Renovating a Gite in Brittany

This account details our journey to France to start running a gite holiday business. As of writing it was about two years ago that the journey started, so some of the details and especially the dates are a little hazy. I’ve tried to piece together events in chronological order from various e-mails and diary entries and a slightly fuzzy memory. A lot has happened since the original inception.

It all started with a two week family holiday in the last week of May 2002. For the first week we stayed at a gite complex of 6 gites in centre of Brittany and the second week in a holiday cottage at Paimpol on the north coast of Brittany. We had a fabulous holiday, loads for the kids to do, and plenty of socialising in the evening outside our gite. The owners of the gite complex lived on-site and we got talking over a glass of wine about why they moved to Brittany, etc. etc. They’d most probably heard and answered the same questions many times before. The couple had many similarities with us, both worked in I.T. got disillusioned with the ‘rat race’ and the hustle and bussle of the U.K. We both felt we were stuck on the treadmill and wanted the stress free dream of living in the French countryside.

There wasn’t any one thing particularly bad about England, we had good child care for the two children, Elizabeth (4) and Hugh (2), Caroline worked 3 or 4 days a week in London, I was a well paid computer consultant, and we had nice cars, a nice house, a place booked in a private school for the oldest, and some very good friends. There was just ’something’ missing. People talk about ‘downsizing’, ‘quality time’ with the family, or ‘less stress’,and it was some of those things and possibly a bit of a mid-life crisis.

The next few weeks involved many conversations about our future. I mean if they could do it, then why couldn’t we. We surfed the Internet looking for suitable properties, made phone calls, did some basic research, and found out if it was possible to up-sticks and start again in a new country. One thing we did come to realise was property in France is not as cheap as we thought, especially for a house with a number of gites. We also discovered quite quickly that estate agents websites we not up-to-date. There was only one thing for it, sell the house, and move over to France into rented accommodation. We decided it was now or never, especially since Elizabeth would be starting her new school in September.

4^th July 2002 – House on the Market

Chose a local estate agent to sell our house and put the house on the market. The interest was incredible. It’s worth remembering that the house market in the UK, especially the South of England was absolutely potty. House prices had been rising for several years at an incredible rate and people expected it to continue. Personally I wasn’t so sure and felt it was all getting a bit silly.

By the end of the following day we had 6 viewings and three offers at the asking price ! Bonkers. Mind you we did everything they say on the TV programmes about selling houses. Moved furniture into the garage, painted the front door, lots of tidying, fresh coffee etc. etc. Boy did it work. So, in order to get the best price our agent suggested going to sealed bids with a closing date a few days hence. Opening the bids a few days later show what a crazy market it was, either that or our house was under-valued. We had three bids at least 10% more than the asking price. We decided to take the second highest bid as they had the shortest chain and were ready to go.

A quick note about the house buying and selling process in England.
In my opinion it has to absolutely the worst system in the world and the the cause of more stress and aggravation than almost anything else. The system is very antiquated, with just about all transactions passing through a solicitor (lawyer) via the postal system. The average time to buy/sell a house in England is 12 weeks. Estate agents are used by buyers and sellers to locate a house and help speed the process along, but the agents are not regulated in any way and some have very shady practices, including deliberate over valuing, under valuing, not passing offers on to the vendor etc. There is a general lack of trust in the whole process.

Buying a house involves putting in an offer to the vendor and if accepted you then have to arrange a mortgage, who insist on a valuation and survey of the property, a search is performed (to ensure a new road isn’t going to be built in your new back garden), itemisation of things to be left with the house, appointment of a solicitor and various other things. This all takes time and costs a fair amount of money. Unless you are a first time buyer, you usually have to sell you old house and consequently you end up in a long chain of buyers and sellers, everyone with different agendas, and nothing signed until exchange of contracts. Up until exchange you can be gazumped (another buyer makes a higher offer that is accepted), or someone pulling out of the chain at a moments notice without any financial penalty. The person at the start of the chain is in the best position because they can start to dictate additional terms and occasionally price reductions moments before exchange of contracts. The whole chain is at their mercy.

