It’s currently a very pink room. There have been times as I’ve painted that I’ve panicked about the colour, it shifts and changes as the light moved around the room and there are certain times of the day when I’m not sure I like it and others where I absolutely love it. Since making this video we’ve moved in the sofas, through necessity rather than it being the right time for them, and introducing another colour into the room has made all the difference in just the way I’d hoped, making the pink soften and retreat to be a warm, neutral, background colour, blending in all the doors and panels and making the room feel like a cohesive space. There are a few sneak peek pictures below for because it will be a while before we can finish things off.

The materials for the bookshelves and the moulding around the library end of the room sucked up the very last of the budget meaning there is nothing left at the moment to finish things off. Rugs, chandeliers/light fittings, mirrors and art work are going to have to wait until later in the summer once the house is earning its keep again and the B&B is full of guests, so that we can save up for the finishing touches.

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Finally boarding over the chimney breast has made the biggest difference, hiding the flue pipe from the log burner and those fake Romanesque columns that we’ve hated for the last eight years. It’s given the room a proper focal point.

The reclaimed fireplace that Tim collected from an old house in Angers for free last summer fitted perfectly around the log burner. We used just the front part of it, cutting the mantel shelf in half almost for a slimmer fit, to avoid taking up too much of the room. It’s a little old and mottled, but then so is much of this house, so it fits in nicely, looking almost as if it has always been there. We were given a little bottle of oil to naturally seal the granite hearth, so I used a soft cloth to rub a little of that on to the marble too and it deepened the colour slightly and made the stone look happier somehow.

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It took a lot of searching to find a company to cut the granite for the hearth for us, I emailed one after another and received multiple nos; but eventually in the depths of an industrial estate in Le Mans I found a stone workshop who could cut the pieces and have it ready the week before Christmas.

A few days later they called to tell us that the diameter measurements we’d provided for the semi circle part of the hearth weren’t good enough and we needed to provide a template. A little baffled, we used the same measurements to draw a semi circle on a piece of card and Tim drove all the way back into Le Mans to drop it of. That done we crossed our fingers that we’d still have the granite in time so we could get the log burner in and roaring.

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We rode back and forth to the dump, hauling trailer loads of debris down country lanes, hoping that we’d strapped the tarp on tight enough to stop things flying out. Dust and rubble were everywhere as we worked our way through all the stripping out, taking the room back to its bare bones so that we could start to put it back together again.

But then things start to slow down, all the boring behind the scenes jobs have to be done. Tim ran pipework for new radiators and we scratched out heads for days to work out how to get the pipes past the old moulding in the ceiling, until Jean popped in and told Tim how to sneak them down from our bedroom above.

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Having a cosy sitting room is such a huge part of a home and it’s something that we’ve been missing this last eight years. Dare I say it? I think that this château of ours won’t really feel like my true home until this room (and maybe our bedroom) are finished. In a way it feels as if we’ve been camping in this house for all these years, waiting, waiting, waiting to be able to do something for ourselves. I’m excited (as I say about a hundred times in the video) to finally be starting this project for us.

Video is not my natural medium, it’s not something I know a huge amount about. I’m sure there are more professional, slick and glossy formats produced by the YouTubers our there. I filmed this with my phone, I have no mic, I edited it on my phone (which took a long, long time), but hopefully you’ll enjoy it and it will give you a good insight into what we’re starting with. As ever with this house, it’s never just a lick if paint and a new rug. This is a full on strip out and put back together, while trying to be sensitive to the history of the château. Let us know what you think.

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Those of you who have been following along will remember that the space that is now our laundry room was actually two walk in storage cupboards that we could only access from outside of the house. One used to be an outside loo and the other was just a storage room. They’d housed our old fridge-freezer and an ancient chest freezer for the last six years, but to get to them we had to continually go outside in all weathers, at all times of day. It wasn’t an ideal use of space.

