Our possessions from the flat in Southend were still in storage and we were keen to get them out to France as soon as we could to save any money wasted on storage charges. After all, we had a château, how hard could it be to find somewhere clean and dry to put it all? Every opportunity Angela got she would be cleaning. It was a challenge, because with many panes of glass missing, the château had become a great place for birds to roost, so each room was filled with dust, dirt and even bird poop. But we definitely had enough space to store the contents of our flat. We decided we were going to occupy certain rooms immediately, even though they would have to be cleared out again at a later date to be worked on. Our logic was to see how we liked the rooms and how we used them and then do the necessary work to make them truly ours.
On 17 February, less than three weeks after we had moved to France, the removal lorry arrived. It was amusing seeing them progress down the drive and then stop and do a double take of the bridge and the gateposts. I’d measured the gap and the very large lorry a couple of times and it was going to fit – there wasn’t a lot of room to spare but the driver was a professional so there shouldn’t be any issue … Still, I don’t know who was the most relieved when the lorry pulled up to the front of the château, the driver or me. Despite the work on the plumbing and heating being in full swing, our attention immediately changed to ensuring we put things in the right place and knew where they were. First we provided the team with tea and coffee, then we showed them around the château naming all the rooms, so they had an idea of the destinations for individual boxes or furniture.
I have moved about twenty-five times in my adult life so I fully understood the pain of a messy delivery. There are many ways of doing it but I am a firm believer one person should be in charge – on this occasion it was to be Angela. The removal men were brilliant and their attitude was spot on and Angela was at her post at the front door throughout checking what was being carried in and telling them where to go. I never saw any of them flinch, even when they were told the destination was the attic or rooms on the fourth floor. Most of the rooms above the ground floor didn’t have names, apart from our suite, so it was a wonder so many items ended up in the right place. It was a mammoth task and it took over six hours to get it all unloaded. After all those stairs I reckon the chaps would have slept well that evening.
In the midst of all the frenetic activity a van turned up with a very slight French chap who came to deliver the bath for our room. Angela had mentioned the delivery cost was €250, so I was very keen to see him take it up the forty-five steps up to our suite. But I wasn’t allowed to be cruel and when I saw the bath I realised if we hadn’t got a bunch of burly lads there it would probably have remained on the driveway. From what I could ascertain, Angela had paid by weight: it took six of us to get it upstairs. We were sucking oxygen in our arses by the time we placed it on the landing outside our suite. One thing is for sure, that bath will stay where it is until after I turn up my toes!
The men who brought all our possessions for us were bloody angels. I couldn’t believe all our treasures were here and part of me wanted to start opening boxes and making our château lovely straight away. But I knew I had to stay focused – I only had a few seconds to decide where each box was to go and, what’s more, I had to remember where they were all going (a château is a big place in which to lose things!). It was like a giant version of The Generation Game at the end when you have to remember all the things you’ve seen!
The long, cold days continued throughout February and the work was never-ending and hard. But the arrival of our boiler was a big day. The pallet with the cast-iron, gas-powered Rayburn was deposited outside the cellar doors. Even if you have never seen a cast-iron stove, it sounds heavy, and ours was 350kg. We knew we wanted gas in our kitchens so the decision to go for a Rayburn was easy; while we waited for our environmentally-friendly plans to come into effect some years downstream, the A-rated boiler would provide all the heat we needed (for some sixteen radiators) and the focus of our family kitchen (when we got to that stage). With the flues, the flow and return pipes and the power all in, all we needed was gas.
Like so many things, when we finally had a visit from our French gas installer (following several earlier appointments when he didn’t show up) it proved more problematic than we had hoped. Instead of the progress we’d been expecting, he suddenly told us his certification was out of date so he couldn’t actually do the connection. Thanks a bunch! Some phoning around later we hit lucky: a lovely chap came with his wife acting as his assistant and connected our gas, fitted our regulators and did the piping to connect to some temporary bottles outside. Lee and Kyle had the water connected so after that we just needed our installer to commission it and fire it up. We couldn’t wait!
With a way of generating heat and getting it to the thermal store, we could then prove the system that distributed the hot water through our hot-water pipes and heating system.* It may sound odd, but when you have a thermal store you don’t have a tank of hot water to use. To get hot water you pass fresh mains water through coils that run through the tank of ‘stored’ heat. The mains water is then heated up. So out of the hot tap comes freshly heated mains water.
It was late in the afternoon towards the end of February when the boiler installer arrived. We had been in conversation (he was bilingual – hurray!) and he understood how important it was for us to get our system up and running. He turned up and worked away in our dark cold cellar and within a couple of hours we had a fully functioning boiler. As the flow and return pipes ran all the way up to the attic we could now fill our whole system.
