How our French adventure started

I thought I'd try and keep a weblog diary of our adventures in buying a holiday home in France, renovating it and running a holiday cottage/Gite in Brittany.

We first started thinking about buying a holiday home in the summer of 2003 and as I've actually started writing this blog on 1st January 2006, there's a bit of catching up of 'how we got here' history to write ...

We'd been thinking for a while of moving house in the UK as the one we've got doesn't have a particularly big garden and with two growing boys (4 and 2 at the time) we felt we would like somewhere with a bit more room for them to run around. Ideally we'd have stayed in the same Bedfordshire village but when we looked at prices we found that we'd have to spend about £200,000 just for a bigger garden and/or a separate study. Couldn't afford that so we reluctantly decided to stay put.

Then when the Newcastle building society cut our mortgage rate again I realised that I could probably afford something bigger, just not at UK prices. Channel 4 was running a continual series of 'A Place in the Sun' and I suppose that the seeds of idea were sown - buy a holiday home abroad (if I could afford it) and as well as being somewhere to go on holiday it'd provide a capital sum on retirement.
The Newcastle said yes to lending us an additional £100,000 so it looked like the idea was a go-er. Question was, where to buy ?