoon and the three of us, Dennelle, John and me, had a late lunch to celebrate. Dennelle immediately got to work setting in motion everything else that had to happen for us to actually be able to buy the house (I will describe all of this in the next post) and we were just pinching ourselves. Had we really found a house we loved after just one day? It seemed like we had.

A few more things about the house:

• It was impeccably kept and furnished as a holiday house by a Danish gentleman and a large amount of the furniture, which we liked, would convey. This not only meant a significant savings financially in not having to start from scratch, but in also terms of time: in not having to run around when we first set foot in Quillan next summer, pulling together basic furnishings like beds, tables, and so forth. We could hit the ground running and just be tweaking and making it our own.

• The outdoor space in front of the house was just what we were hoping for. There was outdoor dining (the table and chairs conveyed) as well as a completely self-sustaining container garden, with the rest of it paved. Yes, dear readers, we do not have to mow! Also, Quillan is surrounded by the Pyrenees and the view from every window is of those mountains. Swoon.

• The community. We learned this later, but Quillan, a community of about 3500, is about 10% expats and growing. We weren’t actually looking for that, but finding it out after the fact was a plus. They have an active English speaking community with a FB page where you can get various questions answered, from how to call an ambulance to how not to get fleeced by contractors to when the community pool opens in the summer. We really want be immersed in French culture but having an English speaking community at hand is definitely a resource.  

• Also, the community: Every village we looked at was between 1,000 and 3,500 people. But Quillan was by far the most active in terms of community. Markets, brocantes, concerts, restaurants, boulangeries, shopping. And all of it was within walking distance.

• Location: Quillan is 30 minutes from the next (much) bigger town, Limoux, and another 15 minutes from Carcassonne (45 min total), where the major hospitals are (though Quillan is not a medical desert in terms of GPs and emergency services). It’s also under 2 hours from the beaches at Narbonne and Perpignan. As someone who loves the ocean and has been landlocked for the past 27 years, that’s great news for me. It’s 1.5 hours from Toulouse as well as 2 hours from Montpellier (TGV to Paris etc) in one direction and the Spanish border in the other.

When you are looking for property, you really want to decide what’s important. What are the basic necessities you need, what is just nice to have? The same kinds of things you look for in the US but perhaps with a slightly different spin. What kind of community do you want? How easily do you need to be able to get to other places in town, in France and in Europe? What’s the medical landscape like?

We were lucky that we found something so quickly. At the same time, we had been looking online for years, knew what we could afford, what was common in that price range and what was something of a unicorn. We knew what to expect, how to recognize that unicorn when we found it and then jump on it. We also had Dennelle with us every step of the way, who not only understood, far better than we did, the pluses and minuses of each property we looked at, but also knew, preternaturally almost, how to support us when we had found the one. 

Dennelle will be featured even more in subsequent posts for all the ways she helped us navigate the rest of the process. . . from translating at every turn to setting us up with a pro-buyer notaire and literally every other step of the way. We would not be able to do this without her. 

Coming up in future “How” posts: Signing the “compromis de vente” at the notaire’s office, in Perols, near Montpellier. The de rigeur 10 day “cooling off period” during which either party can call off the deal, and everything that came next. Why the French real estate market is not as crazy as the US. What we really wished we had done before we left the US. And more.

But in the meantime, we’ll just leave you with some photos from Maison Deux.