It was an interesting evening filling the system – we had installed lots of isolators so we could grow the system a little at a time. After a lot of gurgling, and water being pushed into every corner of the system, we followed each and every pipe to check for leaks or problems. And would you believe, there were absolutely none – which is unheard of in such a complicated system. Well done, Lee and Kyle! The backbone of our whole system was in and functioning. The heating pipes to the radiators in our suite were connected and the pipes that could have a bathroom connected to them were in place as well. We even had a hot and cold tap at the sink in the service kitchen, which would have been without any hot water for years. We’d disconnected the lead piping as part of our initial tidy up and now we were bringing running water back to the château again. It was a BIG moment.
It might sound like our trials and tribulations were over but our gas supply was a still a bit of a problem. We only had the ability to run on the 13kg bottles, which we knew would not last very long, but the system was working and now we could grow it a bit at a time until our home was fully functioning.
In the meantime, we were going to be more reliant on our log burners. Sharing the island with the château is a large and very impressive ‘coach house’. Eventually this was going to be home to Grandma and Grandpa but at this point it was just a very big agricultural outbuilding. In fact, the surface area of the three floors in there is actually well over half the floor area of the château. And it was absolutely full of chopped and unchopped wood. It was a mess in there, with years of junk mixed in with cut wood and old planks, but even a conservative estimate would give us log fires for a couple of winters. And that was only part of the story – we also had acres of woodland that would produce more ‘free’ wood every year. It is a long, laborious process to go from a growing tree to a cut log burning in the stove but if we wanted to be truly sustainable and environmentally friendly we knew this was a brilliant asset and one we could control entirely. So the conclusion to have log burners helping feed heat into our thermal store felt logical and sensible.
Lee and Kyle had been with us for over two weeks by this point and they had worked tirelessly throughout. It had all taken much longer than planned and they had rearranged their diaries to stay on and look after us. It had taken a huge effort but they had installed the basis of our heating and hot-and cold-water systems. Hav
ing laid hundreds of metres of piping and connected everything seamlessly, they were now ready to leave us and go back to the real world in east London. Some people are very special.
Dear Isabelle
I hope you and your wonderful family are well.
I’m sorry we have not seen you in a little while. We were hoping to have been in the château by now and are desperate to invite you over to our new home. Coming to the gîte is not quite the same but you are, of course, very welcome.
Fingers crossed we do the move this week as Dick leaves for America on Friday for three weeks.
Love, Angel
I was desperate to get into the château. I wanted to see what the light was like in the different rooms at every hour of the day. I needed time to soak in our new home. There was so much to do: the unpacking, the cleaning, the working out where the furniture would be best placed. But to do this I needed time and the only real time I ever had was when the kids went to bed. I didn’t want to have three more weeks while Dick was away when I couldn’t be productive. I had made my mind up: I wanted to be in the château before he went.
We had come so far it was now possible to see what it could be like living in our château. But the time for me to disappear to America was fast approaching and I could tell Angela was more than a little apprehensive about me going. Then she dropped the bombshell. She wanted to be in the château before I went to America. I was genuinely struck dumb but her logic was sort of sound. Living in the gîte for the time I was away would be expensive and there was little chance of her getting much done as her world would be taken up with looking after the children. And then there was the big one: she wanted to be in our home. I got it, but we definitely weren’t organised enough for her to move in. For one thing, there was no bathroom. They were feeble excuses, though. I may have had reservations but I knew Angela and I knew what was going to happen, so it was a matter of just doing it. To be very honest, I was very proud of my girl. We would both have some serious challenges, but our new life was about to move into the next phase.
Once the decision was made, it was all systems go. We raided the outbuilding where we had corralled the various bits of bathroom equipment we had found around the château, which included a lovely Art Deco sink. The glaze had sadly been stained but the taps were lovely, though we had no idea if they worked, and the plug was a white solid rubber ball on a chain. We’d never seen the likes of it before and we decided we’d make it work. We also found a loo that looked as if it could be recommissioned, but we had to go out to buy some taps for the bath and all the necessary waste fittings. For two long days we worked on what was to be our bathroom and, when it was time for the children to go to bed, we took them home and had a bite to eat, then Dick would go back to the château to carry on. My evening job was easy: pack up the gîte and clean every room ready to give the keys back to Olga.
Getting the bathroom working was a matter of sorting the basics. It didn’t matter what it looked like, or where anything was, it just had to work. We needed a sink, a loo and a bath with a shower attachment if possible. The waste disappeared into a pipe in the wall, which made me twitchy. There was some damp in the cellar that could have been caused by the pipe, but as no bathroom had been used for years we thought it more likely to be a rain issue and so decided to go for it. We didn’t have much choice.
There was also a corridor of sorts between our room and the children’s that needed sorting – it was currently filled by a plastic shower cubicle from the 1980s. We removed that and made the corridor a little wider by pulling down a flimsy stud wall. Everything else would have to wait.
