I found some tips online the other day about selling your property in the current market. 

The piece was written for sellers abroad - particularly Spain - but there's some good general advice for anyone who's trying to move house but can't shift their property at present. 

Space
Few matters are more important to buyers than a ‘feeling’ of space, says the author. This is as important to someone seeking a studio flat as a person wanting a luxury villa.

He advises that you look at photographs in interiors magazines and notice that what they all have in common is a lack of clutter. Surfaces are generally clear and furniture is minimal.

To duplicate this look, remove everything that in any way reduces the ‘sensation’ of space, he says, including possessions that are dear to you. "Few people will ever buy your property because of your belongings," he points out, so be ruthless - put your stuff in storage if you have to.

Light

"Make sure your property is filled with as much natural light as possible. A lack of plentiful natural light strikes deeply into the subconscious, always producing a negative sensation.

"Get rid of any heavy velvet or net curtains, however inconvenient this may be in the short term. Make sure that windows are clean, heavy curtains are pulled well back and that any nearby vegetation or trees do not darken your house."

In this house, because of our 2ft thick walls and tiny windows, we use extra-long curtain poles, cream curtains, and tie them well back from the windows. As we are not overlooked, we also only use curtains for warmth, only winter and only in the living room, and even here, in summer, they come down altogether. In London, where we lived almost on the street, we used stick-on film on the windows to blank out vision in the lower half, and cream Roman blinds - no clutter, and infinitely variable light.

Deliver the dream

"A few well placed bottles of champagne, a full wine rack and some yachting/golfing magazines can provide a high life ‘feel’ to a room," says the author. "Fresh fruit and flowers always add colour and the smell of freshly ground coffee can be effective."

The magazine and wine idea is a good one - its something we use when we're 'staging' interiors for photography but I wouldn't have thought of it for selling a house.

Cleanliness

"Few things are more off-putting than properties that are unclean, messy, greasy or smell of cigarette smoke, damp or pungent incense sticks," the author advises. "Keep your house well aired and centralise all extraneous mess in one discreet area preferably away from the main body of the accommodation."

Oh Lord, why don't more people do this? It is so basic, and yet I think people can't see their own filth when they're living in it. Smokers are particularly guilty, as they simply can't smell their own smoke, nor realise what a brown, hideous tinge everything they own has about it. I vividly remember moving into a flat in Kilburn and the brown water that ran down the walls as I washed the previous owner's nicotine off everything.

Low maintenance

"Prune trees and shrubs, clear your garden of weeds and undergrowth, power wash terraced areas and paths and make sure that your garden looks easy to maintain. Also mend broken gates, fix dripping taps and ‘sticking’ doors or windows.

"Repaint scuffed areas of paintwork to provide an impression of care – if a buyer sees small areas of neglect he will suspect that your house has more profound problems."

These tips should be tattooed on the eyelids of everyone who's trying to sell in France at the moment - most of their properties look awful, and a potential buyer couldn't help but be put off the second they turn into the courtyard. Some have broken-down old cars in the driveway, most have moss and weeds everywhere, and few Brits seem to spruce up their paintwork and plant geraniums in windowboxes, the way the French do. 

Warm

"If you have a viewing, make sure that your property is warm."

Well doh, you would think. But people are stupid...

Lived in

"Few properties are more difficult to sell than unlived in, empty shells. ‘Dress’ your property so that it feels like a permanent home and not somewhere that is temporary or deserted. Always retain furniture in your property together with pictures, curtains, towels and the minimum obvious objects to give the impression that someone is living there all the time."

This is obviously written for holiday home owners, so its relevance to UK sellers would be minimal, but lived-in vs tidy is a hard balance to strike.  Too many Brits regard their property as a house and not a home, and paint and furnish it to suit the next buyer, stripping it of all individuality.

Property surroundings

"The impression of a buyer is not restricted to just within the boundaries of your property. Rubbish piling up close by, a badly potholed road, excessive weeds on pavements and discarded junk all provide a negative impression.

"It may hurt to clean up the mess of others (or do the work of the town hall!) but it is essential to ensure that the immediate environment of your home looks good and not neglected. So, get out there and fill in the worst of the potholes and regularly get rid of any junk and rubbish!"

Easy enough to do here - my local commune would be delighted if we slung a couple of buckets of gravel into the pothole that regularly opens up in our driveway (there's a source underneath), but harder to do in the UK, I would have thought.

Individuality

"If your property is identical to many others close by, try to give it some aesthetic individuality such as painting it a different colour, having window boxes of colourful flowers, adding wooden shutters or perhaps some pretty water feature in the garden beside an imaginative shaded seating area. Make sure your property stands out and has the capacity to leave a positive and distinctive memory."

Our Dutch friend Gerry was always a big fan of 'My pink half of the drainnpipe' but until he came to Britain he didn't know it was a REAL phenomenon. In London, our half of the drainpipe was black, if memory serves. It can be hard, though, to make a mid-terraced house look individual when it's surrounded by others exactly like it. 

