Crossroads

We'd received the figures (but not the detailed estimates) last week, but hadn't really had chance to talk about the numbers till Sunday morning.

We were driving down from Leeds services (we'd stopped overnight after a wedding reception nearby - staying there gave us a shorter journey after the bash & saved us having to get out of London twice in less than 24 hours!), and spent most of the journey to the tunnel and the time under the sea discussing what to do.

We'd pretty much made up our minds to cancel the whole project!

To finance what is proposed in phase 1, we would have to sell the flat (and still borrow quite heavily).

We figured that if we have to sell my flat, we might as well do that and move into Ormonde Court and wait for the housing market to "adjust" and then buy a house in England.

We'd spend a lot more time there, for a start, and it would probably work out cheaper in the long run!

We could just fill in some of the holes in the house in France, and paint the floors (to stop the demoralising concrete dust) and camp here during the summer months...

What we've done for the last 3 years, in fact!

The last couple of days, though, I've been plugging all the figures into a spreadsheet (easier to see what effect deleting items has on the total), so it looks as though we haven't quite abandoned the idea yet.

It's nice in one respect to find the odd error in the estimates (lose that EUR 600, yay!), but irritating in other ways - the project manager stressed that they'd checked the figures...

Even I don't need 10 power sockets in the bathroom!

[Unlike the UK, you are allowed to mix water & electricity here!]

Once I've finished the spreadheet, I'm going to get out the red pen...

Various friends wonder whether we've been given the "rich foreigner" price; I can't help wondering that myself...

But it's the starting point we've got, so I'm going to get cracking.

PLEASE keep your fingers crossed for us!

How do you find Polish builders??

We've had the quotes...

OUCH!!

So today I am loading it all into a spready so that we can easily keep track of the costs as we go through deleting items!

The temptation just to build a new house is there, but we'd have to go back to the beginning of the process...

Save a lot of money, though!