Earlier today a friend posted a link to the Calmer You 21-day Complaint Free Challenge, encouraging us to become aware of just how much we complain. It’s said that you need to keep at something for 21 days before it becomes a new habit, so that’s also the point of this challenge: to reprogramme the sunnier side of…
I’m sitting here on the rug, fidgeting around to try and get comfy. My back aches (we had a marathon feeding session at bed time), my legs ache (we walked to the park and back yesterday and I carried DS on my back and the rucksack on my front), and I’m shattered. We have this…
It’s 6 months to the day that we left our old home in the North of England for the far sunnier Sud de la France so here’s the progress report on our five main tasks: House buying Settling into daily life Sorting out the paperwork Learning the French language Earning some money House Buying Progress…
We’ve just returned from an exploratory trip (holiday, of sorts) from the Charente and Limousin areas where we discovered there were houses with the kinds of specs we were looking for for sale within our price range. Having stumbled upon a few potential properties a couple of weeks ago we decided it would be good…
Oh, it’s been a long week. Plan A was always to buy a small house with a large garden but when we arrived all the properties we saw were so terrible we decided to investigate building instead. Plan B. That all seemed straight forward – we’d buy land, live in a van onsite, etc. –…
Something I hadn’t considered at all when moving was that there might be different attitudes to health outside of the UK. A different language and culture I expected, or course, but as far as health goes I’d generally heard that the French have an excellent (albeit not free) healthcare system and as such had no…
When we agreed with the owners to take this place that we’d previously rented during holidays in June and September, both nice warm months, we were warned by our neighbour, Marie, who we know from those holidays, that it wasn’t very warm or well insulated and that winters here could be pretty hard. We shrugged…
While we’re in no way religious, Christmas has always been a special holiday for me. I think it goes back to my University years, when I looked forward to coming home, meeting up with old school friends who had gone our separate ways and also, of course, reconnecting with family. Since settling down the draw…
I’ve got a bad case of the blues today. Why? Well, this whole property search seems to be all highs and lows and sometimes it’s hard to maintain any optimism. Then something new comes up, something we like, somewhere we can envisage making our home, and that is usually the point where we find a…