The documentation was hard copy and in French – a major pain in the arse. There are translation apps that use your camera to point at the French and give you an immediate translation. They sort of work, but when I typed up the more important paragraphs and fed them into Google translate, the answers were not always comprehensible. Vendors have to provide the documentation as a matter of law, but many of our priority tasks were not included in the hundreds of issues we had been provided with.

You need time to see how your budget and schedule align. Beware of a ‘conspiracy of optimism’: the system in France will slow you down.

Quite simply, the work we had to do before we could move in came down to safety, followed by the minimum needed to live with, just enough comfort to be a step above camping. After that we could see about a cunning plan to have enough space restored to get married and have a party – all in ten months. Yes, easy.

After the purchase and move, we were left with £20k. We always knew this was not going to be enough to see us through to the wedding, so I ended up taking a job with National Geographic to provide a much-needed cash injection. The flip side was that I was away for most of March until July. It was very hard on Angela, but necessary, and as the old saying goes, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. She may disagree.

The Rayburn 480 provided an ‘A’ rated gas boiler and a sizeable cooker as being the focal point for the kitchen, here.

When first installed we had to use standard 13kg gas bottles. A monumental pain as when the boiler was going full blast they only lasted four to six hours. We had an automatic switch-over between two bottles but they needed constant attention until the large tank was installed. To supplement the gas boiler the two wood burners have back boilers. We have lots of wood and inherited a partly full wood store, though the wood there was past its best. Heating a chateau using wood burners is a lot of work! We tried buying and using coal but apart from the fact it is expensive in France, the workload was still painful.

After research, the best providers of thermal stores and the expertise to design the correct solution for our system was Thermal Integration Limited. We had excellent service from Richard Hanson-Graville, the Technical Manager and his team (www.heatweb.co.uk). The installed system looks positively complicated, but it is logical and with a little thought, it all makes sense. When you understand what you need and it’s all agreed, the team send you a schematic for your final sign off before you pay, and they then build it. When you get your schematic, I think it’s perfectly normal for there to be a sudden intake of air as you say ‘Oh sh*t’.

With hundreds of metres of piping required for the heating and water distribution system, we decided to use a quality multicore system, and elected to go with Herz.

Connections were simple, robust and up to the task. Lee and Kyle, our plumbing mates from Hackney were not experienced in using the system, but it’s a testament that they finished as converts.

After a number of unsuccessful calls, we tracked down a French electrician who arrived with an assistant to confirm how much of our installed wiring was safe to use. Despite the fact that he knew The Chateau, a day’s work only resulted in the cable to a single ‘modern’ water heater, and one socket being confirmed as operational. With such limited productivity we resorted to doing the preparation work ourselves for all electrical installation, and then employed a certified, ex-pat, electrician to do the connections. It took EDF the best part of three weeks to connect us to the mains. It surprised us that the total amount of electricity available for such a large property was so limited – much less than available to a small home in the UK – but we didn’t complain as The Chateau finally got power!

Surprisingly, it was more cost effective to buy and ship cast iron radiators from the UK than to buy them in France.

We inherited a significant amount of lead paint. The most effective, but benign, way to remove it came from Ecosolutions. It was messy and hard work but keeping the stripped paint in solution was safer.

I have lived by JFDI – Just * Do It. Life is very short and it’s easy to be dissuaded by excessive advice or bureaucracy. In France, bureaucracy is an art form. Before we moved out here I listened to Cecil Jenkins’ A brief history of France on audio book, (sadly I have little time to read at the moment but audio books allow me to ‘read’ and work) and I loved the insight into why the French are so… French. We had been warned that everything takes longer than you think possible and, even though we heeded the advice when planning our schedule, we were shocked by about just how long things take!

As an example, a delivery-man struck the gate pillar in August, we immediately informed our/his insurance and produced diagrams, statements and photographs. The incident was not contested, but even after I obtained and submitted two quotes, we had meetings with ‘experts’, meetings with insurance representatives and numerous visits were made to look at the pillar. Decisions were reached in November and we had the repair completed in the following March… the actual work was about four man days.

Thank goodness we arrived with a connected water supply and existing (though not connected) electricity cable - that left us with the need to get a sewerage system. It was a bit gruesome, but our ‘waste’ and that of all those who have ever lived at the chateau, finds its way into the moat. We had a year to get this sorted, so we started in February 2015. There were basically four steps:

• Find the right company to conduct a survey of what we needed
• Submit the survey to the authority to confirm they were happy (this is done by the surveyor)
• Pay to get our preferred solution installed
• Get the installation checked and signed off.

In February we committed to the local sewerage surveyor. He managed to visit us in April and the reports were completed in June. About €500 and four months down, it proved surprisingly hard to get anyone to come and look at the installation and take €12000 off us for four days’ work. We found a local company who were excellent once they actually started the work. They arrived with all their equipment mid-October and, even though they were surprised that if you dig a hole by a moat it fills with water (!), four days later we had flushing loos that didn’t contribute to the monster fish in the moat!

(As a slight aside – the vent pipe from the fosse septic has to be above the highest part to the roof, fair enough you may think, but it took about 60m of 100mm piping and a very inventive route through the cellars, as I had decided to send it up through a disused chimney rather than having a piece of plastic with a hat on sticking up above the finials).

As The Chateau was built at a time when servants were plentiful, the kitchen and work areas were all in the Sous Sol (basement). Funnily enough, apart from events, Angel and I are a tad short on serving staff so we had to decide how to arrange our rooms to make them work for the family. The Sous Sol is so full of character, we wanted it to be part of our everyday lives, so the decision was made to keep our main kitchen there. The service kitchen on the ground floor would be used for breakfast and as the upstairs base for catering when we have events. 

Kitchens are expensive and we needed two. Our take on sustainability involves buying quality and keeping it, so we had to be a bit canny with our expenditure. After much discussion (!) we finally agreed on the layouts and the work commenced with the water, waste and electricity. We had installed the Rayburn so gas was already in situ for the hobs. The carcasses came from a well known Swedish company and, as our design was far from standard, I spent quite a long time sawing them to allow the depths to vary. Somehow they all seemed to fit and we had to commit to one of our biggest expenses: the work surfaces. We could have bought the standard compressed fibre surfaces, but we want the kitchen to be fully functional for when Arthur and Dorothy take it over, so we went in search of the best hard-wearing surfaces we could find. I wanted functionality and Angel wanted it to look perfect (we are very complementary!), so we decided against natural stone and were delighted to find that Consentino make ‘Dekton’ which is exactly what we were both after.

Decoration – Angel and Sam came up with the design of the tiles and Angel spent hours up in the ‘wedding operations room’ printing and heat-sealing them all.

Time was against us as the wedding approached and I had little time to refurbish the dumb waiter, but miraculously a spray of WD40, a rub with a rag and it worked (and has continued to work ever since!).

In 2016, we decided that we needed a lift to open up the upper floors in the Chateau. Our first thoughts were to find a lovely vintage lift, however this was not feasible. After lots of research we opted for a thing of beauty, which was also excitingly geeky. Our lift goes up through the first four floors of the Chateau and works by sucking you up a tube….

Here's our lift.