16^th July 2002 – House Hunting in France

Because of the two children we decided that I would take a trip to France to view houses. I know you shouldn’t in case you find the perfect house and everything goes pear shaped, but we were excited and in a hurry. I took a 4 day trip as a foot passenger on a ferry and hired a car in France. I had meetings with 4 different agents and saw about 8 houses all over Brittany. Arranging a meeting with an agent to see a particular house that you viewed on the Internet is a complete waste of time. Nine times out of ten the house has already been sold months before or is no longer available. The agents just want to get you in the shop to make their commission. The general form is to arrive at the agent, view each of the properties on their books, chose the candidates and jump in the car, with the agent and got viewing. You need the agent, not just from the French language point of view but you’ll never find the vast majority of houses on your own. The address of most peoples houses is just the name of the house and the village. No road name, no clue !
Anyway, each viewing takes half a day, with the driving, the chatty seller, the size and complexity of most older properties, especially when you are looking at those with gites or gite potential. There are obviously a number of out buildings etc. I took hundreds of digital photographs, made quick floor plan sketches and some notes to remind me and show Caroline went I got back.

Back in England we quickly realised buying gites was not only going to be difficult, but much more expensive than we believed. Property prices had risen (more so if you were an English buyer) and the choice was fairly limited for what we wanted. However, we still felt it was a good thing to do and it would be much easier living in France and searching than trying to do it remotely.

During this period we were also searching for a rental property but found ourselves in an awkward position. From what we understood, renting a house if France is usually for 3+ years or just weekly for holiday lets. We wanted between 6 months to a year let, which was proving tricky to find.

Removal Man

Had a few International Removal Companies come round to the house to give us quotes for shifting our gear over to France. We also need to know about storage, because we expected to rent a house and would need somewhere to store all our stuff. As luck would have it one of the removal companies, a small independent ‘man and a van’ mentioned that he had just moved a load of stuff over to France to a new holiday home for an English couple near Dinan. As a added bonus the house had a sous-sol (basement) that he reckoned would be large enough to hold everything.
One thing led to another and we met the couple and agreed to rent the house from the beginning of September until the start of the holiday season, just before Easter. After that we had to pay weekly holiday rental prices! That should give us about 8 months to find our ‘Dream in France’, so the deal was done. I think both of us were a little mad, we had two young children in their brand new house and we had only seen a photo of the outside. We often have lunch with our ex-’landlords’ when they are over and have become firm friends.

Our buyers have a problem

A lot of the loose ends were coming together. We arranged for completion of the sale (i.e. the moving day) to be the 6th of September and booked the removal man. Opps, Houston we have a problem. The buyers for our house now can’t proceed until they sell their house. Suddenly we are in a chain and things are not quite so rosy. We are assured that everything is OK and the 6th of September is still OK.

We tried putting the house back on the market to find another ‘cash’ buyer but nobody was interested because someone else was part way though the sale. Surveys done, mortgage sorted etc. Nobody wanted to enter a contract race when they had little chance of winning.

There was much umming and arrring and general debate between ourselves and we decided to let the 6th Sept slip by. The sale should be completed within a couple of weeks, or so we kept being told. It was the same old story on the telephone, exchange tomorrow, exchange tomorrow, exchange tomorrow, but there was always a minor hitch and delay. Naïvely we still believed the sale would exchange and complete OK, so we decided to go to France anyway. I mean we had already packed up a gazzilion boxes, and we were paying for a rental house in France. Oh why not, lets go.

19^th September 2002 – Ferry to France

The removal men arrived bright and early and after drinking about 10 gallons of tea between them they were packed and off by 13:00. It was a real whirlwind of a morning, I’m so glad we were organised and had just about every either dismantled or packed. A quick final whizz around with the Hoover and a damp cloth and that was it. We left the keys with the estate agent and caught the 15:15 ferry to Le Havre. Goodbye England.

We arrived in Le Havre excited and apprehensive ready for the drive to Dinan to live in a house we had only seen a photo of. The last hour of the journey was in thick fog and we finally arrived in the village just outside Dinan at 1′o’clock in the morning. We couldn’t see a thing and were a bit lost. Following directions when you are tired, in the dark in a strange country is a bit tricky at the best of times, let alone in thick fog. Finally we thought we had found the house, drove in and tried the key. It didn’t work ! It must be the wrong house, so we stumbled around for a while, retraced our steps and eventually found the house that fitted our key. Quick unload of the car (a couple of duvets and bottle of wine) and straight to bed. The children were completely unfazed by the whole experience and have been amazingly resilient throughout.

