Being a watermill, it’s totally uninsurable - so the risk is entirely ours. The place had been on the market for years, as none of the interested buyers had been able to get a mortgage on it, for the same reason. Paid cash, got it for a song - 5ha of land, beautiful old buildings, streams, ancient olive groves and terraces and pools and channels, permission to build as many anythings as we want under 100m2, and all for less than a new midrange car in the U.K.

I did discover that you can totally immerse a lot of modern electronics in muddy water, and so long as you wash (urgh, heatsinks) and dry them thoroughly, they live on. Hard drives in the NAS lasted just long enough to get the data off them - NAS itself was fine. Getting silt out of microswitches is also a PITA. Thought the tv was trash, but after a few months, the water that had gotten inbetween the layers of the display dried out, and now you’d never know.

Our main losses were things like mattresses and bedding, the car, books, and a whole bunch of time - took days to hose the mud off the walls, inside and out, and we had about 10cm of silt to shovel out - it took until summer to dry out! The damage outside was also extensive - lots of clearing of debris and chainsawing of huge treetrunks balanced improbably all over the place - at least the flood delivered construction material for the tent platform, which became our home last year while we worked on clearing up the mill and groundwork for the cabin, and taming some of the utterly overgrown forest. This year, as the flood was much smaller, it delivered commensurately smaller wood - but all in all, enough firewood to keep us going until the nights are warm, and some awesome driftwood that’s becoming light fittings in the new cabin.

So far, spring is gorgeous - the valley really benefits from the floods, leaves the banks super fertile - it’s a strip of luminous green in a grey and brown surrounding.