Initiation To The Vendee
My wife Jan and myself arrived just before lunch time on March 13th 2001 after crossing from Portsmouth to St Malo the previous night with Brittany Ferries.
We had bought this property sight unseen for four years and this is what we found:
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Not altogether a bad picture and much what I expected but Jan was a bit gob-smacked and couldn't talk for about half an hour. It needed a lot of TLC on the outside. The inside was like the Marie Celeste. It looked like my brother-in-law had just had enough and walked away from it.
It took us all of our 4 day visit to clean up, move the furniture up into the grenier or into the barn, we had to refit the front door, repair the lock, make a key and replace the back door with one found upstairs to make the place secure. Although in fairness it is in a very small hamlet and it had been open for two years with no problem apart from a mouse that got in and could't get out.
We decide habitable it was not - so we stayed in a Logis in La Chataigneraie.
The electricity had been turned on but the state of the wiring made me turn it off every time we went out. My brother-in-law was an electronics engineer, but an electrician he was not.
The water was not turned on until the lunch time of our day of departure so for the cleaning and drink making we had to rely on very large bottles of water from the supermarket.
We had fulfilled the reason for the visit. To check if the house was still there and see what needed to be done to get it back on it's feet.
We left eventually at 10 pm on the 17th March and drove leisurely overnight. We caught the morning ferry from St Malo and slept most of the day in our cabin.