HOW: The Search Begins. . .
And ends, with an offer!
(Photo showing a rainbow in the sky)
Things we were expecting about our search:
That it would take a while. A few weeks, on and off, at least. Would we be able to find something to fit our wishes and budget? We weren’t sure. We certainly didn’t want to tempt fate by assuming we would (we’re kind of superstitous that way—never ask us how car is doing). Yes siree, we planned plenty of time for the search.
That we’d see a lot of nos before the YES. Especially nos that required a lot of work, even cosmetic, which we weren’t totally up for, especially after redoing our old house and with our still halting-french.
That we might have to go way over budget in order to find something. Way over. Which would be a whole other conundrum. Could we really, legitimately, afford to do this?
Things we were not expecting:
To find a lot of homes in our budget, actually, most of them in good condition, with one exception (see crazy house below).
To find THE ONE on our very first day of looking. The first DAY!
Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, Dennelle was really good at listening to us and then finding us properties based on what we told her. And during our first zoom conversation, she even said, “Your budget isn’t unusual. A lot of people have that kind of budget.”
Or maybe it was the rainbow over all of Castres on the day we arrived that might have tipped us off.
I don’t know. But we were as shocked as anyone that we made an offer so early in our search.
That morning, after a 1.5 hour drive from Castres, we met Dennelle at a restaurant in the village of Trebes, on the outskirts of Carcassone, for some coffee and strategizing. Trebes is a small, lovely, sun-bleached community with a number of restaurants at the heart, restaurants which line the Canal du MIDI, which runs through it. Lots of waterside dining opportunities.
(Photo showing the boat-lined Canal du Mini)
House 1- Trebes
(aside-let me apologize ahead of time that we don’t have actual photos of any of these homes, so you’ll have to use your imagination based on our description. But, we will have photos next week of the one we chose.)
The first property we looked at was nearby in Trebes, a 2 bedroom basement apartment with a driveway and a small, basic outdoor living space that I nonetheless could see easily sprucing up. Inside, with the exception of a second bedroom in a kind of mezzanine whose box-like stairs would definitely require minimum installation of a handrail, it was otherwise all one level, which was nice to see. With white walls everywhere and a lovely kitchen under a curved stone arch, it didn’t feel dark and basement-y to me. There had recently been a leak in the kitchen ceiling and the owners were going to be replacing all the cabinets before they sold it, but the kitchen had good bones. It opened out into a large living room that led to the entrance of the house. There was room for a dining space, a capacious, comfortable living space and even a nook for a writing space.
Off the living room was a large master bedroom which was oddly configured with mismatched furniture by the current renter, but I could see a lot of potential that could be realized just with new furnishings. Also off the living room was a bathroom and a separate laundry/storage room. So, one of our major wishes met—all on one floor! This one was also really well-priced, walking distance from town, and featured a pizza restaurant and a boulangerie, both just up the street.
House 2- Quillan
From Trebes, we drove about an hour due South, past miles of picturescque vinyards, into the small village of Quillan (key-on), which lies in the heart of the Pyrenean Piedmont Plateau. Although very different from Trebes—shadier, and cooler—Quillan was also a handsome village, one that immediately felt sophisticated—as if you took an elegant Paris arrondisment and shrunk it in the dryer to village-size. Despite containing only 3500 residents, it seemed active, with restaurants, cafes, a grocery, and a few boulangeries. Posters advertised upcoming concerts and festivals in the village center, with the river Aude running alongside it.
Here, along with Dennelle, we met the realtor at her Immobilier (real estate office) and walked with her to House 2. About a 5-10 minute walk from the city center, House 2 was on a quiet street off one of the main avenues through town. It was a compact, two story village house with two bedrooms on the upper floor and a kitchen and living room on the ground floor. Importantly, there was a full bathroom, albeit small, on each floor. While the fact that it was two stories was a concern, the stairs were in the center of the house and were not only stable, with a strong set of bannisters, but also not too steep. That is, it was a relatively short, easy go to the second floor. There was also a twin- size bed in the corner of living room. We have often stayed in old French houses with a bed in the living room (one was queen size!) so this wasn’t a total shock to us. I saw the potential for turning it into a daybed which could also be practical for accessibility reasons.
House 2 was simply but impeccably kept, with wood ceilings and stone walls and a lovely eat-in kitchen. The front of the house also featured an interesting little glassed-in entryway where you could sit and drink your coffee or wine, depending on time of day, regardless of the weather. This entry opened out on another outdoor space fitted with an outdoor dining table and chairs and a large, square, concrete container garden filled with bushes and plants that seemed to thrive with little upkeep. There was also room to park a small car behind the locked wood gate that led to the street. It wasn’t as well-priced as the Trebes house, but still comfortably within our range.
We looked at one other house in Quillan, and the “crazy house,” which was in nearby Axat and which John will describe below. But, although the other house in Quillan was also nice and well kept, as well as larger (4 bedrooms and a small office) it had a truly daunting number of stairs, not uncommon in French village houses for maximizing space. First, there was a set of steep stairs through the garage, just to get into the house. Then the house was stacked with a living area/kitchen on the first floor, another set of stairs to the next two bedrooms and then another set of almost ladder-like stairs to the last two bedrooms at the top, about which John observed quite frankly, “we could never let anyone over 55 stay up there” (I am 57, make of his choice of age cut-offs what you will). Finally, the only outdoor living space was a rooftop sitting area that had to be accessed through a window/stepstool combination in one of the bedrooms. So this other house in Quillan, while also lovely, was never something we could really consider.