Be relaxed

"Always give the impression to any potential buyers that you are perfectly relaxed and content. Never appear nervous, never over-sell and never mention anything derogatory about your home."

Well LOL. The last time I sat in someone's house to ask about selling her property, she gave me a massive list of everything that was wrong with it. Admittedly, I wasn't buying, and she may have been unguarded, but her near-hatred of her own home certainly came over in the conversation.

"Have a plausible reason for wanting to sell and make sure that reason has nothing to do with anything that could be considered a negative about your property (‘we would like an en-suite’, ‘need a bigger garage’, ‘the garden takes too much effort’, ‘we hardly use the the pool’ etc)."

I know only two people who've cracked this - one who sold because her husband died and another who sold because she had become too disabled to continue living in the property. Both are reasons that any buyer would understand and sympathise with. If we ever sell this place, we'll probably just say we're moving closer to family.

For more tips, visit the link above. 

Read an interesting article the other day about straight women living together.

I always thought I might end up living with my old friend S by the sea with a menagerie (or whatever the group noun is) of cats, mad as a couple of batty old hens. 

Actually, I don't think this will come to pass as she decided to get sprogged up instead, but it still strikes me as a civilised way to live. 

As the article points out, two or more women sharing a property was very common between the wars, when so many men had been killed. Sharing a house or flat gives women companionship, stability and support - like the flatmates you have when you're younger, but on a longer-term basis. Sisters sometimes manage it, but when it comes to 'mere' friends, prurient eyes begin to roll in the sex-obsessed west. 

I've suggested house-sharing to my sister, who is a widow in a coterie of widows, eight or so of them, each owning their own house, running up separate bills for electricity, gas and whatnot, eating most of their meals alone etc.

Unfortunately she feels they've all lived alone too long to be able to compromise with anyone again, and she has a point. Let's face it, compromising even with someone you're in love with is difficult enough, never mind with someone who's just a friend. Still, at least if it's women, hopefully no-one will be leaving up the toilet seat...

The set-up of the three women in The Ice House seems to me to be an ideal way to live if you're single - one wing each and a big living room to share. Perhaps if the property market continues to squeeze we'll see more of people pooling their resources in this way, which would certainly put an end to the loneliness so many people feel as they grow older. 

I was truly heartened to read a story in today's Telegraph about women's co-operative Amazon Nails, which specialises in environmentally friendly housing, being commissioned to build Britain's first straw council houses.

Only six have currently been commissioned, by North Kesteven County Council in Lincolnshire, but it's hoped that many more will follow.

There are many sound reasons for building in straw. To start with, such houses cost far less than conventional buildings - £60,000 on average instead of £80,000. They are also less polluting, especially as they use less concrete. The houses are so well-insulated and energy-efficient that they save householders around 80 per cent on their heating bills (the planned houses will be connected to the gas grid for cooking only, and will be heated by woodburners in winter).

They also make use of a waste product - enough surplus straw is produced in the UK each year to build 250,000 homes, and God knows there is a profound need for social housing, which will probably increase rapidly as hundreds of thousands of people lose their homes in this recession.

My first encounter with straw bale housing was about a decade ago when our friends E and K built themselves a bale house to live in (above). They had been living in a 6ft caravan and E was now pregnant, so something had to give. Straw bale construction was in its infancy then and they build a load-bearing structure. Very few people do this now, as it means you're very limited in the heights and widths of walls, doors and windows - instead, modern straw bale houss are usually timber-framed and you use bales as infill rather than bricks or breeze blocks.

Being a couple of feet thick, the insulation properties of the straw are truly amazing. We popped down from time to time while it was going up and it was astonishing to find how warm it was inside even when the openings weren't glazed, it was winter, and there was no heating. Once E&K took occupation and fired up their tiny woodburner cooker, they lived with their big window open for much of the year round, to let OUT the heat. The walls, both inside and out, were lime-plastered - a wonderful finish that gradually turns (chemically speaking) back into rock over time. Like most straw bale houseowners, they left a 'truth hole' (right) to show that the house really is made of straw. 

I have my secret fantasies about having a house built (too much watching of Grand Designs on telly) and it definitely involves straw for areas such as utility rooms and porches. Straw, lime plaster, lots of energy-efficient double glazing, exposed timbers, terrazzo flooring. Oh la, all a pipe dream really, unless my architect friend M decides to make one for me out of the kindness of his heart.

Still, a girl can dream...

A few years back I used to enjoy a very guilty pleasure from watching a TV programme called Escape to the Country.

It was just another one of those estate agency programmes that litter the UK networks (Big Strong Boys, Place in the Sun, Big Strong Boys In The Sun, you know the kind of thing...). Each day, an aspiring couple, tired of the city, would decide to move to the country and task an estate agent with finding the right thing. Three or four properties would be chosen, and the people would view two of them. Brits being Brits, of course - a bunch of whingeing Poms - they'd never like any of them. 

