Buyer beware

Caveat emptor
Anne-Marie and Patrique came round tonight to see what I'd been doing to the house. They knew it before I bought it and wanted to see the changes I had made. After the grand tour, we sat around eating and chatting and the conversation turned to the perils of buying houses in old villages (or anywhere, come to that). I mentioned that Mana was having a spat with a neighbour over the flow of a downpipe from the gutters of her house which (allegedly!) ran down against a wall on the neighbours property. Gutters here almost always just empty into the road below. The neighbour was complaining that the water was destroying her wall. However, the wall (allegedly!) was illegal anyway since it blocked a public right of way. Two arbitrators were coming from Buis to the Mairie in Mollans to try to sort the dispute out. More of that when I know the outcome.

Anyway, I added two problems narrowly avoided in my own experience. When friends Steve and Jo bought their house, I helped with the legal language in the contract of sale. They wanted to buy “en tontine” (maybe I'll explain later). The point was that 3 versions of the contract faxed to me didn't mention en tontine. It was only with great insistence that these words were eventually inserted. It was surely just coincidence that if, as Patrique pointed out, you wanted this clause inserted later, you'd have to pay the notaire (lawyer) quite a lot more.

When I bought my own house the contract of sale I was invited to sign just happened to omit one of the parcelles (plots of land) in the sale. A word processor error, I was told. I had previously totally ruled out a house which turned out to have floors overlapping with an adjacent house, where the definition of responsibility for roof, ceiling and floor was simply guesswork.

Patrique mentioned the situation of his mother who lived in Corsica, where apparently very many agreements are made on a handshake without any supporting documentation. She owned (undocumented) one quarter of a floor of a house. So who exactly owned and was liable for what?

These, it would seem are omnipresent hazards of buying village houses, where virtually none is totally freestanding and all kinds of overlaps and potentially shared responsibilities are common, even if the notaire is totally on the ball. Plus the problem of searches, for incoming motorways, high speed rail track, etc, which I won't go into here. Caveat emptor!

Plants
Anne-Marie wanted to know what flowers she could plant in a place in her garden almost always in shade. I immediately thought of bergenias, which I had grown successfully in just such a spot in my garden in England. Just after she and Patrique had left I thought of pulmonaria and cyclamen but will try to think of others before the next pizza evening.