The Return
Back on UK shores and soaking up beach life once again.
It’s been a while since my last blog post and A LOT has happened in that time, so let me fill you in!In the final instalment of ‘The big reset’ I spoke about the straw that broke the camels back with the French red tape and how I wanted to come back to the UK. At that point I couldn’t see how it was feasible, all I could see were obstacles and it felt like the path we had taken out to France had been a one way street, too narrow to turn back, and no way of reversing our decision. I said I felt trapped but with hindsight I can see that I trapped myself by thinking the only way out was to finish the renovation in order to sell it for the best price and protect the financial investment we had made in the property. The winters in rural France are tough going. In the early months of 2022 I hit quite the low. I have been a Christian long enough to know that God never lets you go through a trial without there being a lesson to learn or some serious spiritual growth to be had. In my desperate prayers during that dark night of the soul I kept asking God 'what is the lesson I need to learn here?' Please let me get it so I can move out of this dark and cold place I was in mentally, emotionally and spiritually. I kept asking but kept drawing a blank. As Spring came around I had started to reach a point of surrender. I was slowly starting to loosen my grip on 'The Plan'. I don't remember a penny drop moment now but I seem to remember that at some point through the lows I started practicing an attitude of gratitude. We managed to do a bit more work to the chalet with the little funds we had. We got a few more rooms decorated. Rather serendipitously that summer a lovely French lady, a friend and colleague of our neighbour happened to be staying opposite the chalet. It turned out that she was an estate agent, and a very competent one at that. We took the prompt and made the decision to split the properties and put the chalet and the house on the market as separate residencies. It stung a bit to put the big house on the market without having done any work on it at all but it was a major step in letting go. Letting go of my expectations and my ego which were making me very blinkered. 
Here’s a little recap of how far we got with the chalet with befores and afters. We didn’t manage to do the roof, windows and exterior which is a shame but took it as far as we could.
Coming back to one of the red tape issues, Carte Grise (the vehicle registration department) told us definitively that after well over a year of drawn out form filling and hoop jumping that they could not register our UK car in France so we had to deliver it back to the UK. Although this was incredibly annoying it turned out to be fortuitous and the start of a few things aligning in our favour at this point. The car issue forced a visit back to the UK at the same time as my sister and her husband were doing a renovation on a flat in St. Leonards-On-Sea and they needed some help as they were having issues with tradesmen. So Michael, an electrical engineer, and all-round excellent kitchen, bathroom fitter and DIYer was able to step in and do they work whilst we were in town. The offer was then put to us by them to rent the flat if we wanted to return to the UK. I definitely did want to return, and being able to rent from family was the perfect solution as we would not have been able to rent through an estate agent as neither of us had jobs in the UK at that point. The deal was that we would continue and finish the renovation on the flat whilst living there. This gave Michael the time to find a job back in the UK and my sister also kindly offered to share her art studio with us. 
My sister’s studio space which she kindly offered to share with us. It was nice and big but unfortunately didn’t have any natural light and it was freezing!
We found a buyer for the chalet and we now had somewhere to move to in England so the return was set. If you read the previous blog posts, you will remember that we had not managed to even start the renovation on the main house, all the renovation work we had done had been on the chalet. So, although the house was on the market for sale too, potential buyers weren't able to see the vision we have for the house and the feedback from everyone that viewed it was that it was too much work even at the 'come get me' price that we had it on for. We subsequently took it off the market deciding to try and do some work on it and try to sell again at a later date.
Here are a few of the before and afters of the renovation we did on my sister and brother-in-laws flat when we first returned to the UK
2023 was spent settling back into UK life. We got our daughter into a school, Michael got a job, I had a couple of juicy commissions to do and had the fun of doing a bit of interior design in my sister’s flat getting it ready for sale, I painted a mural and in a moment of madness applied to get on the TV show Interior Design Masters on the last day of submissions. I got a call back and had an interview over the phone and it seemed like I might have got in, we discussed dates, van hire etc. I was just waiting for another call which never came. So I let that one go and decided it was probably for the best because we needed to get out to the house in France and start work on it. We enjoyed all the things we had missed about life by the sea in the UK. We caught up with friends and family, got rooted back into our church, had a fab summer spending time on the beach and enjoying our favourite foods. We made it out to the house in France for the last four weeks of the summer holidays loaded up with tools, paint and wallpaper. I must have been delusional to think we could do a make over and get it on the market in four weeks. On our drive down we went via the IKEA in Dijon and bought everything we needed for a temporary kitchen whilst we built and installed the main kitchen. We arrived to a very overgrown garden. This was our first time actually staying in the house because we had spent the full two years of our time in France living in the chalet. So we hadn't previously opened the pipes and used the plumbing. We didn't know what to expect. Michael installed a hot water tank and got the plumbing working relatively easily and we thought everything was ok...which it was for a few days but we were unaware that the sewage pipes were blocked and each time we flushed the pipes were just filling up. In not much time the problem was very apparent. Michael was then tasked with trying to find exactly where the blockage was and how to clear it. He had to dig up the manholes in the courtyard to access the sewage junctions. He tried power jetting it through from there but it didn't work. In the end he had to break through a cemented up bit of waste pipe in the basement and much to his dismay about ten years worth of old blocked sewage exploded all over him flooding the basement with sewage. He had to strip off naked in the garden and I had to hose him down. Looking back now we can laugh about it but it was a real trial at the time. It took Michael three days to clean the basement. This whole debacle set us back by over a week. We had also somewhat optimistically invited friends out to come and stay with us for the final two weeks so we now had the pressure of building and installing a kitchen in a week. We did get a functioning (but not finished) kitchen in place but by the time our friends arrived we were totally wrung out. I've also included a photo of how the chalet looked when we arrived. The new owners had given it a new roof and had all of the exterior sandblasted and repainted. If I had had the funds to finish the chalet I wanted to have it all in white with a dark grey or black roof, shingle courtyard around the chalet with ornamental grasses. It wasn't meant to be though and I'm sure the new owners love it as it is now. 
So we made some progress but no where near as much as we had hoped for. We had to get back to the UK for the start of school for our daughter. We knew we wouldn't be back again over winter so it was necessary for the water heating system to be drained as temperatures often drop to 15 degrees below freezing. It was taking way longer than we anticipated to drain on the morning of our departure, so we were faced with a difficult decision, wait while the water system drained out completely and potentially be late for our ferry or leave on time but risk the massive bucket we left under the tank to maybe overflow. We left in somewhat of a hurry with the tank still draining into the bucket. We got back to UK life with the slight worry of a flooded basement in France lingering in the back of our minds.... Next blog post coming soon...Find out what we had in store for us when we returned to the house the following summer.