One thing that always struck me, though, was the repeatedly expressed opinion (by the women) that moving to the countryside would entail less housework because 'it's so much cleaner'.

Hah bloody hah I'd think. Cleaner my backside. You'll learn, missy.

The countryside is filthy compared with the city. Spiders, spider webs, flies, fly shit, chestnut pollen, poplar fluff, willow seeds, stone dust, barley chaff, arsenic bugs, dead leaves, dust, mud. I wonder which bit of the countryside these women are planning to move to that's magically cleaner than town. They're in for a nasty shock. 

I know because it was a shock to me. I was thinking about it again this weekend, as I scoured and scrubbed the kitchen and living room (penance for my taking all Saturday off to drive around the region, having a girly good time while the DH was working).

It starts in spring, when the house fills up with pollen and seeds - hazelnut, followed by poplar, followed by willow, which carpets the courtyard (and our ground floor) in white bunnies (called "kittens" in French). Then comes the chestnut pollen, which smells exactly like semen, in case you didn't know - hence the local name 'spunk trees'.

Meanwhile, in the gravel courtyard, up comes whatever my farmer neighbour Patrick planted last year, seeded into every crack. Every other year it's wheat, but we've had maize, barley, rye and oats as well. Oats are particularly persistent, being a very natural sort of cereal and if I don't get them all out, by late summer I've lost the path to the woodshed.

In an old stone house like this, the stone constantly sheds. Nobody told me that, did they? This house is 'granite doux', and doux (soft) it certainly is. It has to be constantly vacuumed to keep the dust at bay, and the rough, uneven surface provides a lovely home for spiders.

Spiders, of course, are just a way of life. We have to pretend different to visitors, but there are big crawly ones hiding in every crack, and overnight some of them will spin webs across a doorway or over a mirror. I get rid of them with a big brush that looks like a giant loo brush - the best thing ever invented, but you can never stay on top of them. "A happy home has spider's webs," say the French, so I'm happy to go with that. They're at their worst in summer.

I don't kill them though - being a bit of a Buddhist - so I catch them in a big plastic jar with a lid and put them outside (my job, since the DH is scared witless of them). After all, spiders kill flies, which are much more of a problem. They start as soon as the weather warms up, coming out to feed on the ivy, and by mid-summer most of us here have fly papers (cat-friendly, of course) in every room, buzzing frantically with dying insects. I also have a bead curtain at the doorway. It is pretty useless, but I can't bear fly screens. We only put these up once the mozzies start in late summer, and only then out of dire necessity.

With the flies, comes fly shit - something I'd never encountered before moving to France. Little brown or black dots of velcro-like persistence that coat all your windows, along with every cup, plate or pan you leave out on show. I quickly learned, in our open-plan kitchen, to wash utensils before every use. And after the flies come the wasps, attracted by our calva pear orchard and as insistent as they are dumb. The only things worse are the hornets, the sight of which has me running for cover. With these beasts, I am not going to argue. 

Then there's the pets. Who doesn't love the little darlings? But with six cats and a big-pawed mud magnet of a spaniel, no surface stays print-free for long, as the cats leap up with fur wet from the grass onto the sideboard and coffee table, and every two weeks there's a faint brown line right round the sofa where the dog's rubbed himself dry. Thank heavens for removable covers on all the furniture, and pale grey paint on the woodwork (believe me, it hides a multitude of sins). From spring right through to winter the critters tread either dust or mud into the house in kilos, and you can't teach them to wipe their feet.  

There's also the question of hair, and if anyone's allergic to cats, they'd better never come in this house. Yesterday, after a period of neglect while I painted the bedroom, etc, I swept up a small dead animal's worth of fur from the living room floor. I like sweeping, which is quite contemplative, but I also can't afford to keep filling hoover bags, so it's a necessity as well as a choice. A damp rag is the best thing for getting fur off close covers, if anyone's interested.

Autumn, of course, means the house is full of leaves. Surrounded by orchard and woodland as we are, hundreds of kilos of leaves are shed around the house every year and a fair proportion has to make its way indoors, along with the odd rotting apple brought in by mutley as a toy.

Then, come winter, there's just as much muck in the house, only it's a different colour. As anyone with a woodburner will tell you, your house is covered with a fine layer of ash the whole time you use it, along with soot that drops out of the chimney and coats everything around the stove. Ours is peculiarly crystalline and gritty, which is just as well, as we usually get a bird or two down there each season, and you can brush it off a kestrel or an owl relatively well. But it renders housework like the Forth Bridge. I can write my name in the dust an hour after cleaning and whenever it rains, great rivulets of soot and rust pour down the back of the register plate over my freshly painted stonework, which gets whitewashed every summer.  

So now you know, country lovers. There's a reason we country dwellers all have hard floors and no curtains. And in this house at least, we have two rules: never start cleaning, and whatever you do, never look up.