We awoke in the morning to discover that the house was brilliant. Absolutely perfect. The living accommodation was spacious and very well presented, the sous-sol was huge and easily big enough to hold everything in storage to our untrained eyes, and we had a huge garden with swings etc. for the children.

The removal Lorry arrived on the morning of the 20th and after 10 more gallons of tea all the stuff went in the sous-sol as promised. There wasn’t much room left but we had all our boxes numbered and itemised which was invaluable. A quick scan through the spreadsheet on the laptop usually found the item we were looking for.

French House Hunting

We gave ourselves the weekend settle in, buy some provisions and then it was time to get house hunting, after all that’s what we were here for. Fortunately Carolines’ parents arrived on the Monday and helped enormously. The date for the visit had already been arranged before we delayed our arrival in France, and having them there in the first week was a real bonus. They looked after the children whilst we visited estate agents and viewed houses. It would have been too difficult to look after a two year old and a four year old whilst trying to buy a house in a foreign country. We saw a few properties in and around the Dinan area but couldn’t find anything we really liked. The dream place would have 3 to 5 gites (possibly requiring some renovation), a habitable house for us on the site, and a reasonable slice of land. At the end of the first week we found La Lohuas. It was just what we were looking for, and in the same village as our rental house! The photos below are some of the ones we took when we first viewed the house.

The main 3 storey house is in the middle of the two other two storey buildings with a third building at right angles. Difficult to see in the photo, but it’s on the extreme right.

The viewing took about 3 hours, the place was huge. Nearly 2 hectares (4 acres) of grounds, barns, outbuildings, ancient bread ovens, orchards, various animals (chickens, geese, goats etc.). plus the house. The main house was fine and perfectly habitable, our main priority was the three other buildings in the photo.

The first potential gite (far left) was 4 chambre d’hôtes (bed and breakfast rooms), two on each floor, all with toilets and bathrooms. It was relatively easy to see this as a gite. Strip out the two bottom bedrooms and convert one into a kitchen/diner and the other into a lounge. The small windows at the front also needed enlarging to match those of the house, as it was typically dark in the ground floor rooms.

The second potential gite (right of the house) was a dance studio (with mirror ball) downstairs and a spiral staircase leading up to a large open space with just flooring and plasterboarded walls. No rooms, hot or cold water, but some electricity. Major internal works, new kitchen, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, velux windows, decoration, etc. Again the front windows needed enlarging to make the gite more light and airey.

The third smaller building (far right behind the tree) was already a gite, but needed quite a bit of updating. A room partition and velux upstairs, a window replacing, and a new kitchen plus decoration.

Out of shot to the left was a large barn which had a new roof. It had the potential for complete renovation to two more gites.

Outside we had our work cut out. The two smaller pictures above show some of the grounds that surround the property. They were going to be our play fields (for tennis, croquet, trampolines, swings and slides etc.) but needed ploughing, levelling, weed killing and reseeding with new grass. The chickens, geese and goats would be moved to new ground and be made more accessible for the guests.

It wasn’t quite the dream, it didn’t have 3 gites let alone 5, but it was fairly close, in an ideal location close to Dinan and we could see how to get to the end result. Considering the other properties we’d seen, our budget, and lots of gut feeling we knew this was the right place. We returned, with the children and parents-in-law, for a second viewing and by the end of the week we had agreed a price with the owners and committed by signing the Compromis de Vente at the agents, Agence Arguenon. There was no going back now.

A quick note about the French house buying process.
The Compromis de Vente is the first bit of paperwork you sign once you decide to buy a house and have agreed the price with the current owner. It is a legally binding contract usually written by the estate agent or the Notaire (an impartial State appointed ‘property solicitor’). The Compromis de Vente details various items including the property description, price, deposit payable, fees, termite & asbestos inspections, penalty clauses and expected completion date. There is a seven day cooling off period under which you can withdraw without penalty. At the end of this period you must pay the non-refundable deposit (usually 10%) and then both sides are committed to the sale. It is possible to add ‘get-out’ clauses into the compromis but they need to be agreed by both parties.
After signing the Notaire will perform all the paperwork for the sale. It usually takes about 3 months, but, unlike in England, if either side pull-out the financial costs are great (usually 10% of the house purchase price).
On the completion date the Acte de Vente is signed in the Notaires office with all the relevant parties (or proxies) present. The Notaire reads through everything and then you hand over a very large bankers draft (plus taxes, agent and Notaire fees – about 10% to 15%). You must also have house insurance arranged before this meeting.

