The backstory - so... the Pyrénées then?

After very extensive internet research we decided that somewhere near the La Mongie/Grand Toumalet ski area would suit us, this is the biggest ski area in the French Pyrénées. Probably somewhere close to Bagnère de Bigorre which is close to, but on the edge of the Pyrénées giving enough flat land for properties to have decent amounts of land.

Aside
In France it is hard to find places with more than an acre or so of land as an agency called the S.A.F.E.R monitors and has veto on all sales of property with more land than this attached (the size of land they monitor varies slightly department to department). The purpose of this is to protect farm land and stop it getting broken up in to smaller plots, to achieve this they can intervene once an offer has been accepted and buy the property themselves for resale to a local farmer. This process doesn't simplify land purchase in France any...

On the August bank holiday in 2011 we went to Bagnère de Bigorre, having looked at the particulars of about 40 places and narrowed it down to 2 we wanted to see (the rest had various things wrong including no access in winter, too far from skiing, not enough land, too expensive, too ruined, no electricity, north facing etc etc). One of these we were extremely excited about as it looked amazing in the photos.
In the event one was withdrawn from sale before we saw it because the members of the family who had just inherited it couldn't decide whether they were going to sell it or not (luckly the less favoured one)

We saw this place and as my beloved mother would say - 'it spoke to us' - in her case this normally means she is about to spend a lot of money on something that is going to cost even more money to bring up to spec, but will almost always give her a great deal of fun and pleasure. I suspect it is going to be the same with us (the money bit and hopefully the fun bit...). We loved it so much we had trouble playing cool and leaving it until the next day before making an offer. Even in our excited state we realised we had better see a bit of the area first and inspect where we could ride the horses, how long it took to get to the ski area etc. The drive to skiing is slightly longer than we would like, but we thought that a fair compromise as useable land is obviously harder to find deeper in to the mountains.

So to summarise we bought the first house we saw, in an area we had never been before that weekend, with no clear idea how we were going to earn money living there. What could possibly go wrong?