Renovation project - It´s all gone wrong, I want to go home

Renovation project - It´s all gone wrong, I want to go home

We have a great few weeks and the solicitor is really good, apparently in Portugal, once the sale is agreed you don´t have much dealings with the agent. But we are still no nearer to actually seeing a copy of the habitation licenses. But not to panic, it will be very quick once all is in place.

After all the agent knows that we have only a maximum of 8 weeks to sign and move in.

So we have a great time visiting places. My daughter and granddaughter spend a week with us and friends come over for a long weekend. Everything is perfect until we get the call from our lawyer.

The licenses have still not come through and she has chased up the local planning, architect and the camara. She has arranged a meeting for us and the architect and the sellers as she has some serious concerns.

The meeting does not go well. Apparently the habitation licenses are not in place and never will be. We have just lost the house of our dreams.

But we are so pleased that we used a reputable solicitor as this could´ve dragged on for months, we are so pissed off at the estate agent that told us everything was in place, it was just a case of waiting for the forms.

I am also really pissed off with ourselves, how could we have been so naive, this is not the first time we have bought abroad, hell for 5 years I wrote a blog and had a face book group a~giving tips to people buying properties and yet for some reason we believed this agent without seeing the proof.

We don´t have any more dealings with this particular agent, we don´t even get a proper apology.

We are now nearing the end of our 2 month rental, luckily the owner agrees we can have another month but then she will be returning and moving in herself!

My mind is going into overdrive, we are going to be homeless in Portugal in 6 weeks, we have no houses to view, we have no idea where we are going to go or what we are going to do, we know nobody here and I feel so homesick for France, I really want to go home, back to our beautiful little village, back to my friends, back to everything that is familiar. Even the weather has started to change and we are freezing at night, still lovely during the day but we are so cold at night.

This is not what I signed up for when we decided to move to Portugal, but we know that glitches happen, that at some point it will work out that today is just a bad day and things will get better and the sun will shine again in the morning.

We go back to our original search which is more inland, but now I have a taste for the coast……..

Top tips

1. Always use a reputable solicitor

2. Always make sure that the property has a habitation license

3. Don´t take somebody´s word for important issues

4. Constantly chase things up

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Renovating an old manor house