Thereafter all our work was geared towards getting the plumbing and electrics in. That meant clearing routes to be ready for drilling holes, putting in pipes and cables and getting the infrastructure ready.
I love getting my hands dirty and with so much to be done and Dick on his own, I desperately wanted to help, but I fully understood that on this occasion the château was just not safe enough for the children. It was also frightfully cold, so the decision for me to stay at gîte was sensible but annoying.
With all the expenses of moving to France, we knew categorically that we didn’t have anything like enough money to do all we wanted to in our first year. We had some money coming in from the television series, but to be honest that was never going to be enough, so we had to plan what we spent our money on very carefully.
I was still working as a television presenter as well. It meant I would have to travel and spend time away but it would bring in enough to tide us over until our business was built up and could sustain us. Before moving to France, we had worked out a business strategy that would enable the château to start paying for itself. We had gone through a list of possible revenue streams, the investment required to realise them, how much they could earn and then, most importantly, how much we wanted to do it. The result was interesting and our eventual plan was based around offering high-end experience weekends and some events. But for all of these we needed to have the château functioning.
I had been across to America during the autumn of 2014 to audition for a survival series for National Geographic. It was called a ‘chemistry test’ and lots of different applicants played at survival and showed off their skills. The idea was that there would be three chaps heading off on their adventures: a survival guru, a fabricator (someone who builds things) and an ‘alternative’ engineer (this was my group). The audition was great fun and I had a couple of days in New Jersey with some really interesting people. I was the only Brit and the oldest person there, but I did have some advantages: firstly, I was a country boy who loved the outdoors and knew how to enjoy myself; secondly, I had twenty years’ military experience; and, thirdly, I used to teach survival.
Before we left the UK, the formal offer had come in and I was due to start filming in early March, so we had to get organised for me to be able to leave Angela and the children for two and a half weeks at a time. As if that wasn’t enough, I had to try to get up to Paris to the American embassy to get a visa as an ‘extraordinary alien’ so I could work there. That would have been relatively easy but I had a broken nose and black eyes, which were not exactly photogenic. It was a matter of waiting as long as I could so my face could heal, but not too long as I needed my passport, complete with a visa, on 1 March.
Our gîte was advertised as sleeping sixteen people, but the reality was it had four very large rooms with dorm-style beds, all with plastic sheets on them. But we soon made it feel like home. Our trip to the supermarket and a scattering of kids’ toys was all that was needed. The floor tiles were very shiny and a little slippy, but we realised the benefit of them when we bought ten-month-old Dorothy a seat on wheels. Dick called it her ‘trundle buggy’. It was orange, sturdy and had a little tray to hold, well, grubby stuff. In between feeding, pooping and sleeping it gave the non-walking Dorothy freedom and she whizzed around the entire gîte on it! At first it nearly gave me a heart attack but I relaxed after a few days when I realised it wouldn’t topple.
The living space may have lacked a little ‘something’ but its redeeming feature was a huge oak table that seated sixteen comfortably. This table really came into its own when people started to come and stay. First to visit were my dad and Lee and Kyle, our father-and-son plumbers. I had known Lee and Kyle for many years. Lee was my plumber when I lived in east London. He lived in Hackney and I was in Mile End. As I lived in an old schoolhouse, with old pipes everywhere, he did tons of work for me over the years. He was kind and never let anyone down but was always late. His son Kyle had just started to train as a plumber. Lee joked that he was taking over the business when he retired, but we knew that would probably never happen. Lee loved his work.
Trustworthy friends and family that were handy were the order of the day and they were a much-welcomed addition to the team, which was currently just Dick, Arthur, Dorothy and myself. True to form, Lee and Kyle arrived late and blamed the laden van – which contained the huge shopping list of bits we had requested, including the cast-iron radiators – and the terrible weather. I was looking forward to seeing my dad for many reasons, not least the fact he could spend some time with the kids so I could finally get my hands dirty.
The next morning, everyone was up bright and early and I was taking orders in the kitchen: warm chocolate-milk served in a bowl for Kyle; fresh baguettes, jam, cereals, toast, cheese and eggs for everyone else. Arthur was in his high chair throwing his food around and Dorothy was in her trundle buggy dashing around the room. Work had begun and the gîte had a whole new energy; it was pleasantly exciting.
We had not yet mastered how to shop for technical supplies in France so when Lee and Kyle arrived their van packed was to the gunwales with every sort of fitting and pipe we might need. They were even collecting items the night before they travelled. They are total stars! It was so lovely to see a father and son working together and I recognised lots of the same pluses and minuses I had experienced when working with my big boy, James. Two things shone through: how much they cared for each other and how much they cared about getting the best job possible done. It was an absolute pleasure working with them, but the work wasn’t easy, and it didn’t go to plan.