Our original plan was simply to tidy these outside rooms up, move the washing machines and tumble dryers in and keep on accessing them from the outside. Once we cleared the two rooms out though, we realised that things were a little tighter than we’d planned, and while all the appliances fitted, the space wasn’t going to be workable. I’d be scraping my knuckles on the wall every time I lifted a basket of laundry.

When we first discussed this room we’d talked about sacrificing one of the larder cupboards in the kitchen to create a doorway and open up access to the storage rooms from the inside. I dismissed it because I didn’t want to lose the storage space and Tim dismissed it because he didn’t want the hassle of taking down walls.

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We moved in to a half empty house, many of the rooms still had furniture in them, pieces that the family no longer had space for; old armoires, washstands, one beautiful gilt framed mirror. Many of the cupboards were still full of things - dusty hardback books with gold edged pages, trashy French fiction with dog-eared covers and wrinkled spines, probably leftover from a long-ago beach holiday, old pieces of mismatched china, exercise books full of homework, an enormous number of little sherry glasses. The things no one wanted.

We had agreed that we would take whatever was left in the house after the family had taken anything of sentimental value. We knew that the furniture from our house in England would only fill a tiny corner of the salon, so we were happy to have whatever was left to get us started. And so, we got the treasures and the junk.

It might have been sensible to sort through it all at once, to empty every cupboard and clear every shelf. But in those early days we just wanted to settle in and start making the big, rambling house into as much of a home as we could. We squeezed our things into the empty spaces on the shelves, nestling our life alongside the leftovers of the previous family.

They were our things now we supposed, we owned every cobwebby one of them, strange objects we didn’t quite know the use of, books we couldn’t read, glasses we didn’t need. We were nervous about throwing anything away, just in case it was suddenly remembered and someone came back to claim it. I imagined the awkward conversations in a language I couldn’t speak, trying to explain that I had indeed thrown away the school exercise book from 1977, and I couldn’t bear it. So we just left things where they were, or boxed them up and moved them to a different cupboard.

The boot room had a set of ramshackle shelves along one wall, made from old bits of timber and floorboards bolted into the wall. On the shelves were boxes of light bulbs, a basket of shoe polish and brushes - one stiff, one soft; there was a tangled badminton net, some 1kg weights from an old set of scales and a few rusty tools. We let go of the badminton net and piled our shoes and boots onto the shelves, popping our shoe polish in the basket with the rest.

There were no coat hooks, just an old piece of rebar hung under a shelf as a make-shift clothes rail, we squeezed our coats onto a few wooden hangers, until picking them off the floor constantly became too unbearable and Tim put up some hooks on the opposite wall. The wall was plastered with a spikey artex that scraped your knuckles if you were at all absentminded about hanging up your coat. Dragging you back to the present by tearing at your skin as you reached for the hook.

Opposite the shelves, there was a door that led to the bottom of the back stairs, and behind it, at the foot of the stairs, was an old log store full of crumbling wood. The stairs were always icy and dark, a door and wall at the top blocking them off from the light and warmth of the sun that streams through the window on the landing. For four years the only thing that changed in the boot room was the size of the children’s shoes scattered across the floor. It was dark and cold and always a mess.

We took down the doors and walls at the top and bottom of the stairs in the winter of 2022. Opening up the stairs and letting the light and warmth flood in. As the wall at the bottom of the stairs came down we found that the supporting beam was rotten at one end and the wall had been set into the tommette tiled floor, leaving us with a rubble filled trench running across the room. We propped up the rotting ceiling beam with an acro prop and swept out the trench. Then we ran out of winter. And so, the acro prop and the trench became yet more obstacles to work around, until finally two years later we had the time and budget to start work on a proper boot room.

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I did some digging around on Substack and realised that it was entirely possible for me to share videos with you all here. So the sneak peek of the boot room that I filmed this week for everyone on our Instagram close friends list can also be sent out this way too - to reach all of you lovely folk who support my journal with a paid subscription.

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