Category Archives: Moving to France

Adding a Heating System to our Swimming Pool

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Villa Roquette is located in the South of the South of France – recently, to avoid confusion with the other bit of the South of France, North of us, the coast from Marseilles to Menton, including St Tropez, Cannes and Nice, the tourism people here started calling this area Sud de France. Call it what you wish, but Languedoc gets more sunny days than any other part of France and is in the same temperature belt as North Africa.

With all this sun it seems silly not to use it for heating. I have been planning to do this for years, but always had something else to do more urgently – I still have a pile of work to do, but next week (if it is not raining) I will start on a heating system for our Swimming Pool.

Thanks to the Internet I have found plans which are simple, inexpensive and work – I found a calculator online which takes into account pool size,  latitude, sun, shade, and a host of other factors and reckon I need about 15 square meters of solar heating to give me a very comfortable pool temperature and this will extend the use of the pool from April through to October.

Making and fitting the system is straightforward and materials cost abut 100 euro, but I already have most of the items in stock, piping, plastics, tubing, mountings etc – so, hopefully the cost will be very small and the befits enourmous.

I will make notes and write up the progress.

Here is our pool as it is – next time I will outline the first stages of construction and installation of the heating system.

Heated swimming pool at Villa Roquette in Languedo the South of France

The Pool at Villa Roquette

Finding Your New Home in France

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Twenty years ago we rented an apartment (in the Beaujolais) and I spent three years exploring every corner of France to find our home. I found the best way to discover France was by rail and stay in local B&B to get the feel of a town or village (and masses of information from the owner) – for us Languedoc was the perfect region with sun, civilization contentment and opportunity, and we have lived here for seventeen years, moving only once, a few kilometers down the road, to a larger home so our parents could come and live with us and our family.

We now run a guest house and many people staying with us do exactly what you suggest, rent a studio or stay as our B&B guest for a few days or up to several months, to understand the region and what it has to offer – many of our guests have now bought homes here and others decided to look in other parts of France.

The only way to discover France (or anywhere I guess) is to live in a community and make it your “home” – as we say on our websites – “stay with us, from one day – to a lifetime” – My advice is to choose one region, go there and stay awhile – every village will have a unique personality so sit in the cafe – talk to the secretary in the Mairie, ask the boulanger about the town and avoid the estate agents – if you don’t fall in love with one place – try another region – if you find your ideal spot, stop looking and your new home will reveal itself

Good Luck

Tony and Carole at Villa Roquette

Solution for the English Property market

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I saw this post today

Let’s send our parents off to France

In his column, Boris Johnson has needled the real problem in this country – the reason why we’re never going to be able to go back to really cheap houses. Quite simply, there are too many of us. As Boris puts it, 10 million people are due to “crash land” into the country like a fleet of gliders on D-Day, and they all need somewhere to live. Well I would like to propose a solution. On one day in 1944 we managed to send 175,000 young men into France. Given twenty years, would it be so difficult to send 10 million?

Let me elaborate. As a nation we have clearly decided that we don’t want many more houses. Hating suburban sprawl goes back as far as suburbia – the ugliness of new houses was something even George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh could agree on – but only now are we in the enviable position where we can probably avoid making it worse. How so? Well thankfully, a large chunk of the population doesn’t have to go to work, and so probably doesn’t need to be here at all. Not the unemployed I mean – but retired people. Conveniently, there are almost exactly 10 million of them, and that number is only going to grow. Wouldn’t they like to relocate en masse to somewhere a little cheaper?

Obviously the Dordogne is traditional, but retirees have a whole world of options. America has got a lot cheaper recently. So has Spain. Even tiny Ireland has 300,000 empty houses, all desperately in need of people to live in them. If a few hundred thousand British OAPs were willing to move to Ireland, not only would we relieve a bit of the pressure back here, we’d help a small country get through a drastic economic crisis.

You may ask how we’d pay for it, but it’s simple. Young people can cough up – we’re happy to, providing we can move into the newly empty houses. By the latest measure, the average first time buyer is 37. I’m 22, so apparently I have a good fifteen years left before I’m likely to be able to buy somewhere. Since I’m working in journalism, and living in London, even that number is probably hopeful. Rather than make us wait decades to buy ugly Barratt boxes, old people should just sell us theirs.

So how do we bring about this great migration? Obviously we can’t actually force pensioners onto planes, but surely we could give them an incentive to go? I’ve not worked out the best way yet, but exclusively from the evidence of my parents and their friends, I’d start with a hefty tax on golf courses.

First posted by Francophile