Well I suppose if we made one mistake so far it was overlooking the gains made by the Euro against Sterling, when we started we got two Euro’s to the pound, now its almost a parity.
We should of spotted this because we had a good fund here in the UK that we transferred our renovation budget from, this went into our BNP Paribas account and then we used that to pay the builder. With hindsight we should of pushed the money over sooner, as soon as the pound started losing significantly against the Euro.
That said as we know some banks went to the wall overseas and people lost all their money so its was a difficult call in some respects. Our finances are now in France but soon we will be looking to get our property mortgaged to enable the final phase to be implemented.
I will document the process we used for this so that others will be able to see how we did it and follow the same path – thats if it works out to be the right one of course, we are now implementing the second phase of the project which covers the rebuilding of the kitchen and the renovation of the structure at the ground floor (the mill is on 3 levels).
Our finances are in place for this phase which will take about 3 months and then once that is complete we move inside, that will mean in three months time all exterior and structural remedies will be complete, this includes the complete re-roofing, windows, doors, stonework etc etc
The next bit will be just as expensive I am sure but time will tell just how much 
