We have a house finally!

Well, at last, some good news for us. We signed for our house last Monday and so we are now the proud owners of a very large house, numerous outbuildings and 18 acres of land!! We have also gained a few new pets, in the form of three cats and quite a few mice! The run up to the signing did not run smoothly. The moral of the story is never to trust a bank with your money. We arranged the money transfer to the currency exchange specialist for the Thursday before the meeting at the notaires office on the Monday. The bank were supposed to send the money on the Wednesday, however, they tried to take it from the wrong account and it was rejected. I re-did all of the paperwork and after several phonecalls on the Thursday they had still not sent it! A computer error apparently. I did not find this information out until the afternoon of the following day when I had sat in the branch, with Kirsty and Peter, from 9.20 until 2.40pm!!! Consequently we could not send the money to France on the Friday and we did not know until an hour before the signing on the Monday if the money had actually got there or not!! Well, no thanks to the bank, we have a house, so we have to be thankful for something. Andrew has also now spent the last week taking all of our belongings to France. After completing three trips to France we thought it was finally over but NOOOO! Guess what? I left the kids passports and the dogs one in the filing cabinet that is now in France!! OOOPS! Andrew has now got to go on another trip to retrieve them! Boy am I in trouble! Well, enough for now. I promise to do an update in the very near future. We have booked the ferry for Boxing Day to do our final trip to France and to take up residence in our new abode, so we hope to see as many of you as possible before then. If we dont, we apologise. Have a very lovely Christmas and a great New Year. xxx