No No No No Yes
Eyes wide open, it is surely impossible to have spent any time researching life in France without hearing about shall we call it, “problematic” French bureaucracy.
Our experience arranging a house purchase had gone really quite well for the first 6 weeks. Maybe too well.
And of course it was the first involvement of French bureaucracy that allowed us to experience a great French tradition. The word Non.
We are waiting for the seller to have the technical reports made on the property. The main diagnostiocs report on all aspects of the building and the SPANC report which is the fosse septique report, covering the septic tank. See our earlier blog about confusion on the name of that report.
Anyway, our agent told us recently that despite several phone calls the admin team had been unable to book the SPANC inspection. Apparently the lady handling the phone at the SPANC office was particularly unhelpful. Explaining that the department had a large backlog of work, staff had vacations and she could not even offer a date for a possible inspection. Not even being able to arrange an appointment several weeks or even months in the future is very hard to understand to our non French minds.
Jim always says no first, then yes, eventually.
Frustration aside, this very much reminded me of the character Jim Trott from the classic British TV comedy, The Vicar Of Dibley. The character Jim had a very rural, country village style to him and was known for a very bad stutter. He was unable to say yes without first stuttering no several times first.
Perhaps Jim was secretly a french bureaucrat, never being able to say yes without first saying No!
What to do to over come an apparent refusal to provide the required SPANC inspection? We were told that the French sellers were returning from vacation next week and they would try calling the SPANC office too.
Well, clearly there is power in being native French. They called on the Monday and we had an inspection scheduled for the Wednesday, just 2 days later. Or perhaps it is just because they could explain their position as sellers and that they were legally required to get the inspection and not having one was blocking them selling their house.
Perhaps it was because their request was the Nth and the magic number of previous refusals had been already been delivered.
I suspect that we will never know what caused their success, but I do know that I am thankful for the positive response that they got.
Now, we just need to wait for the official reports from the inspections.
