'House left empty 27 years will be my forever home'

A BRITISH woman is renovating a 500-year-old farmhouse in France abandoned by her family 27 years ago and so dilapidated it was taken over by animals.

- By Freddie Noble

Sam Maunder, 34, has been working on it for six years and reckons it will take three more to complete, in a project costing “thousands”.

She said the place was a concretefloored “shell” when her parents bought it for £12,000 in 1993, when it had been empty for 50 years.

The family moved in when Sam was four and had grand plans to renovate the house, two cottages and a barn on the land in the Dordogne.