I came to France after my truly absorbing travels through Egypt and Istanbul, to see if there is an apartment I could buy within my 100,000€ budget, with costs I can afford, somewhere I want to live.
Sitting in Cuenca, mining through real estate aggregate sites like Bien’ici, it seemed there should be lots of possibilities. Not in Paris of course, or bigger, more sophisticated cities like Lyon, but in smaller cities like Beziers, or Bordeaux. I was intrigued when I came across Saint-Etienne in my researches.
This is a city of about 170,000 people, only fifty minutes from Lyon, with frequent train service for about 15€ (about $20 Canadian). Saint Etienne was known in the 17th to 19th centuries as a centre for arms manufacturing (it was nicknamed Armeville during the French Revolution), mining and, oddly, ribbon making. It is now in the process of establishing itself as a City of Design. It was entered into the network of UNESCO Creative Cities in 2010.
It actually snows there a bit in winter, but on the other hand, at least it doesn’t reach into the 40 degrees in the summers, like Beziers.
I’d like to say it’s been an adventure, but after a couple of weeks it’s mostly been an exercise in futility.
First there have been the strikes disrupting rail and air traffic. I have actually been fairly fortunate in that my flights from Istanbul to Tolouse via Paris were not cancelled. We won’t dwell on the five times I booked and rebooked trains from Beziers to Toulouse, probably spending close to a hundred bucks in the end.
At least none of my buildings were set on fire.
Real estate agents in France seem, as a body, to be supremely disinterested in actually responding to inquiries. In Saint-Etienne I have sent out 17 messages which are currently waiting for an answer.
The big problem is that there is no MLS system. Not only do you have to contact each agency separately for each place you want to see, it also seems that even within the agency, you have to contact the individual agent. For example, there is one agency in Saint-Etienne that has four reasonable looking places in my price range. When I called to inquire, I was told that agent for the first one would call me back. I asked about the other three and whoever answered the phone, just kept saying the agent for the first one would call me back. That was three days ago and no one has called me back.
I started my search in Toulouse. I lived there for a few months eight years ago, and really liked it. I still like it. My very basic Novotel hotel threw in free dinners for every night I was there. The food was really good, including a delicious carrot velouté.
Prices there are higher, so I only allowed three days to look at apartments. I started sending out inquiries a week before I arrived. I did not succeed in seeing any apartments in Toulouse.
In fairness, one agent did call me back – a week after I had left Toulouse.
On to Beziers, which I also knew fairly well from my housesitting days. There is some beautiful fin de siècle architecture in the city.
But I didn’t find too many promising restaurants and cafés. Burger and pizza joints seemed to have proliferated since my time there. Even the covered market, Les Halles, was half deserted.
Although there was this one cheese shop….
I selected this one and it was great.
The city as a whole seemed dirty, run down and very low energy.
I did feel better when I stumbled across a flea market on the main boulevard. That was fun.
And I had a salade de campagnarde at a nearby restaurant, which is the first time in my life I’ve actually enjoyed eating liver.
I had allowed five clear days for house hunting in Beziers. I spent some time walking around the city while I waited for responses from agents and appointments to be set. It seemed to me the city had deteriorated, especially around the train station area.
I had an appointment to view an apartment in that area. There were all kinds of men loitering around the streets in groups of four and five and more, smoking, and holding down chairs in the shabby looking cafés, smoking and drinking coffee. I didn’t really feel unsafe, although I was the only woman on the street. But it wasn’t the ambiance I was looking for. Although this was only one of two appointments I had, I messaged the agent and cancelled the viewing.
The other agent who had responded, picked me up from the hotel. I was telling him in my rusty French which I keep mixing with Spanish, about the area I had seen and decided against. So of course, that’s where he took me, all the while telling me how great the area actually was. Who was I going to believe – him or my lying eyes?
The apartment he showed me didn’t even have the advantage of being the classic design with long French windows opening to a Juliette balcony.
The street door gave onto an absolutely filthy foyer and stairway.
Because yes, you had to climb to the second floor to access the apartment.
The reason I had said I would look at it (aside from being desperate to see anything) was the photos of the kitchen, the big windows in the living room and the fact that there were three bedrooms. It was weird. The kitchen had been indeed been redone, pretty nicely.
It even had a built-in dishwasher. But the rest of the apartment was really cheaply built. The living room was rather nice, but very small.
The bedrooms were tiny.
The agent told me there had been only two bedrooms before, but they had put up a wall to make three, to accommodate previous tenants who had a family. He suggested I could easily knock down the wall and make a bigger room. I could certainly believe that, as the wall felt as if a strong breeze would knock it over. But then I’d only have a two bedroom apartment.
There were some tiny closets with rickety shelving. The bathroom might have been redone as well. I couldn’t really get into it, as the electricity was off and it was dark and very, very narrow.
When I reached in to open the shower door, it rattled in a most alarming way.
We then saw the ‘balcony’.
Basically a concrete box that was covered in mould and grime.
It turned out the building was owned by the real estate agent who showed it to me. No doubt this was why he responded to my inquiry.
