I MENTIONED the other week we are looking into the possibility of investing in a log house. We would like it built on our piece of land, which we christened The Folly some six years ago when we bought it.

The views are stunning and it would be good to maximize the asset, even though it did not come with building permission. The fact there is a wooden house just along the road encourages us to believe we might have luck with a similar building Application. Added to which, there is a change of mayor.

So we have been busy looking at wooden houses. Being English this is something of a new concept. There is almost an in-built suspicion directed towards such dwellings as akin to pre-fabs or those asbestos and wood houses they erected after the war.

We had to remind ourselves we had travelled through New England in the Fall last year and, everywhere we looked, there were glorious colours and wooden houses. Almost every house was made of wood and we got to the stage where we had narrowed down our preferences – grey or yellow wood houses were top of our list. In the end, we got wooden house fatigue because lovely though it is, New England is very repetitive.

The other week we travelled down to Limoges to visit a chalet en bois - a house made of wood. The man that owns it, and lives in it, works for the firm that makes them. Once inside it seemed like a normal house with, for the most part, wooden-panelled walls. Of course you can have plaster-board stud internal walls if you so desire.

In most cases, the first floor or the second floor as the French would have it (the one above the ground floor) is not as large, because the roof starts to slope inwards. Some of the rooms nestle under the eaves. Your council tax, and other official estimates, only take into account the floor area of a room that is 1.8 meters or more high. So if you are vertically challenged, I imagine you could live quite cheaply.

It transpired we could pick up a basic four-bedroom house for around 80.000 euros and “pick up” is indeed the operative word. That is the price for the kit. That figure does not include the roof, tiling or second fitting (internal wall-cladding, plumbing or electrics). The internal cladding is significant because this enhances the insulation of the 11 cm-thick walls..

You want the kit delivered? That’s extra. You want it erected? Well that is a whole lot more.

So you pay 80,000 euros just for the kit. On reflection, I cannot think of many people capable of picking up a kit and erecting a house… “Hold the side wall, Mabel while I just nail the front wall on.”