Starting inside

Today it was due to rain for most of the day according to the weather forecast so we planned to start work inside and start renovating one of the chateau wings. First photo shows this wing from the outside. Serge the electrician (who we have decided to call "Power Serge") arrived early in the morning to connect a temporary power supply into the first part of the building in

which we will work. This was all up and running (and Serge was soaked by the rain) at 11am. The part of the chateau that we plan to do first dates, I think, from the 17th century but it has been changed so much over the years it is hard to tell. There are some very thick walls, one of which I am sure was originally an outside wall because it

really is big. So it could be that one part was perhaps added in the 18th century. The idea is to create two self contained gites, one on each floor. Each gite will have two ensuite bedrooms, a living area and a kitchen. One will be on the ground floor and the other on the first floor directly above. We started off by ripping out the old bathroom which was fun as the actual bath had been concreted in! Once everything had been cleared out we started to take down the partition walls. Originally this area of three rooms had been one big room with a central fire place. When it was

divided is hard to say but what we did find when we started knocking down the wall was quite surprising. The partition had been made out of some very old and very thin hand made bricks, almost like floor tiles or roofing tiles. They were about 3cm thick and as you can see in the photograph had been laid side on and then plastered on each side.  So these partition walls were actually quite flimsy. We tried to save as many of the old

bricks as possible. I am quite sure that they must date from a much earlier period in the life of the chateau! Once we had two of these walls down the room looked amazing, you could now see the original proportions. It would have been quite a grand room at some point. There is a very large support beam running across the middle of this large room and when the room was divided this beam was plastered over. We removed the plaster to expose the original old oak beam which will look incredible when it is cleaned

up. We also removed part of the ceiling that had also been plastered over to find that the original oak cross beams are still all in place above the plaster. What was great was that we could then see that above these was a very old solid wooden floor from the rooms above! In the final photo you can see where we have taken out the two partition walls that formed two small rooms. The wooden partition with the glass windows is still in place in this photo - tomorrow we will carefully remove it as we want to reuse it when we restore the room.