STOP THE PRESSES! HOLD THE PHONE!

This changes a bunch of stuff

Things are starting to move pretty fast. As Elizabeth said the other night, “This is getting real!”

We met with a real estate agent this past week and believe it or not, homes in our area are selling in under 60 days. Granted there are some on the market a lot longer than that, but if priced right they move quickly.

Our agent is a smart go getter. She was suggested by our neighbor. Well, she is our neighbor’s daughter. We immediately felt comfortable with her and signed up. Her name is Colleen Martens with EXP Realty. We are feeling pretty confident. Getting signed up with Colleen is the easy part.

Now what?

You are probably saying, “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched”. Yep, you are right. That said, with this huge step taken, we are getting anxious. I mean it is a big step for us. There is lots to do to facilitate the sale of our home and also a ton of stuff to do to be ready to make our move to France.

There is another saying that is apropos, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Sounds good. I think we will have to take several little bites at a time. Let’s see, we need to get the pets all set, of course get the house ready, sell a bunch of our house stuff, arrange a shipping company for the personal things to ship to France and get an address arranged in France. We will need to arrange a short-term apartment rental while everything is finalized. Our tax guy said that we need a USA address for mail. Some kind of virtual mailbox/address? Advice online suggests that the FEDEX or UPS store is not the best way to go. I guess this virtual mail approach is pretty common. Folks who are doing the Great American Loop use some version of it.

So here is where we stand on some of those little bites.

Pets?

Rosie has an appointment in two weeks to check off a long list of requirements for her to travel to France. She needs a chip that is compatible with ISO 11784/11785. Our vet is USDA certified and has the compliant chip. So, we are good there. Then we will need to set up an appointment 10 days prior to our departure to get final checkup and documentation. We are putting Rosie in her backpack and taking her places to get her used to the backpack. It is slow going. We will have to keep it up. We don’t want to drug her to take her on the flights to France.

Rosie and Artemis haven’t been getting along very well so we will have to find Artemis a good home here. I will really miss the boy.

House Prep

We have to have most everything in order before we leave for our scouting trip to France at the end of March. Colleen wants to start the marketing then. She will schedule a video session and then open houses while we are gone on our scouting trip. With a little luck she won’t need to schedule anymore open houses after that. That would be great!

Hurricane Milton produced some very high winds and little rain in our area. The high wind sucked the moisture out of our plants and trees and killed some of them. Replacing plants and mulch is one project we have nearly completed.

I will be pressure washing the sidewalks, walkways and lanai one last time in the next couple of weeks. I have promised to sell the pressure washer to my neighbor, Cory, after this last wash. Then window cleaning after the pressure wash.

Elizabeth has taken down and bubble wrapped our family pictures from the walls. The walls will need a little spackle and touch up paint. Luckily, I kept some paint from the last paint project. Colleen liked the way Elizabeth has decorated and recommended that we keep all of the pictures from our travels up on the walls. We are planning on taking all of them with us to France eventually.

I’m a terrible photographer but you get the idea. The below photo gives you an idea of some of the pictures from our trips that Colleen thought would help with the house showings. The big guy in the middle is another Humane Society fund raiser auction score. Sorry the glare messed the image up.

The below photo shows some other photos that Colleen thought would help our showings. These are photos that our good friend, Joe Federsal took over the years, The big piece in the middle is another of our fund raiser auction finds. This particular fund raiser, if I remember correctly, was to benefit a local youth arts program. Sorry, I don’t remember the actual name of the program. The artist is Brittany Probus. I think she was just starting high school at the time. This must have been around 2009 or 2010. As I understand it, Brittany went on to be very successful at the University of South Florida. I don’t know what she is doing these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if she is the president of some important organization helping people. Needless to say, we were pretty impressed by her. When we brought the piece home from the event, we noticed that she hadn’t signed it. We convinced her to come to our house and sign it. Her dad brought her to the house and now we have a signed one-of-a-kind Brittany Probus!

Getting the garage done will be the tough part. I don’t really have a problem with letting most of my tools go. You gotta do what you gotta do. Right? I will bring a small tool box with me when we make the move. It is just that I have managed to collect so much stuff. We took pictures of some of the power tools today. Elizabeth has a friend that might be interested in some of them.

I’m hoping that we can sell the house with most of the furniture. 3 TVs, Sonos surround sound, a beautiful near new bedroom suite, couches and a cool fireplace. Fingers crossed that we will be lucky. My sister is taking our “live edge” dining room table and bench.

When I look at it that way, the house prep won’t be so hard.