Arrange school for the children – 30^th September 2002

After signing the Compromis this morning we knew where we were going to live and the rough timescales, so we might as well get the children enrolled in their new school. We hesitated beforehand to avoid changing schools. The enrolment procedure was painless. We arrived unannounced, and saw the directrice (headmistress) who listened to our broken French, took a few basic details and told us that both children could start at 9AM then next morning. Because it is a small village school both our children would be in the same class, which provided security for them at the start. The directrice actually spoke very good English and really helped the children settle in. We did have lots of tears in the first few weeks with the biggest battle being lunchtimes. Elizabeth attended all day and Hugh just in the mornings, so Lizzie saw Caroline collect Hugh each lunchtime and wanted to come home as well. Starting a new school is never easy, especially when you don’t speak the language.

Everything’s going brilliantly, the people are nice, schools sorted, we are getting the hang of this. I’m even speaking a little French !

House Sale Falls Through – 2^nd October 2002

Wednesday morning and it all goes pear shaped. The first time buyer at the beginning of the chain has pulled out. He said the whole house buying episode has been too stressful and caused him and his girlfriend to split up. The deal is off. So he walks away at almost no cost leaving behind a chain of very annoyed people. Just what we didn’t need, a empty unsold house in England and bank balance that can’t pay for our new French house that we had just signed and committed to. We tell the agent and the owners that we may have to withdraw during our cooling off period. Everyone was very understanding and told us to wait until the end of the seven days to give us a chance to find a way around the problem.

After a fretful nights sleep and some frantic back-of-envelope calculations we called the bank in the morning. In principle they were prepared to lend us the cost of the new French house against the equity in our house in the UK. We sent our accounts etc. and had to wait for confirmation. So on Thursday we told the agent and the vendors in France that we didn’t want to pull out of the contract and will be proceeding. We both really hoped we would sell our house in the UK or we would be in deep trouble. Both the sale in the UK and the buying in France take about 3 months. Lets hope we sell before we buy otherwise we are going to saddled with a very large mortgage to pay in the UK.

New Buyer – 10^th October 2002

Well we have sold the house again, and accepted the buyers offer. We managed to get 4 offers at the new slightly lower asking price because we wanted a quick sale. The new chain was short and the buyers at the start of the chain were known to us. One of the couple does conveyancing so knew the ropes. We trusted that they would speed things along and not drop out. Hopefully this saga should be over within a couple of months.

With a bit of luck we wouldn’t need the backup plan of a bridging loan from the bank.

New Car

We bought a French car on Tuesday. A blue Peugeot diesel estate. Two years old with 100,000km (60,000 miles) – a bit high – but in good condition. We got it from a garage so it has 6 month warranty, new tyres and brakes, and a free towbar fitted. After we picked up the new car I popped back to the UK to dump the Left Hand Drive Ford Focus at a dealers in Portsmouth. A flying 24 hour visit and to check that the house was OK.

Right after we bought the car we read in a French Property Magazine that you could not buy a car in France unless you had a Carte de Sejour (residence permit). I’m glad we read that after the purchase. Just goes to show, you shouldn’t believe everything you read. As of writing I think a Carte de Sejour is no longer required.

Waiting Game

Now it’s just a waiting game for the house sale and purchase to complete.

Hugh is enjoying school still but very tired. Elizabeth is having a bit of a hard time. She is finding it all very strange and foreign. I think it’s all a bit tough for her. Everything has changed, house, car, friends, language, food, everything. The only thing that has stayed the same is me and Caroline, and we are a bit stressed out.

French bank account is getting setup and underway. That should save us some exchange rate charges on our credit card. We have also got our contents and general school and public liability insurance all sorted along with the car. The estate agent helps sort all this out along with the bank account. They have been great. I went to a French conversation class today in Dinan. It’s run by the college in town and only costs 15 euros (£10) for the year. It’s an hour and a half and just general French conversation to give me confidence and get me talking. Caroline does most of the talking when we are out and so gets lots of practice.

