The long Road

So at last after 2 years of searching, talking, viewing and soul searching we are finally there! This beautiful chateau dating from the early 1200's is now ours. What a journey it has been, this road to this chateau! It started back in mid February, right in the middle of the ski season! Not the best time for me to drive 10 hours from Austria to France for a viewing. But in reality the long road to owning a chateau had actually started many many years earlier in the mid 1990's when I was asked by a business associate to use my transit to take some large paintings from his house in the UK to his French chateau.

That was when the "wow" happened. Classic French style, white walls & blue shutters with those beautiful steep sloping high roofs, pretty much love at first sight and the idea that well...... "one day" Then life moves on fast as it does and life happens as it does and the years go by and one day you find yourself sitting in front of the TV watching something called "Escape to the Chateau" and your mind drifts back and you start thinking, why not, perhaps the time is now right. Well right enough to start trawling the internet, looking at what is available at prices you can afford. That was just over two years ago. The ski season was coming to an end, months back plans had been talked about and then made to go and cycle along the Canal du Midi in the early summer. Well that is in France so maybe we should just go and look at a few of these chateaux after the bike trip, you know just for fun like. So appointments were made and routes planned. Quite an education it turned out to be, some amazing places and some not quite so amazing. You quickly realise that there are reasons why most of these places stay on the market for so long - most have long lists of problems, mainly due to neglect. But we did see one that instantly made us feel like it could be home! It was in the Auge, not far from Poitiers. Very old with beautiful original features including a 700 year old fireplace and a lovely round tower. Over the next

weeks back in Austria we talked about that one chateau and how we could buy it and what we would do with it if we did manage to buy it.  Eventually after a couple more visits we decided to put in an offer, quite a way below the asking price but after some discussions it was accepted. But then of course the road became bumpy, trying to finance the purchase of an old chateau is not the work of a moment and as time went on I of course continued to look at other chateaux on the market and beginning to realise that if we were to buy such a place then it had to be totally right. Whilst the Auge chateau was beautiful and would make an amazing home it did not have much land and I really wanted land along with privacy - so we pulled out of the purchase.

What next then?! Well I like my lists..... so I made one! A list of everything that we would want in a chateau and it was quite a long list. I realised that it could take years to find such a place that would tick every box but we were not in any hurry and preferred to wait to find the right place. So I kept searching on line and the winter got closer and I searched more and the winter arrived and with it the ski season - time to work my socks off again! And then in early February a new listing popped up in my chateau searches and as I started ticking the boxes, it was like the lottery - one by one they were all getting ticked, excitement rising. So now it seems the perfect chateau has appeared and it is mid February my busiest time..... bloody hell......