Building a home in Allier, France – Part 0.0

We can begin.

We have bought land in France and are about to build a home. This is not a how to guide or grand design. These, I hope, will become semi-regular updates on what is happening and what has happened. After many delays, suddenly everything is happening at once.

Our hope with these short films is to share the build with you. I am going to photograph and film much of the next two years, regardless of what happens. So putting that footage together makes sense both as a memory for us, and as a way for you - our friends and family - to be a little closer.

Let’s start closer to the beginning.

We moved to France a few years ago and have been living and working here ever since. We live in Lyon, a large city in the east of France near the border with Switzerland. It is about two hours by train to Paris and two hours to the south coast.

Lyon has provided us with everything we needed to get settled. That has meant easy access to work, accommodation, various government offices, multi-lingual doctors and dentists, basically everything we have needed to begin integrating into the system in France.

Now we are ready to move on.

A couple of years ago we started looking for land to build on.

Where we ended up is Allier. Allier is a large region of fairly rural France. It felt like somewhere we could call home.

The last two years have been spent finding and actually buying the land. The legal process has been horrible but it is done. Those are stories for other days.

This week the building work begins.