We visited a couple of friends of our accountant in Bagshot who live in a nearby town. He is from Somerset and she is French. They run a couple of gites and chambre d’hotes. We had a quick chat and a look around which has encouraged us that we are doing the right thing.

So we have had a fairly hectic month; bought a house, bought a car, sorted insurance for both + contents in rented house, got the kids into school, I’m attending French lessons in a local college one day a week. Caroline’s French is brilliant, she does most of the talking Sorted out a bank account, progressing with health care and most of it has been conducted exclusively in French. EVERONE, without exception, has been really fantastic. Really helpful and very little bureaucracy. Bet you couldn’t turn up at a school on a Monday in the UK and have the kids start Tuesday morning. The only fly in the ointment is the empty house in Hook.

Even with all the stress, I’m actually enjoying life in France, especially the wine, food and NO traffic jams !!!

First Gite Booking – 31^st October 2002

We just got our first booking for Cerise Gite for May 2003. The slight hiccup is that we don’t actually own any of the gites yet and Cerise is still a dance studio with no bedrooms, bathrooms or a kitchen. At least it gives us a deadline, you can do a lot in seven months. I must admit I never expected our website to work quite this well or so quickly. The only photos I had of La Lohuas were the ones we took back in September and the prices and descriptions on the site looked to a future somewhat.

We also applied for our Permis de Travaux to enlarge the 4 south facing windows in two of the proposed gites. This process takes about 2 months so the permissions should be granted ready for when we moved in.

Exchange of Contracts – 7^th November 2002

Hurrah, we just exchanged contracts on the UK house sale with completion scheduled for December 6th. That’s when we get the money, which we will need to pay for La Lohuas (hopefully on the 20th December). Fingers still crossed.

Knowing the house sale in the UK was well underway we started to plan a bit more for the future.

We went round to the new house to measure up the potential gites for kitchens and to get a couple of Devis from two maçons for enlarging windows in two of the gites. The existing owners were fantastic and very helpful. They showed us round the house, and pointed out details about electric supplies, water stop cocks, boilers, septic tanks, etc. The lady of the house even met with Caroline each week at the house to give her French lessons and receive some English lessons in return.

With the gite measurements we went to IKEA in Nantes to buy three kitchens and various bits of furniture. We also bought fencing for the play area, and various materials to build a slide, swing and seesaw. We could have bought domestic play equipment, but it wasn’t really tough enough for public use.

My parents came to visit for a week at the beginning of November to see our new purchase and help us think about what we needed to do for the future. Sometimes you can get bogged down in the detail, and need a second opinion to see things in the round. It helped us finalised our ‘back of envelope plans’ and sort out an action plan.

One of the things on the action plan was to setup the company structure for running the gite business. We both met an accountant and an advocate to get advice on company formation and financial options. The number of options were bewildering, ranging from a micro-enterprise to an SARL with optionally a separate SCI company owning the bricks and mortar of the buildings. We eventually settled on just an SARL, which meant we needed a visit to see the bank manager to set-up a company bank account. All very hard work in a second language. One good by-product of creating the SARL was entry into the French ’system’, as a taxpayer (not quite so good as they do pay high taxes), and as a beneficiary of their excellent health cover. So now we had an official French business and the buildings to run it. Once we move in the really hard part of the renovation can begin.

Caroline painted up three large road signs ready to put outside outside the house. We guessed that we might have to rely on passing trade rather than the Internet in the early stages. We where already way too late for any printed holiday publications as they usually have a copy deadline around July and publication in November. So this was our backup plan should Google not rank our site well. As it turned out the work I had already done on the site and some later tweaking in February 2003 put us high enough up the ranking to almost fill July and August in our first year.

Completion in England – 13^th December 2002

We received word that we had completed our house sale in the UK and the money was being electronically transferred to our bank account. The solicitor divides up the money to ensure he get paid, the estate agent receives their commission and the mortgage company receives any outstanding loan on the house. We get what is left. It should be easy, a few basic calculations, and institute a TT to move the money. It seems to be quite common for TT’s to get delayed or go to the wrong account (first hand experience and anecdotal evidence) and sure enough ours got delayed by 4 hours. It might not seem like a big deal, but in that 4 hours the pound/euro exchange rate moved enough to cost us nearly £1,000. It makes you appreciate why it is so difficult and expensive for international companies to manage multiple currencies.

