Ivy

For many years the chateau has been unloved and nature has been overrunning everything. One of the main problems on the chateau itself and also on a lot of the lovely trees in the park is ivy. You can see from the top  picture how the back of the chateau looked last week when it finally became ours. Now after just one week of thorough work by Michelle & Julianna it has undergone a big transformation. Each day they have been scrapping and cutting away at the ivy that was climbing up the walls and now the difference is amazing. We still have to remove the ivy and some small tree growing out of the top of the wall adjoining the tower but this will have to wait until next weekend when we get a cherry picker work platform. Now after all this work it is once again possible to see the lovely old stonework at the

bottom of the rendered walls. the next step is that we will jet wash the walls and render to clean them up and hopefully remove a lot of the staining. If we have time before the winter arrives we will remove the wooden shutters, take them to the sand blaster to

remove all the old lead paint and then repaint them. We will also rotavate and clear out all the roots and weeds that have been allowed to run wild next to the chateau walls and reseed with grass. Hopefully the grass will establish itself over the winter and that will be the end of the ivy! Next summer we will also re point all the stone work with lime cement and repaint the rendered walls.