After a walk around to talk through the details of the routes the plumbing and electrics would follow and to confirm that we were all singing from the same song sheet, it was about unloading and getting started. The first job was to sort the heating and to do that we had to get the customised thermal store we had bought into the grenier*. As the name suggests, a thermal store is a place where you store heat. If you want any hot water or heat for your radiators, that’s where you get it from. We were going to be generating heat from back boilers on wood-burning stoves, the gas boiler on our Rayburn, an immersion heater and, in the future, a solar thermal system. The thermal store would enable us to prioritise where the heat came from, so if our wood burners or a solar thermal system were operating heat would come from there, rather than burning gas in a boiler. It’s all very clever and logical. At nearly £3,000 it was quite a commitment, but it did everything I wanted it to for the heating and hot water in the château. But it is also bloody heavy. And from the bottom of the château to the grenier we have ninety-two stairs.
Lee and Kyle are both fit and strong and I am not exactly feeble, so we decided to just go for it. There followed a significant amount of grunting, swearing, sweating and general abuse of an inanimate object. It was the last two staircases through the floors where the staff and the children would have lived that caused the most difficulty. They are tight and steep, so the store had to be moved vertically one stair at a time, with each move being greeted with the sound of men doing themselves mischief. Eventually we got there and placed it directly above a main load-bearing wall, as we knew that, though it may have felt heavy now, once installed and filled with water it would be well over 500kg heavier.
The very first pipe we installed went from the one and only tap in the cellar to the thermal store in the attic, five floors up, and then down the far side of the château to the main kitchen fifteen metres away. It was our mains water feed and – to give you a feel for our pain – the water arrived at ground level in the eastern tower. It then went up to the ceiling of the basement in the tower, across the tower, across the main cider cellar at ceiling level (and through wall: hole #1), then across the secondary cider cellar (and through wall: hole #2), into and out of the expensive wine cellar (through the floor: hole #3), up through the playroom, through a series of floor joists (holes #4, #5, #6, #7), up the rear stairwell and through the ceiling (hole #8), then up th
e attic stairwell and through the ceiling (hole #9) before coming across the attic in ducting to save drilling through two more significant walls to the thermal store. So that was nine holes and masses of piping (all 32mm, for the techies). And to reach the kitchen down the other side was equally involved – on that pipe alone we put nine ‘Ts’ and full-bore isolators to allow us to break out. With hundreds of metres of pipe to lay it was daunting but, bless them, Lee and Kyle just got on and did it.
Lee is a great thinker and problem-solver, so we had discussed the project in some detail and, even though he and Kyle had no experience with it, we went for multicore piping that was made up of multiple layers of aluminium and plastic – it was strong yet a bit flexible and could be jointed and terminated in a robust way using a powerful compression tool. The main ‘highways’ for our hot and cold water were all through 32mm pipes to ensure the flow and the elements used in the rooms were 20mm and in some cases we came down to 15mm copper.
We built upon our work, rather than using different paths, so in most cases we were using the same route for the waste to come down. A slight restriction we had was that no sewage pipes were going onto the outside of the château. It did cause a bit more work but there was no real need to have them outside, so why spoil the look of our château? (Can anyone else hear Angela’s voice when I say that?).
The multicore came in 100-metre rolls, which was a godsend as we could lay long runs without having to join pipes. Having put the first pipe in place, we had to go back and cut it and insert ‘Ts’ at every location where we were going to eventually connect into a bathroom. Again, this increased our workload but it did mean in the future we would not have to drain down the pipes to make connections as they would already be there, ready to go, which was to prove very sensible. Years later, I connected the water for the final bathroom in the château to the pipe and connector we installed on that very first day. I love it when a plan comes together and I raised a glass to Lee and Kyle that evening!
It was not all plain sailing as daylight was very limited and, without mains electricity, everything had to be done by hand or with battery tools. Rather than drilling out holes we put pilot holes through the two-foot-thick walls and then dug out the stones around them; it was not neat and definitely not tidy. Progress was slower than we had hoped but Lee and Kyle had the bit between their teeth and there was absolutely no way they would have left us until there was heating and a hot-and cold-water system working in the château. A hole that could have taken a physical twenty minutes of drilling (the drills are heavy and the walls thick) instead took a couple of hours jackhammering out stones and making a lot of mess that had to be fixed afterwards.
But before we could get any system working, we needed the electricity turned on. The only electrical item we had in the château that was acceptable was the meter. That was a little disheartening, but we needed power, and EDF wouldn’t turn it on until a competent electrician said it was safe. Enter Monsieur Manceau.
It took three visits before we got any work from him. The first was to say he would come and look at the job – that was lost in translation, so when he turned up we got very excited, only to discover he’d turned up to look at the job and intended to come back and work the following week. During all this diddling we had no power and no electrical lighting, so in the middle of winter it was very hard to work, which was more than a little frustrating. When Monsieur Manceau and his assistant, who was a very young apprentice and moved with the lack of energy that only the young can show, turned up again, we had a list of tasks for them. Firstly, a socket below the meter; secondly, power to our thermal store and down to the boiler on the Rayburn; then there was a whole raft of simple spurs to give us power around the château.
