If there’s anywhere I wanted to buy a holiday home, it’s the Auvergne region. Mountainous, verdant, laid back. My place of choice was the super-quaint village of Saint Bonnet de Montauroux in the Chaperoux Valley, about an hour’s drive from Le Puy-en-Velay.

At 8am, at 12pm and at 6pm, the village bells ring out majestically around the tranquil valley, the ebb and flow of the Chaperoux River carves itself a path out of the valley floor, and all is well with the world. I love this place, and that’s where I decided to invest my money in my dream French property.

However, I was foolish in that when I purchased a once derelict hotel in the valley, while I did think to use a travel insurance compare site to get my annual policy, I didn’t look into a home insurance compare site. Very strange – and upon hindsight, an absolutely foolish to have overlooked.

In fact, I didn’t actually look into buildings insurance at all, and found that when I came back to the house on one of my early monthly visits to check on the place and make my restoration plans, part of the roof had, since my last visit only weeks earlier, caved in.

Now it wasn’t a huge hole, but it was Winter, and the rain had penetrated not only the old wood in the roof, but the floorboards and walls below, some of the materials I had stored there – basically, this relatively small hole made an absolute wreck of my already-flagging old property.

And (as I’ve since found) while the people in the village are friendly and really look out for one another and their properties while the absentee owners are out of town, it was Winter, and not a soul could be found, so no one was there to see the disaster unfurl or, more importantly, try and get in touch to alert me.

So my advice, if you’re going to buy property anywhere in France, get yourself a decent buildings insurance policy as soon as the property’s been signed over to you. You’ll save yourself an awful lot of time, money and heartache – it’s just not worth it!

Stumble it!