So much to tell you...

...no idea where to start

I had so many wonderful plans.
So many schemes and ideas for ways to bring you along on our inaugural trip to our little French farmhouse this month. Breezy daily updates; early morning trips to the boulangerie together. Vicarious French supermarket shopping and summer DIY.

Needless to say, this didn’t go as planned…

We should never have gone there in August.

In our defence, the sale was originally due to be completed in the final days of Winter, but delays due to COVID, archaic French bureaucracy and our elderly vendor’s idiosyncratic whims meant the keys were not officially ours until the latter days of July.

By then the house had been empty for over 2 years, so we knew we needed to get over there soon to breathe in some life.

As it turns out, we needn’t have worried. Opening the doors up at last in the 40C heat of France’s hottest ever heatwave we were met by an abundance of all things alive. Bats, spiders, rapid scurrying ‘house centipedes’ and ominously chunky black crickets. My 9 year old, deeply arachnophobic, took one look in the hallway then ran back to the car.

All of the appliances were a fire and health hazard. At our insistence, the vendors had removed all of their old, funereal furniture, but left us the 40+ years of filth they uncovered in the process.

The water from the taps gave you an electric shock whenever you put your hands in the flow. Washing my fringe on one early morning, I received a painful zap I felt all the way to my teeth.

It was like one of those awful celebrity reality-TV jungle shows, except with even more spiders, with weather too hot to wear clothes.

We’d booked into an AirBnb for the first few nights, but once they had passed we made a valiant effort to camp on the living room floor. Mosquito-net draped IKEA mattresses on the floor, a cheap air conditioner running 24/7, drinking €3 wine from the supermarché, appeasing Orla by draining our phone data to let her stream Netflix.

It got slowly better from there. My heroic husband made amazing progress getting things clean and habitable. He scrapped all the old appliances, fixed the water-electro-shock-therapy and chased all the bats back up into the attic. The cleaners I’d booked finally found us, and did an epic (and ethical) spider-removal.

I found furniture - lots of it cheap and second-hand via Le Bon Coin, France’s answer to Loot-meets-Facebook-Marketplace, and Orla gradually consented to going into the bathroom alone. It began to feel safe to store our possessions outside of sealed plastic tubs.

Those early days were undoubtably ghastly, but they were also - with hindsight, of course - remarkably fun.

Sure, I might not have admitted that to you if you’d asked me as I lay broken on my floor-bed in those early, sweltering evenings, but the thrill of new problems that could be fixed just with effort alone was a welcome reprieve.

No intellectual puzzles (the water thing excepted), just the simple application of human labour and time.
I was never naive enough to think that buying a 200-year-old farmhouse in the remote French countryside would be an easy ride, but that was never really the goal. I just wanted something different. Fresh challenges; new problems. A fresh take on life.

And as luck would have it, our french house delivered in spades.

By week 2 we were comfortable; by week 3 I didn’t want to come home.

Because despite the discomfort and fear and doubt and mess; despite the hundreds (literally, hundreds) of insect bites I accumulated; despite the stress and expense and the vacuum cleaner we’re probably going to have to burn after all it’s been through; despite all of this, it just feels right.

Like a path we are meant to be walking.

Like the much-awaited new title in my favourite series of books.

Home (for now) in chilly Blighty, I have a hoard of photographs, plans, and anecdotes to share. Stick around for upcoming posts on:

- The online French interior stores I’ve newly found and love
- All my plans for each room - phase 1 (quick and low-budget) and stage 2 (further down the line)
- Our lovely neighbours, local villages, sights and stores
- My plans to offer retreats, free stays and other fun things
- My long term game plan

Plus allll the #frenchlife photos along the way!

I’m also expanding the scope for things things I write about here to include some of my other favourite topics, like social media, Instagram, mindset, life, work and happiness. I’ll be setting up opt-ins so you can tweak your subscription to only receive the things that are most interesting to you, but my hope is that you’ll find a thread of connection that runs through it all.

Speak very very soon,

With love,

Sara xx