I never cease to be amazed by this chateau and how it constantly reveals its secrets and its history. Today was just such a day. A day in which I saw something in a totally different light. On the top floor of the chateau is a large room that was last used as a nursery. Unlike the rest of the top floor this room had a low ceiling. I had been up into the roof space above it and found it to be dark and cramped.
The top floor of the chateau will be our private apartment and this room will be the bedroom. I had therefore figured that we would leave the ceiling at the low level. There was water damage to it so the plasterer thought it best that we take it down and board it with new plaster board. That was the plan today - take the ceiling down. We did this but so much more. The result as you will see from the pictures was a total transformation!
I had left the guys taking the ceiling down and was amazed when just an hour later they said it was down already. They had kicked it down from the roof space above and it had proved to be an easy task. It appears that this ceiling is a relatively modern alteration having been installed most likely sometime in the 1900's as far as we can tell. When I saw the results of the guys work I started to change my ideas for this room. Now that I could see the whole roof space and realised that we should remove everything up to the original beams. As you can see in the third picture the ceiling had been constructed by
hanging smaller oak beams off the original large roof support beams. These smaller beams were still very heavy and if you look closely You will see that they are supported only by a small plank of wood at each end. These planks were nailed to the each beam. This meant that the whole false ceiling and TEN oak beams were held in place by about 80 nails!!! It was so unsafe that it almost fell down when we took a lump hammer to it. We literally had it down in 20 minutes.
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