two and a half years ago we quit our jobs in paris
left the city and our friends behind and took the biggest gamble of our lives we decided to spend
all of our savings on buying a crumbling chateau hoping to be able to renovate it into our dream
home and begin a new life in the countryside this chateau has 16 rooms plus a cellar and an attic
space but it only had two toilets when we arrived one of the biggest tasks for us when
we started renovating was to install more bathrooms a heating system get electricity
to all the floors we had to find a way to bring in all of those pipes without damaging the integrity
of the chateau and without changing too much so the only way to do that was through
the entrance hallway under the stairs we did have to remove all the tiles that were
here but we took that opportunity to put it down this really beautiful pierable gone stone
that could have been used in the 18th century would you say you are a professional builder now well i never wanted to become a builder it wasn't
a plan was it no the problem is when we budgeted the renovation work we had a loan in mind but it
did turn out for several reasons that the loan would be much less and then we had two options
either you know not to buy it or to find a way to renovate it with much less and we decided
we were so much in love with this place i'm crazy enough and crazy enough to go for it anyway
that's how we became builders full-time billions we calculated everything as precisely as
possible but we made one major mistake yeah and that was with the facade the facade yeah
i think we had budgeted about 25 000 and the quote came in at a hundred thousand but there was no
way not to do the facade and we couldn't do it ourselves so we had to spend that money in fact
there was five people working over three months and we managed to do three out of
the four facades and we're happy originally we were living well i say
living but it was more like camping out of cardboard boxes on the first floor whilst
we renovated the second floor which was the former servants quarters and we transformed
those into our private living quarters do it took us about six months longer
than expected but the result is perfect for us we have our
small but cozy apartment it felt like we'd finally made
the chateau a little bit ours and we started walking on the three first guest
rooms for our guest house business but we didn't have much time we were on the enormous pressure
because we were running out of money and in order to continue the renovation we needed
the income from the guest house this is our biggest guest room apart from rotten windows
it was in good condition and it will get its own ensuite bathroom this is a south facing room
and it has a lot of windows so it's quite light we decided to be daring and
go dark with the color in here are you doing a good job that's the main
question i'm extremely slow especially compared to the professionals who used to
work here with let's check out your handy work it's also the first room where i tried to make my own bespoke wallpaper using
a lino printing technique this room here was actually a small bedroom and we
decided to create a bathroom in that bedroom one of my favorite features in this bathroom is the
car scion bath it was originally here but it was very damaged wasn't it phillip but we managed to
restore it and yeah and it's a beautiful feature and it looks out over the ground and i think this
is the perfect spot to run yourself a nice bubble bath and have a nice glass of champagne as
you relax and look over the front garden this room didn't have a bathroom obviously
and there were two options either we would make a square bathroom in here but then we
would have lost the symmetry of the room that would just be a typical hotel configuration
and we wanted to avoid that so the only other option was to use these two cupboard spaces and
turn them into a shower a sink and toilet room it's a lovely light room here
because we have beautiful big windows and we also have a stunning view
over the 12th century church but then in the midst of our
renovation of the guest rooms coveted and suddenly we lost all of our walkers
they couldn't come back we quickly managed to buy some building materials but we were the two of
us basically locked in in our kind of diy bubble your mum was thankfully looking after the girls
and we just worked night and day you had some injuries as well and i had like a tendonitis from
painting so it was really physical and mentally we were like pretty exhausted but thankfully
they lifted the restrictions my parents were able to come over from the uk and give us
a hand for about two weeks yeah and we were able to finally finish the guest streams and the
breakfast room in time to open in august of 2020.
We had an excellent start we had a full house
but unfortunately the fun didn't last because kobe hit again and there was another
lockdown we had a finished guest house we didn't wanted to sit around feeling
sorry for ourselves so we decided to film us renovating and putting
it out on youtube so at least after the lockdown people would maybe know
about us and come and visit us that's how the vlog started and the very first video was
taken here in this room do you remember anna this is what happened this red is really stressing me i was
like just doing one panel over here and i literally had to stop because
i was like getting palpitations i was physically stressed by the red then we
realized okay so we need to change the color and as the youtube channel started growing
we figured out i needed an editing room actually i figured out i need an
editing room and you stole my italia i did normally our guests don't don't see that
room for obvious reasons because it's one of the unfinished rooms in the chateau and we use
it as a as a storage room and anna also uses it as her atelier we will eventually turn it into
an office probably and at the back kitchen there's anna walking on two benches
to canapes for our evening salon say philippi happy i'm very happy
i finally get my yellow room i think it's going to be very nice to work in here
because it's north facing so it's going to kind of warm the room up a little bit
not that it matters for you as it is in my room i think i will be coming
in here yep to bring me coffee and tea so one of my favorite rooms downstairs however
is the guest washroom that anna made so here it is this room never existed and once we had the shell
here it obviously looked very bland very modern and so we knew that we needed to do something
to make it feel that it existed in this space within the chateau we had the idea to
get benoit in and he did a great job putting in this beautiful paneling so that it ties
in with the paneling and the rest of the chateau and then we found this original 100 year old sink
and taps which are beautiful they were in the only bathroom upstairs and we knew that this would
be the perfect thing to bring a little bit of history into this room the inspiration for the
mural actually came from you because you made a beautiful documentary about the pompeii frescoes
and i was very inspired by those roman frescoes and all that botanical feel obviously i had to
transform the italian orange trees into normandy apple trees and then what's the technique that
you use to do this well the idea was to make a kind of degraded effect so down at the bottom the
paneling is very dark green and then i did a light green wash as a base and then i did a darker
green wash so you can see that kind of fades out towards the top of the room and then i worked
on top of that to build up my botanical scene we hope you enjoyed watching this video and if
you did then please consider subscribing to our channel because we have loads more renovating
coming up and we can't wait to share it with you guys and click the bell button because then
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