House 3 Bize-Minervois
Ah, Bize-Minervois. Also in the Aude Department, like Quillan, another dreamy village with a romantic, medieval feel to it, with another river running through it, this time the Cesse. On the walk to it, we learned that House 3 actually had rights to a small beach/swimming hole on the Cesse. Here, everything was also walking distance, including the swimming/wading hole. The stone house (goes without saying; they’re all stone) opened right off the street into a well-equipped, bright, white eat-in kitchen and then a compact living room behind it that was kind of oddly laid out, with a dishwasher in the far corner. Yes, a dishwasher in the living room (after that, a bed doesn’t seem so weird, does it?). The truth is, we’ve gotten used to not using a dishwasher on this trip; we haven’t had one in either apartment. Dishwashers don’t seem too common here. So we’d probably pretend it wasn’t there, sell it, or use it as a surface to store things. It’s hard to imagine rinsing dishes and then carrying them through two rooms to be washed. But behind that was a nice-sized bathroom and laundry/storage space.
A narrow set of whitewashed, twisting stairs with a rope handrail led off the kitchen to the two second floor bedrooms, with a small hallway between them and another WC and sink off the larger bedroom. The larger bedroom had some built-ins on either side of the bed with lots of books and a kind-of artsy feel, like Patti Smith might suddenly appear in the doorway at any moment offering us an edible.
Another set of narrow, rope-handrailed stairs (easy enough to replace with something more solid) led to the last bedroom and an outdoor room on the roof. Acknowledging the difficulty of reaching this outdoor space, Dennelle said hopefully, “well you could just move a small refrigerator and coffee set up here and live up here for days at a time.”
So that was House #3. Some challenges but a lot of funky charm too, and a great location.
If you ever watch HGTV’s House Hunters or International House Hunters, you know that they narrow it down to 3 houses with time enough during the commercial breaks for viewers to predict what the buyers will choose before a big reveal at the end. We’re inviting you to do that here, as well. Post in the comments which house you think we chose by 5 pm next Sunday. We’ll post the actual house (with photos!) in next Monday’s HOW and we’ll even do a drawing among those who guessed correctly for some cool, blank vintage french notebooks I recently picked up at a brocante (antiques/flea market).
Finally, without further ado, we’re going to end with John’s description of the “crazy house,” which, the more I read it, the more I realize we should have titled the “commode” house, for reasons that will become apparent. This house was never in the running or on either of our lists, it was just something the Quillan broker “thought we should see.”
From John:
A house we didn’t buy but won’t ever forget was in the town of Axat, a considerably smaller and homelier ville than either Trebes or nearby Quillan, but not without its appeal from the outside. Inside was a horror show: dingy and outdated, with rooms positioned here and there in crazy quilt fashion and no logical plan. No room led naturally and easily to the next—think a living room with extremely low ceilings leading to another sitting room with high ones. Worse, every room appeared to have been decorated fifty or more years ago–by someone with ludicrously bad taste–and then left untouched for decades. Maybe it had been.
To tell the truth, the house was so unappealing, I have blocked most of it from my memory. But two things I recall most: 1) In a home otherwise furnished, if badly so, we saw two oddly shaped rooms (one triangular!) with concrete floors and nothing in them but one ancient toilet each. Understand, the house had two normal, if ugly, bathrooms already. These were just gratuitous toilets in pointless rooms. And the realtor wasn’t even sure those toilets were hooked up to the sewer system. Whoever lived here before must have really needed to have toilets around. (I think it was in one of those rooms that Stephanie looked up to notice that someone had wallpapered the ceiling with paper that was supposed to look like wood. We’d seen real wooden beams in the other houses that day. But the best this house could do was to throw up faux wood, now-peeling, wallpaper.)
2) There was an interesting back garden, but in order to get to that garden one had to go through a bathroom, out a window, and then cross a rotting metal bridge to the hill behind the house. It was not a bad garden, actually, especially if you could overlook the fact that it was built precariously into the side of a hill, and it had a sizable, if decaying, storage shed. But here’s the thing, the realtor proceeded to tell us that the owner of this house did not technically own the garden but the neighbors to the right and left probably wouldn’t care if we made it our own. Hmmm. Really? They probably wouldn’t care? What if it turned out they did care? The last disconcerting information we received was that the former occupants had been the parents of the people next door, who had inherited the place and were now trying to unload it. Seemed to me that the only way to make this house better was to dynamite it and then build it all over. But our new neighbors would surely resent anyone doing that to their parents’ home.
From Stephanie: To add to John’s description, the home also used to be a hair salon (again, this must have been many decades ago) so the ground floor opened into that from the street. This floor was three rooms, one filled with ancient, rusting salon equipment, one crammed with excess furniture, including an enormous dining table so big it was hard to imagine it wasn’t built in the room, and a smaller room which held—you guessed it—a lone, unattached toilet.
(Photo of a blue shutters on a stone window)
I think you will pick house #2, though all sound great!
I’m thinking House #2!