We moved in and settled the children early one evening. It was very special being in our own bedroom in our own château but we did not really have time to savour it. Arthur and Dorothy were sound asleep in our room and Angela was silently arranging things and making sure I was packed to leave for the US. Getting the bathroom working just had to be done; it just wasn’t easy. For example, the waste under the world’s heaviest bath had to be connected in the ceiling of the service kitchen on the floor below that was nearly five metres high. You name it and it fought back, so the final completion of the bathroom was more a sigh of relief than a cry of victory. It was late, we were seriously pooped, but we did smile as we fell asleep.
On the evening of 28 February 2015 we finally moved in. I had no idea how anything worked but I didn’t care. I was just so happy to be in our forever home. We put the children to sleep in their beds and continued to tidy, clean up and finish the bathroom. The fun was about to begin.
February had been cold and provided us with an unforgiving environment in which to work. What we needed to get done in our first month, in the middle of winter, was challenging to say the least. There are not many tradesmen who would have stayed the course and, from our limited exposure to local craftsmen, we knew it was too much to ask them. Luckily for us, Lee and Kyle were as bloody-minded as we were and they made it happen. Unbelievably, just over a month after we had arrived in France, we had some electricity and enough of a heating and plumbing system in to allow us to get by in our home. We were in.
* * *
* Cabbages.
* Jerusalem artichokes.
* The basement.
* The attic.
* Shin of beef.
* A large shop or market where second-hand goods are sold.
* ‘Proving’ in this case would be seeing if it was watertight and actually worked.
chapter three
MARCH
March was a month of new beginnings and the start of living in our home as a family. For years, the château had been silent but, as its new custodians, our family brought the château children’s laughter and fun inside the walls and grounds again.
The old saying is that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. That usually refers to the weather, but for us it felt like the whole month was shaping up to be very busy and there was no sign of the pace relenting. We are always being reminded by my mum to take time to ‘smell the roses’ but we believe she would have forgiven us for failing so badly during our first year. Although we did manage to appreciate the cherry blossoms that appear every March around St Patrick’s Day. We inherited some wonderful ornamental cherry trees: one as you turn into the driveway and a couple more at the western corner of the moat. As we were continually popping in and out on shopping trips it was easy to notice the beautiful display of flowers but it took us over a year to discover we also had a massive fruiting cherry tree in the walled garden. It had probably been tended to at the start of its life, but for decades it had grown wild and it was now at least thirty feet high.
Logic has never won me an argument with my gorgeous wife so when she announced on 25 February that she wanted to be in the château before I left for America I knew I just needed to get on with the work that needed sorting. Our family bathroom was far from perfect but by 1.30am on 1 March it worked. There had been a niggly little drip behind the cold water tap on the bath that had meant taking it off and refitting it three times but with that sorted we had the bathroom that served us for the next two years.
The toilet and sink were château originals and showed many signs of wear. Our bath looked wonderful, though, as it was new. It was a bit out of place, with the taps mounted on plywood onto a stud wall that only had plaster on the other side. All of the noggins made a massive shelving unit we got used to and really missed when we eventually boarded and plastered the bathroom side of the wall. We put up a shower curtain on a semi-circular rail that was again attached to the wood of the stud wall. It failed on all levels of style but it was robust and stopped the water from splashing everywhere. We must take every victory with glory, but I have to say there is something very uncomfortable about brushing against a cold, wet curtain when in the shower.
When you have young children, a bath is essential. It was and still is the start of our bedtime routine. We bathe Arthur and Dorothy every night before settling down to snuggle and fall
asleep. It is a huge part of family life and the kids know nothing else. On the 28 February they did miss their bath but we made up for it on our first morning.
I was quite well organised for my trip. Angela had mustered all that I would be taking and it was all in neat piles in our room. It was so novel – it was ‘our room’. It was spotlessly clean but far from salubrious. There were cracks in the plaster ceiling (‘our ceiling’), peeling wallpaper (‘our wallpaper’) and the tower room was full of boxes and suitcases, but it was all ours. We couldn’t have been happier, though my imminent departure meant we never actually raised a glass to celebrate. We were too busy and far too knackered.
Without any lights or sockets, a cable and extension leads were used to bring us civilisation. I don’t think our eyes shut properly before we heard our alarms. I was up and showered and then we were bundling luggage and the children into the car before 5.30am to get me to the railway station.
I drove and I can’t really remember the short fifteen-minute journey, as it was mainly full of lists and instructions. Angela was so brave and, after unloading and the briefest of hugs with very dozy children and a lovely warm wife, I sent them home. It was a hard goodbye as there was so much to do and so much that was new, but the money I was earning was going to allow us to do the things we had to do over the next few months, so there was no choice.
Driving back through the freezing early-March morning was surprisingly peaceful. The kids were asleep and there were no cars on the road. I kept telling myself to be calm and brave. I know I have a strong and determined spirit but the truth is I’m shit-scared of the dark and it was pitch black. I blame my imagination. I grew up in Essex and I’m a city girl at heart. I love a bit of light pollution.
A Year at the Chateau Page 8