After a day’s work, the two of them had put in one cable and a socket. It was incredibly disappointing because at this rate the total bill to rewire the château would have worked out to be hundreds of thousands of pounds. They had done enough to get us connected and from there it should have been a case of ‘don’t call us we’ll call you’. However, electricians who would come and take your money for working were as rare as hen’s teeth, so we had to smile and see when he would come and visit us again …
The EDF inspection had been booked in anticipation of some electrics being done and it was not long before we were switched on and had a functioning socket at the château. It was a total game changer: we had electric lights, we had a kettle not flasks, we had a microwave, we had power tools. We had rejoined the twenty-first century. The amount of joy that single socket brought us was amazing. I don’t think I’ll ever take the flick of a light switch for granted again.
As well as making the work faster, it meant it was possible to have a warm lunch. We always had a relaxing and substantial evening meal back at the gîte complete with wine – we were in France after all – but lunch had been very ordinary with baguettes and some fillings to keep us going.
Now, Lee’s wife Val is a legendary hot sauce maker. He always travelled with some and he knew if he didn’t bring enough to give us some we’d eat his supply, so he’d come with plenty. The recipe was a closely guarded secret, but there were a lot of Scotch bonnet chillies in there. The word on the street was that Val wore full chemical protection to make it and it was way up there on the Scoville scale (actually between 100,000 and 400,000). But it was a lot more than just heat – the flavour was also very special and, because it was Scotch Bonnet-based, the heat seemed to be worth it for the flavour.
It only took a little experimentation before we developed a soup that is now classed as ‘comfort soup’ here at the château. In all French supermarkets there are freshly made, or heat-treated, fish soups available. Doesn’t sound great on paper, but it’s delicious! They are very rich and deep in flavour, ranging from posh lobster-based soups to very basic fish soups. We had tried them and found the one we liked best, which was actually not the most expensive and it was lovely. However, to add a little extra, we popped in anchovy fillets in chilli and oil that we bought in bumper-sized tubs. The hot, smooth soup with the whole fillets in it was lovely, especially with fresh baguettes covered with too much butter.
Then, of course, Val’s hot sauce took it to yet another level. This was the fuel that warmed and comforted us on those freezing, short February days, partly because it was so easy, but also because it tasted so damn so good. We loved it so much we even served it at our wedding nine months later. We knew Lee would approve.
It had been days of very physical hard graft for Dick, my dad, Lee and Kyle. They started work before first light and finished well after 9pm. Compared to the team on the ground, my days were easy-peasy and every evening I looked forward to their return, to hear the stories of the day.
I tried to get as much ready as I could during the day, so every night we had a feast. We would have soup, salad, pasta, cheese, some kind of meat dish and lots of fresh baguettes and wine. We had to remember to enjoy this … and we did. But at this very early stage there was mounting pressure to get the essentials done and Lee and Kyle were due to go in four days’ time.
With the arrival of electricity came the opportunity to get out our truly massive drill. I knew it made short work of cutting a 150mm core through solid granite and, as we still had a fair number of holes to do, we looked forward to the job getting more quickly. Sadly, the château had other ideas. Unbeknownst to us, the walls had been constructed with stone and infill material in exactly the correct configuration to defeat a huge water-cooled core drill. We tried several walls and a couple of different core sizes but no dice, so after a couple of hours of doggedly trying, we gave up and it was back to prising out stones to make our holes.
Heating needs a heat source and, after long deliberation, we had decided to start with a gas boiler that could be augmented by wood burners. To be honest, it was all we could afford, so the aspiration to have a biomass system or heat pumps had to be put to one side as we cut our cloth according to our means. Even though we were li
miting our initial ‘system’ to just one bathroom, the small service kitchen beside the dining room and a bit of general heating for the house, the whole infrastructure had to be laid.
With cold water all the way up to the attic and down the other side, the thermal store had to be connected. Obviously cold water is only a proportion of your plumbing problems: you need hot water and central heating too. When the mains are linked to the thermal store it can then be miraculously converted to hot water to be shipped around the château. This was done via the hot-water pipes. Obviously you need heat going into your thermal store so that meant flow and return pipes to the boiler in the basement, flow and return pipes to the two back boilers behind the log burners in the dining room and salon and, to provide the actual heating, flow and return to the radiators, some of which had to be connected in phase one. Our suite and the salon and dining room may have been the priority but – just as we had done with the first set of pipes – we also had to lay all the way to rooms that would need heating and hot and cold water in the future, and everything had to be terminated (which basically meant isolators to stop all our heating water escaping), so we could fill the thermal store tank, the boiler, the back boilers behind the log burners, the radiators and all the pipes. Trivial really … (If you followed that, you probably feel our pain. And if you don’t understand what I am even talking about you can probably imagine our pain!)
My feet were getting itchy. I knew being at home and ensuring the kids were happy was my best role at this point but I was desperate to see what was happening at the château. The heating was going in and I knew that today there was going to be a Frenchman called Pascale fitting flues for our chimneys. I have to be honest, I never even knew this was a thing, but I did know it was a huge step in the right direction for getting heat into our house. Plan ‘move-in’ felt closer. So I asked my dad to stay with the kids while I visited the château. I knew I only had a few hours before Dorothy needed feeding, but I was very excited.
A Year at the Chateau Page 6