Shipping stuff to France

I have started researching shipping companies. OMG there are a zillion companies. At this point I’m just trying to get a rough idea of cost. I made a WAG at the number of boxes, and I figured 2 pieces of furniture, 2 bags of golf clubs, my banjo and a couple of bigger pictures. It really is not a lot. My idea is to have our stuff shipped door to door from Venice, Florida to somewhere in France. I have been telling the shipping companies Bergerac, France. I don’t really know where we will land yet. We need an address. The team at French Connections HCB are working on the address for us.

I gave some information over the phone to one shipping agent. The first quote knocked me on my butt. As Elizabeth had said before I even called anyone, I really need to get more accurate details. Of course she is right. Bottom line though, it won’t be cheap. We need to get dimensions of boxes and number of boxes and document the contents of each box. The cost is based on volume, not weight. They will come to the house and make sure any furniture is properly packed. Of course, they take care of all customs paperwork and fees. Some of which needs to be translated to French. Then deliver everything to our French address and move it into the house. I’m not making any commitments just yet. I have asked French Connections HCB for advice.

I still need to follow up with the airline that we plan to take when we make the final flight to confirm the size and allowable weight of checked baggage. I have heard 77 pounds, and you can have 2 such bags per person. That is pretty heavy. We won’t want to lug those bags around a busy airport through customs and to the car rental agency. Will it all fit in a rental car? We have to be mindful that many towns will not have big wide streets and alleys sufficient for a large SUV or something like that. We have heard horror stories. We might have to lug our bags some distance to get to our new rental. Minor details, we need the exercise anyway.

As far as I can tell the cost per extra bags could be $150 to $200 each. We do get 2 bags checked without fees. The weight limit is 70 pounds on Delta. Air France partners with Delta so fees are about the same. 70 pounds is pretty heavy, and Charles de Gaull airport is big and busy. I think I want to find a way to travel light.

I did find a company, “Mybaggage.com that will ship suitcases and golf clubs door to door pretty quickly. This might be an option instead of lugging them. I would rather travel a little lighter. We will be traveling with Rosie and even though she is very little she still adds to the stress level….serious stress level!

About the French address

Along with a bunch of other details, we need a French address to get our long stay visas. I’m told that a VRBO address is good enough. I would like something a little more substantial. Nothing against VRBO and maybe that is what we end up with anyway to start out with.

We have high hopes that French Connections HCB will come through for us. Renting in France can be very difficult as you must have a dossier prepared and a guarantor and the landlords are very picky since laws in France favor the renter. I have followed up with HCB and I have already received an email from HCB requesting that I fill out a form with details of our needs for a rental. Needless to say, I completed the form and submitted it in about 10 minutes. I’m glad HCB will be helping as they will make sure all of the utilities, phone, internet and etc. gets set up for us. This is more a language thing than the mechanics of it. It will make life a lot easier.

Bank account

Another thing that we will have to get squared away is a French bank account. This is another learning curve for us as French banks are not like banks here in the states. Luckily, we have a bit of a sponsor with HCB helping us. Here is where language is critical again. I bring it up here because I have asked HCB if we can make the arrangements to set up an account when we visit in March. I’m not sure if it is possible.

Part of my concern is the exchange rate of the dollars to euros. Recently the dollar lost a little ground against the euro, so our dollars won’t go as far. Today the rate is $1 is equivalent to just a little more than .96 euros. Put another way it costs about $1.05 for 1 euro.

We are studying French and actually making progress. It is just that we are a long way from mastering the language. We can order coffee and a croissant for sure. Anything more technical than that, who knows what would come out of mouths? LOL

I do have an account with a currency exchange company, but they aren’t a bank, so access to our money is a little restricted. I mean we won’t have access by way of an ATM card. We haven’t deposited anything yet because of the limitation but, this company has the most favorable exchange rates. I’ll let you know what we finally end up doing. If we get a French bank account, then we can go through the currency exchange company, and they can distribute the euros to our French bank. That way we have easier access (ATM), and we get the best exchange rate.

Questions??

You probably have questions as I have just scratched the surface here. If you do have a question, comment or suggestion please feel free to leave them in the comment section below.

Elizabeth does a quick check of my work on this before I hit the “Publish” button so if you have any questions for her specifically, I will let her know. While this whole thing is a bit stressful, it is exciting and actually kind of fun.

We are about 5 weeks out from our scouting trip so it is time to start planning what we will do while we are there and schedule some wine tasting tours. We will follow up on our VRBOs too. Seems like good topics for next week’s post.

Thanks for reading this blog. I hope it is informative and entertaining.

I hope you had a:

HAPPY VALENTINES’ WEEK!

A BIENTOT (See you soon)