Your French property is rural, in a village centre, or up a track.
What an access survey is actually checking
The house survey establishes what has to move. The access survey establishes whether the vehicle carrying it can get within sensible reach of the door, and if not, what happens instead.
It is the half of the job people skip, and it is where the expensive surprises live. A crew that arrives to find a lane it cannot commit to has two bad options and no good ones.
- Final approach: width, surface, gradient, passing places, overhanging branches.
- Turning space at the property — getting in matters less than getting out.
- Any height restriction: arch, gateway, low cable, overhanging roof.
- Where the nearest hard standing is if the vehicle has to stop short.
Arches, gateways and the porte cochère
Courtyard properties across the Charente, Poitou and much of the south-west are entered through a single stone arch. It is load-bearing, it is older than anything else on the site, and it is not negotiable.
Height and width both need measuring, and height needs measuring at the crown and at the spring of the arch, because an arched opening narrows as it rises. Where nothing suitable fits, the answer is a larger crew and a planned hand-carry, costed honestly at survey rather than absorbed on the day.
Village centres and stationnement
In most French communes, holding kerb space outside a property for a removal needs a temporary parking authorisation from the mairie. Practice varies enormously — some communes want notice and a form, some want nothing, some will close a street for you if asked properly.
This is worth getting right. A move that arrives to find no space outside the door in a village where the alternative is two hundred metres away has lost most of its day. We identify the commune's actual requirement as part of the survey and deal with the office.
Tracks, weather and the shuttle
Unmade chemins ruraux are normal in Gascony, the Gers and much of the Dordogne, and they change character with the weather. A track that carries a loaded vehicle comfortably in high summer may not once the autumn rain has been through.
Where that risk is real we plan a transfer point at the top of the track on hard standing and shuttle the load down in a smaller unit. It adds handling, it is entirely predictable, and it is vastly preferable to a vehicle sitting axle-deep at the bottom of someone's drive.