Dear readers, as I write to you today I realize that we have hit two milestones along our journey. Firstly we have now owned the Château for three months, it seems very strange that it has only been three months! I complain about how slow everything seems to move in France in regards to getting restorations off the ground and started, and yet it has only been three months! The second milestone is that we have marked our one year anniversary of living in a foreign land. We arrived in France one year ago into a countrywide lockdown…

It has been two months since we took possession of the keys to the Castle. Two crazy months of wandering from room to room, to room, to room, to room, to room… a fleeting attempt to understand this monster of a house and to discover all of its secrets…

With a steaming cup of coffee I am looking across the rolling hills of the French countryside on a misty fall morning. Broken clouds, filtered sunlight, birds magically ascending from the valley floor into the light. Behind me is a large stone structure rising up through the mist, a stone castle known as Château Avensac, and it is impossible to believe that we now call it home, and were I dare to turn around and look at it I would think to myself “Shit, we actually own that!!”. In some ways the last month has been entirely surreal, fast paced and full of incredible ups and downs. Lets step back for a moment to September 6th 2021, the day we became the lords of the Château…

One more dawn, One more day, One Day More!

Hello dear readers! We are in the countdown stage to Château ownership, today should have been 10 days and counting, but, like everything else in this transaction, why should it go as planned? We received an email yesterday informing us that the signing date has been moved to September 6th at 11am… No explanation, no apologies, no thank you for your patience, just a…

All across Gascony it has rained a sea of yellow. Vast fields of sunflowers surround us where ever we go. I am ever watchful while driving as we will come around a bend to find a stopped car with cameras out to catch the sight of the happy flowers staring back at you. It is easy to understand why there has always been artistic passion for capturing these fields of magnificent yellow beauties on canvas, simply breathtaking. We are counting the days to Château ownership, 37 days from today…

July in the South of France has been a surprise to say the least… Cloudy, rainy, and chilly. We have made a move from Carcassonne to the small village of Solomiac France five minutes away from our future home. I say future because although we have signed the purchase contract, the owners have put the closing of the sale off until the 31st of August…

Last Thursday we appeared at the offices of the Notaires in Saint Clar France (very near to Avensac) to sign the Compromis (the official contract for the purchase of the Château). We were surrounded by lawyers and real estate agents, all speaking very fast French amongst each other as if we were not even there, even though the majority of the conversation was about us.

Mark is normally the man “behind the curtain” of this blog, but he is all about the pretty and flashy (like a crow to something shiny) and I would like to address the mundane and the boring… the process and the timing of buying property in France. We have been getting many questions about when we will be able to move in to our new home. Well, France teaches patience, a quality that Mark is struggling with. So here's the process…

We have a date! A date that we will actually sign the contract that will bind us to the purchase of Château d’Avensac… Thursday, June 3rd at 11am…

Dear readers, it is time to start introducing you to our new home, and I fully expect to be flooded with comments questioning our sanity!! I currently have limited resources with what we have on our cameras from our previous visits to the Château, but with lockdown lifting, and the freedom to move about the country reinstated, we will be revisiting the Château soon…

Our soon to be home is a bit of an enigma, with every directional view of the buildings being completely different. The approach to the Castle is not what you may be expecting, a castle, small albeit, but a midaeval castle nonetheless. Upon entering the outer courtyard and looking to the right you are presented with the very early nineteenth century Facade, gracious and very Château like. And the look behind the Château, yet again different, almost like a farm house in the French countryside…

It took weeks for the owners to finally agree amongst each other and come to the decision that they would accept our offer. We still have a lot of bureaucracy ahead of us, but it looks like our holiday in France is coming to an end…

Dear readers, first things first… we are still waiting in regards to our offer and the Winner of the Château Game! The announcement is ready to go. I created my first Adobe After Effects video as a big reveal, all I have to do is hit the submit button which will send out the newsletter announcement to our subscribers. But… although there has been some movement, we do not have anything in the way of a written confirmation that our negotiations…

It is true, we are still playing the waiting game. A small update presented itself this morning by way of a phone call from our agent. It would appear that the holdup is one of the three siblings that own the property. It can take years to sell a Château due to their size, the amount of renovation work needed, and the general upkeep demands. It takes a special breed of human (totally bonkers) to take on one of these properties. The Château that we have made an offer on has not been on the market very long, four to six months, and the owners were not ready for it sell so quickly. The hold-out sibling is going through the pains of having to let go of something that has been in the family for generations, and I totally understand that. I do however have one small piece of advice for her…

I would love to get to the written part of the process in France! It all starts here as a verbal back and forth. Generally speaking there is only one agent involved - the sellers agent - no one represents the buyers needs! Listings are generally not exclusive in France (meaning that your property can be listed by a multitude of agencies), consequently agents/agencies do not want to work with other agents/agencies, heaven forbid they have to split their commissions. We are bucking this system by…

From the atthechateau.com studios in Carcassonne France, the Château capital of the world... in living color... it's The Château Game! With the stars our show, and your hosts, Mark and Phillip…

Hello Bubalas! On todays show we have two special guests, and so many things to talk about. Our two adventuresome Cháteau Shoppers are here to fill you in on their hunt, and you are getting the first glimpse, (even before Oprah!) a sneak peek of Château de la Mudd-led. And all I can say is… Oh my Gawd! Look at that! Seriously! look at it! and what a beautiful photograph. It is très obvious that the…

As with our former home in the wine country of Northern California, we have discovered that many Châteaux are illusions of size. 227 North Street in Healdsburg California did not show its size from the street view. The street side was in keeping with the neighborhood, the facade hid the secret of its rather vast interior. Chateau des Forges does the same thing only in reverse. Appearing massive and intimidating, it is actually on the smaller side. The sheer thickness of the stone walls (up to three feet) certainly take up mass amounts of interior space…

Five hours north of Carcassonne is a region known a Le Berry, it is located in central France and was once a province until the département system replaced the provinces. Le Berry was split into three Départements, but the locals still refer to it as Le Berry. With our agent in tow we drove up to spend three days exploring and looking at real estate. Chateau shopping in Le Berry is very different from shopping in the south as there are so many more properties available and the prices are much, much lower. This of course immediately causes the internal question machine to kick into high gear… Why???