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Morning ladies & happy Sunday. So it's been 2 months since we moved to France. Typing that seems crazy as in a lot of ways it seems a lot longer. So much has happened & whilst I'm always the sort of person to keep pushing on to the next project & as my husband would say set impossible tasks/timeframes, even I'll admit we've achieved quite a bit.
If you follow me on Instagram here or Facebook here, you'll know that I've already shared a few stories & pictures of our new home & some of the work we have already undertaken. So today I thought I would also share these on the blog.
If you're wondering why France then the whole thing came about due to an opportunity of work for my husband. He noticed a position had become available at his dream company which he mentioned to me but also stated that there was no way he'd get it. He was already considering changing roles so I said he should apply for it & see what happened. On top of this our son had been restless for a long time & had a deep longing to live abroad, so whilst I was someone who has always lived in the same area my whole life I had over recent months started to think about the possibility of moving aboard as an adventure & a way of keeping our family unit together for longer. Plus we've also seen a lot of friends have to battle serious illness & I think you start to get to that stage/age in life where you think that you need to take a risk & well as we said, the worst that can happen is we come back home!
So long story short, hubby got offered the job in June, we had sold our house within a week of it being valued & mid July after spending a few weeks & many hours looking online hopped over to France for a 12 hour visit to view 2 properties.
The first property was the house we thought would be our dream home, which was quite remote & set in the countryside but when we viewed it, it needed far more work doing to it than we had anticipated & although it was in the most stunning setting I decided that for our son & I not speaking the language or knowing the country it was going to be too remote for us. Plus ideally I wanted the dream of being able to walk to a fresh weekly food market & local patisserie.
It's no exaggeration to say that the second property we viewed was a last minute find. Around 10:30pm on the evening prior to our whistle stop visit & our departure from home at 3:15am the next morning my husband decided we needed to see at least a second property before buying & so we re-visited the internet to look for a second property we thought would be worth viewing as a comparison. Luckily after an hour searching we found something which we thought would be a good comparison but not 'the one' & literally boarded our flight not knowing if the agent would see our email or be able to arrange a viewing in time.
Luckily for us the agent was able to arrange the viewing & despite hubby & I agreeing not to give anything away when we were viewing the properties as soon as we drove up to the second property I got out of the car & announced that I wanted to buy it! For me I didn't even need to see inside to know it was 'the one' it just had such a lovely feeling about it even from the front steps.
For us the house was perfect - all the major work had recently been completed on the property including new roof, electrics, heating etc & although there is some work still be done there was enough completed to be able to make the house feel like home straight away, whilst give us a project that will no doubt last a few years.
It's certainly our dream home & not something hubby or I ever dreamed we'd be able to buy & live in. The house is situated in small village with just over 3,000 inhabitants & whilst known as a village I would describe it as more of a small market town. With a weekly food market (that is apparently one of the best in the region) & all the amenities within walking distance. Which is extremely lucky as when we visited the property we were so short on time that we literally didn't get out of the car to walk round the village & only turned one way out of the driveway. We didn't even make a second trip back for another viewing but we just knew. Someone I recently met at the local market asked if we were mad, but I told her the house stole our hearts & luckily for us the gamble really paid off in terms of location. In fact the only compromises are that we live on a main road & hubby's commute is a little longer than he had hoped but since starting his job we've found out he can work from home 2 days a week & as he said the house is worth it.
Since moving in we've been working silly hours to get the house up & running & feeling like home as soon as we can. Needless to say moving just before Christmas meant we put ourselves under more pressure to get jobs done & whilst we didn't quite get to where we wanted, we did get most of what we'd hoped completed.
One of the first & most important jobs was getting the kitchen updated & feeling like ours. As you can see from the picture on the day of viewing the house there had been a little bit of damp & as the village doesn't have a supply of gas the hob was powered by a gas cylinder stored in the underneath cupboard. Plus the extractor was literally hanging off & had been there for years.
Our first job was to deal with the damp, paint the insides of the cupboards, sand & distress the outsides of the cupboard doors & swap the handles with blue & white china ones I'd sourced on eBay. Then we ordered a new electric hob, extractor, fridge freezer & wine chiller - luckily the oven was fairly new & a good brand so we've been able to keep that. Then we distressed the architrave & wooden edges to the worktop, re-grouted the tiles & finally decided our existing island & dresser that we had brought from back home also needed painting white & the handles swapped.
Due to time constraints & not knowing the area & at the time managing with the one car a lot of the items I've purchased for the house have been from Etsy, eBay & Amazon. You may remember from past posts featuring our old home that I love blue & white china so when I spotted the tiles in our new kitchen they were definitely been kept & helped decide the colour scheme for the room. As our new home is a period home we wanted a fresh modern feel that was still in keeping with the style of the house & felt French. The kitchen table was a lucky find in the attic & whilst it's top might have seen better days a pretty table cloth easily hides this & has meant we have a small table that's perfect for eating breakfast & light suppers together.
I must admit we're really pleased with how the kitchen has turned out & I can't wait to see it flooded with warm sunlight in the summer with the French doors open onto the patio.
In case anyone is on the lookout for something similar pieces I thought it might be helpful to link below to any online purchases made for the kitchen.
Needless to say there's still lots to do & share on the house but for now at least the kitchen is completed & was ready in time for cooking Christmas dinner :-)
Back to fashion now & today it's all about that simple Sunday style for a day at home.
Back to fashion now & today it's all about that simple Sunday style for a day at home.
Shirt - Isabel Marant Etoile
T-shirt - Uniqlo
Jeans - J Crew
Boots - Chloe
Shop My Style
Shirt - John Lewis & Partners
T-Shirt - Marks & Spencer
Jeans - Boden
Boots - Dune
Enjoy your day lovelies, I think we're hoping to start getting back to normality & enjoy a fire & a film at some point, which was always something we tried to do on a Sunday back in the UK.
Once again thank you as always for all the support & encouragement. I've been so grateful for all the lovely messages during this whole process as it goes without saying there's a lot of life changes going on at the moment!
See you in the morning & I promise to share more home related posts soon.
