This is the first view we saw of OUR Barn. I had lots more pictures taken when we first saw our property. But in February 2006 we had a burglary from our apartment in London and our computer was stolen and all the pictures on it were lost. We have been able to re-download most of our pictures to our new computer, but not all of them. We may be able to download more eventually when all our belongings are retrieved from the storage in due course.

For the time being I will be downloading (or is that up-loading!!) to this Blog from the pictures we have at the moment. I wanted to start this diary while I have time. By the time we get to Naillat on a permanent basis we will probably be much too busy house building, garden planning, and generally settling into our new life to have much time to keep this up to date as I would like to. So this will be a start . . . .

In September 2003 we had a fabulous holiday in central France. We made all the arrangements for this holiday and property buying trip while Gavin was living and working Jakarta, Indonesia and I was living and working in Aberfeldy, Scotland. This is when you realise what great developments the world wide web, internet, e-mail and msn messenger truly are!!

We spent the first ten days of our holiday touring different parts of Limousin (our chosen area of central France). In fact, we drove about three thousand kilometres visiting and inspecting barns for conversion, houses for modernising as well as taking time to be tourists and getting to know the area better. As each day passed we liked the area more and more and decided that if we found somewhere we really liked this would be the perfect area to settle in over the coming years for our home together and for our retirement.

We had talked to Laura on e-mail and on the phone for a number of weeks and it was good to finally meet her and to visit the northern part of Creuse with her. When all of a sudden we rounded the corner on the outskirts of Naillat (between La Souterrraine and Gueret) and there was OUR barn!!