French house purchase delayed

The original completion date for the purchase of La Lohuas was December 20th, but a delay in sending off some paperwork meant that the Farmers Union did not have the statutory period to veto the sale. The French Farmers Union, FNSEA, is given a two month period to decide if they wish to buy a parcel or parcels of land over a certain size (1 ha, 10,000 m^{2 I think}) for farming. The whole of France is divided into little strips or parcels of land and each is marked and numbered on the cadastral plan. My understanding is that after the revolution the land was apportioned so that each citizen had thier own plot of land.Our house and surrounding grounds covers 5 different plots.

The new date for completion was set for December 30^th, which wasn’t a big problem, but it did mean Christmas was going to be a bit flat in a rented house, rather than in our new house. As a consolation we went a bought a very large Christmas tree to brighten our temporary home.

Free Advertising

Whilst waiting for the big move we realised that Dinan, France was twinned with Exmouth, UK (my old home town when I was a child) so as a bit of marketing Caroline wrote a short article about our move to France, the gite business, and the coincidence with the twin towns. The article was published in the Exmouth Journal on the 27th Dec, but they failed to print our website address. Very annoying. You can see the article here.

When we lived in the UK both the children had very bad Eczema, but we had both noticed it getting much better since we had moved to France. We had stopped wet-wrapping and the itching had reduced remarkably. For us, and the children, it was remarkable, and another marketing opportunity. Caroline wrote an article about the change in lifestyle and the disappearance of the children’s eczema, and again it got published in the Eczema Exchange Magazine magazine. You can see that article here. This time we were a bit wiser and got the web site address published.

Moving day – 30^th December 2002

The French removal men arrived 6 strong in two trucks bright and early to unload everything from the rented house. It was actually a very easy move for them, as just about everything was boxed and in the sous-sol. The only tricky item was the upright piano, but then the two thinnest chaps just popped a couple of straps under the piano and walked it out the house and up the ramp into the lorry. It’s all in the technique. By the way, French removal men don’t drink tea and have tea breaks; they drink beer, and had cleared me out by 10am. They do however stop for lunch, just like the whole of France. With just a few boxes left to load the clock struck 12 and they all disappeared for two and a half hours. Once they got back, about 20 minutes work saw the jobs finished and they were away. We hoped to see them tomorrow at La Lohuas, beer and wine permitting.

Our appointment at the Notaires office in Dinan was for 3:30 pm. It’s at this point you hand over the money and become the owners of your new house, however we only found out at the last minute that you must prove to the Notaire that the house is insured. So en-route we had to very hastily arrange house insurance and get an attestation from the insurers to show the Notaire. Carrying around the HUGE cheque (basically all our money in the world) to pay for the house was a bit nerve racking. Because the bank closed on a Monday (today) I had actually got the cheque on Friday and it had been sitting on the mantlepiece for 3 days. I don’t think I let it out of my sight in all that time.

The meeting at the Notaires went smoothly with the Notaire reading out loud most of the deeds (with our estate agent translating) and the present owner and Caroline and I signing and/or initialing what seemed like a mountain of paperwork. Relieving myself of that cheque was a relief, and now the house was ours, we got the keys and went back to La Lohuas for some champagne.

However, there was no time to relax just yet, when the original moving date of the 20th was set my Sister and family planned to arrive on the evening of the 30th. That would have given us 10 days to settle in, instead of just a couple of hours.

The first day – 31^st December 2002

The removal men arrived bright and early to unload. The unloading was a little more difficult with three storeys tyo climb and five very excited children playing hide and seek for most of the day.

None of us stayed up to see in the New Year. It was early to bed in our new house and gite business. A rush, stress and struggle but we were in. We spent the next week unpacking and settling in. My sister and brother-in-law were a huge help. They kept us going in the first week and got our new house into a home very quickly. After the previous 6 months we were relieved to finally be installed and felt drained, exhausted and just wanted to relax for a while but there was no time for that, we had bookings for our new gites. Now it was down to work to renovate and create the three gites that would be our future.

Little did we know that exactly a year later we would be celebrating a successful year and toasting in the New Year at a fancy dress party of 20 people in our new house with myself and Caroline as the only English couple. Bien Integration.

Part two, and the following 18 months at La Lohuas.

This document is my opinion and understanding only. It does not constitute legal advice and you should always obtain professional advice before acting on anything herein.