If that wasn’t depressing enough, he then insisted on showing me a house. I told him repeatedly I didn’t want a house, but he took me there anyway. It was even worse than the apartment. Another very run down area.
The outside of the house was rather pretty.
We entered through a decrepit door and dirty tile floor.
There was one tiny room on the ground floor which was the kitchen. I know that in France a lot of times an ‘unfurnished’ apartment or house means not even kitchen cupboards. But this was on a whole other plane.
Even the agent seemed to understand that no one in their right mind would entertain the idea of putting money into this wreck. He told me that I could build a new kitchen upstairs.
The stairs were ancient which means winding and narrow.
They were also covered in blobs of paint. I climbed one story, being extremely careful not to fall, and came out into a small room. This was the living room, which the agent thought I should make into a kitchen. This would leave me with the third floor for a bedroom and living room. Up another flight of breakneck stairs to two small rooms under the eaves.
The toilet was on the second floor.
Which meant if the resident had to pee in the night, they’d have to negotiate those stairs. Weirdly, as with the kitchen in the apartment I had just seen, the shower room seemed to be the only part of the house that had been renovated. How do you have that wreck of a kitchen and this nice shower in the same run down house? Maybe they ran out of money?
That was a discouraging morning.
Next day I went around the corner for an appointment at 10:00 a.m., as I thought, to see a traditional apartment with the long French windows.
This one, I knew from the photos, required some work, but the kitchen looked as if it was at least good enough to manage with, and the living room and apartment in general were very large.
I waited for half an hour, then called the agency. “Oh, but Mme. Griffiths, your appointment is not until 2:00 p.m.”. Okay. I didn’t believe it, but okay. I went back at 2:00, waited until 2:45 and no one showed up.
I wrote that one off.
Next day though, I actually met an agent who was helpful, professional and understood what I wanted. Nadine, as her name was, showed me a really interesting place down near the remains of the ancient Roman arena. The whole area had been converted to monasteries and nunneries in the Middle Ages.
It had undergone a renewal about ten years ago, and many of the old stone buildings were now small apartment complexes.
The unit I was seeing was two bedrooms, 68 square metres for 95,000€ (about $140,000 Canadian). This place had character.
There were perhaps ten apartments on two floors. The one I was looking at was on the ground floor – good for aging in place. It had no outside space except the little spot in front of the French doors to the courtyard.
Nadine was pretty sure no one would complain if I put a chair and table there, although she was careful to point out that the walkway in front of this apartment could be used by tenants accessing the inside for other apartments upstairs.
I loved that an old stone lintel had been kept in the common hallway.
The paint was peeling there, and Nadine made a note to tell the building management to fix it. Otherwise, the building seemed to be in good shape. And again, a nice mix of clean and new, with older elements preserved like the stone stairs to the apartments on the next floor.
We entered through the building, not through the French doors.
The door into the apartment gave onto a long hall. I was charmed by the preservation of an old arch there.
The living room and kitchen were combined, but it was a pretty big room.
The French doors and the deep windows gave light.
The smaller bedroom was off the living room.
The bigger one was on the other side of the apartment near the separate toilet room and bathroom.
I liked that there was a tub.
There was also a large walk in closet/storage area off the main bedroom.
The monthly coproprieté fee (like the condo fee or HOA) was only 80€ per month (about $120 Canadian), which I later learned was quite small.
It certainly gave me something to think about. And a little lift to my spirits.
Throughout these days I had been trying to get in touch with the agent for a small house I had seen online. The photos made it appear charming, with a stone wall in the living room. It seemed to be behind the Madeleine Church, which was another old area of stone houses and winding streets. One day as I was wandering around, I happened across the agency with the listing. It was open. I went in. The woman behind the desk happened to be the agent with the listing. She took my number and to my surprise, actually called me back later that day with an appointment at 8:00 that night.
The house was not where I thought it was. I had to climb up and down streets that were in very bad shape to get to it.
The house was horrible.
Alas, the photos in the listing didn’t do it justice – in that they didn’t show how extremely poorly constructed it was, to begin with. The living room did have a stone wall, but was barely big enough for a couch to go in front of the TV without touching it, and still leave room for a table behind.
The kitchen was a galley and very shabby.
I knew it had stairs. I didn’t know that once again they were the extremely steep, narrow and dangerous kind.
There was a toilet in a closet on the ground floor. The shower room was sort of stuck in a closet half way up the stairs.
The next floor had a bedroom. The third floor had another toilet and a fabulous view of the run down neighbourhood.
The third floor consisted of a big open room with some kind of platform at the back.
I was so disappointed. I kept trying to make excuses to cut the visit short but the agent insisted on showing me the ‘cave’ which indeed resembled a cave. A dirt floored, low ceilinged cellar dug out from under the house, in a series of caverns with crap piled around everywhere. Holy mackerel. I was so creeped out I didn’t even take photos. I just wanted out before I contracted the Black Plague from the germs undoubtedly still thriving there from medieval times.
Four showings from probably ten messages and phone calls, and only one possible choice, which i was by no means totally loving. Too dark, and in Beziers. I was left with my remaining hopes, such as they were, pinned on Saint-Etienne.
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