Today was a day or talking to one person after another. We started with an architect to check out building regs and more. By good luck he is doing work on the attic level above us for another person, so knew our building well. It will be getting a complete new roof at the new owner’s expense, which is rather good for us. No issues there.
We moved on to two more real estate agents, to try to get a better handle on alternative properties. The long and short of it is that there is nothing else close. Over the course of the day we looked at a couple of properties and at others on their computers. The ones we saw were way more expensive, but had no real sun or outlook, and the rooms were smaller and dingy, though both had more of them. For our purposes, and we suspect many future buyers, our place is so much brighter and more inviting, a place you would be very happy to live in rather than just some beds to leave in the morning and sleep in at night.
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| To be living room/kitchen |
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| To be bedroom |
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| Public stairwell in our building |
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| Our outlook on Place de l'Eglise |
Had a lovely time talking to an artist who has a gallery below the apartment. Denis Ribas is one of France’s best known living artists, painting in a van Gogh style. He was an Olympic runner, but is now clearly a very successful artist, living in Monaco. He’s done 80 trips to Shanghai where he also has a gallery! He was great fun to talk to, an interesting man. He got Karen a coffee from next door, and as we were leaving presented us with a beautiful book of his works. It’s very heavy!
Valerie and Lorcan came over at 2pm for a look through the apartment. They were very taken with it, and gave it the thumbs up. Our agent Christelle is seriously weird. Her English is great when she wants to know something, but fades away to a pantomime of head-shaking and puzzled looks when our questions are awkward. We do not trust her at all. However, Valerie and Lorcan were good value. Great to have a sceptical and less-involved set of eyes seeing what we can’t. We sat down and had coffees (don’t get a cappuccino in this area –you get some coffee in the bottom of a tall glass, topped by whipped cream) before they headed back to Laroque. They head back to Dublin for the next 10 days on Wed and have given us use of their house for as long as we like, great news as there will no doubt be a bit of to-ing and fro-ing over the next week.
4pm saw us viewing two new apartments with another agent. Both were horrible. Far more square metres but pokey rooms, view across the narrow lanes to apartments on the other side, dark, needing huge work and costing more to buy. Back to our real estate agent to find out the results of the obligatory termite/asbestos/lead paint report to find out the survey was still being done. Received one piece of paper to confirm the size of the apartment, asked for the next page (which the text obviously continued on to) and was reluctantly given the next page. I asked for all the subsequent pages because it obviously represented the co-propriety management report relating to all the apartment owners in the building. Very reluctantly given this, and I just about had to strangle the agent to get all the remaining pages from Page 1. Extremely frustrating. J very close to throwing the whole thing away. Went home quite irate but very pleased to have persevered. We spent until midnight translating the French to English. Technology can be amazing: photographed the photocopies, trimmed and straightened with software, sent to OnlineOCR.net, copied resulting text into Google Translate and in a minute, a photocopied page of French is turned into a Word document in English. It is actually a very good document, and was written by the notaire we are likely to use. It sets out “who is responsible for what” for the 7 apartments in the building.
