Explore Our Chateau Outbuildings | French Chateau Renovation Projects

So we finally made it to the farmhouse, but before we get started on our tour, we want to introduce you to a very special member of our family, which is Arkaya. This little one, that's you, that's you. Oh, belly rubs, belly rubs, happy puppy. This is one of my favorite buildings on the property. I mean, the chateau is obviously gorgeous, but the farmhouse has a whole nother feeling to it. It has these big, beautiful fireplaces in it and is a favorite spot for movies. You'll notice that there are some things that are original to the building and then some things that are not. So like if we look down here at the floor, there's these big, beautiful tiles, but they're actually not real. There's fabric underneath them and they were created by a film crew. And I'm not sure for which movie. If you look at these beams over here, this one is real. I can't, you can't even hear that on the mic. But if we jump up to this one, totally hollow. These walls were also added and these nice door frames. And then on this side, we have a fake fireplace. The last movie we had filmed here was Eugénie Gorondé and they had built a wall here and repainted this side of the room. So we found some old photos of the back of this farmhouse, and you can actually see that there's a deck that goes the whole length of the farmhouse, and it's really beautiful. I don't know at what point it fell apart, but we can still see the like iron beams that come out. So it seems like a feasible thing to put back in. We definitely have to take down the ivy, which I mean, aesthetically, I love ivy, but the roots dig little pathways between the stones and then it allows water to trickle in. But this building has three floors, so let's keep going upstairs. Come on, Arkea. I don't know if you've ever been to Universal Studios, but my dad took me there when I was a young teenager and they had a bunch of walls like this where they would basically have a window that comes out before another wall so that they can film from one side to the other and be able to control the lighting inside the room. So this is the top floor of the farmhouse, and it has a really beautiful view out through this window of all of the horse stables. A few months ago, we found out that we had a fungus growing on the wood beams here called Merule. We had to take care of it really quickly because it's something that can spread from one building to another and can just take down an entire building. This building is a Colomier. It can also be referred to as a pigeon tower or a Pigeonier. Unfortunately, this tower is not in great conditions. The plaster is falling, and I don't think these beams are in great condition either. But you can see all the little spots where they housed the pigeons. I don't see any pigeon nests anymore, but we do have a swallow's nest up there. Don't touch this beam. Oh, there's a huge spider! Babe, do you want to do this one? So we're here at the top floor of the dove house, and this is my favorite because you can see these high ceilings and they can push this ladder around on this wooden beam here. I'm not going to do it because I feel like I might fall through the floor if I do that, but it does move. France still practices training carrier pigeons. The French army trains them, and it's kind of just in case there's ever some kind of communications blackout. And I think that's pretty awesome. We've had a lot of fun ideas of how we might be able to remodel this space. Our favorite idea is turning it into this fairy tale style honeymoon suite. And if you were to cut out a big window right here, then every morning you would wake up and have this gorgeous view looking out of the chateau. We want to know what you guys think. So please leave a comment below or send a carrier pigeon. We have the 28 horse stables on this side. Right now, we're using the space for the tractor. When I was little, my grandpa had an arrangement with somebody to have a horse here. And I remember going and feeding it carrots. And that was fun. But we haven't had another horse since then. And I have a dear friend of mine who's trying to convince me to get a donkey or two. I'm no expert, but I think that window needs to be replaced. I mean, these big beams that we see going across shows that the building is quite old. But then if you look up at the ceiling where the plaster has fallen, there's iron rods and there's even old electrical boxes. So it definitely was modernized at some point. We have some old barn doors. I'm not sure where we can put those yet, but they're beautiful. This building has a whole second floor that we've actually we can't figure out how to access it. We've never been up there. So we'll have to go and explore it at some point. In here, we have the old saddle racks, so they put the saddles here and the harnesses above. And then in the back, they have lockers. Here we have some Ursae Parquet, which is this special cutting of wood. My grandma would probably say that this is gros bordel, which means a big mess. You were saying that you think that these might have been repurposed for lighting. I'm not sure. But if anyone else has an opinion, if these may have been used for farming at some point, I would love to hear your opinion on that. So I don't really know where a lot of these things came from, but I would really love to be able to repurpose them. Like there's these marble pieces that definitely came from a fireplace somewhere. Those big metal grates for the horse feed would probably be really nice as vertical gardening aesthetic on these walls. But I'm not sure that this wall would lend itself to something so heavy. Here we have some more horse stables also used for some storage. There's actually quite a bit of stuff back there. There's some crazy science going on here. I think if we had 1.21 gigawatts and we could get it working again. Oh, look at that funky old ladder. It's so cute. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Nachos? Nachos? Oh, tomato trellis. Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was my second thought. And look at this beam. Oh, that does not look good at all. These are by far the biggest doors that we have on the property. But I really like them. I like that color. And over here we see the backside of the horse stables. There's quite a bit of water damage and most of the windows are broken. This huge building over here is our hangar. It's used for storage for like tractors and tools and stuff. It really needs to be organized. Next, we're going to go into the orangery. An orangery is where they would store fruit trees and plants in the wintertime to keep them from getting frost. But they were usually big glass buildings. And this building doesn't really seem to get enough sunlight to me. This actually could be a really nice second venue, but we would have to do something about these walls. Look how awful this is. We've had a few ideas for this space. One of them is to remove the floor above us so that we have a big open room with high ceilings and maybe fixing up the skylights a little bit, too. Another option is to actually keep the second floor and have those be like Airbnb or like a little hotel. That one's not my favorite option, but we just we have to see what we can do. And we're still open and looking for suggestions. My grandpa started building a bar in here as a set design. The bar was never completed, unfortunately. This is one of my grandfather's artworks. He liked to do collages. This is a music box that my grandpa gave to me when I was like seven years old. And every year when I came back to visit him, he would always play it. And then suddenly it stopped working when I was 17. But we're looking for somebody who can help us fix it. And then I guess he left some other clock boxes in here. And the TV series Stranger Things has completely ruined grandfather clocks for me. This beautiful canopied forest area reminds me of a little fairy land. All the trees have interesting shapes. And the fact that it's all covered and there's this moss coming up the trees and ivy just feels really magical. This is a little gem on the property. It's this cute little stone bench between these two trees. And not a lot of people know about it. But when you sit here, you have this beautiful view of the chateau. Over here, we have our little French cottages next to our hunters lodge. And we're hoping to remodel them in a slightly more Tuscan style. So this is a classic example of how ivy is beautiful, but it's really destroying the building. As you can see, like this piece just crumbles off. I wonder if we actually pull this off if we have a stone foundation. We did have some builders look at the safety of the building and let us know what kind of work there is to be done. And they said that the foundations are solid, but that the floors are falling through. So we do need to fix that up pretty quickly. Under the stairs, it's also falling apart. Just have to be careful walking up here. I've never known my grandfather to use this building. I wonder what it would take to get the electricity up and going in here. Up here, there's a cool little loft. We definitely need to fix up the windows and the walls and the roofing in here. All of the space, it could be used for a hotel or Airbnb. I'm also kind of drawn to the idea of making like an artist atelier with these buildings. This is an old water pump. It'd be really cool if we could turn this into a little water fountain. It's like Arkea when she runs. So you'll notice how these rooftops are slightly different. This part was actually sold off with the house behind us. They're an elderly couple from Alsace and they have a huge family. And it's really wonderful hearing them laugh on the other side of the wall because there's lots of kids and it just brings us lots of joy. And every once in a while, we get to enjoy their company as well. We also have some lovely cobblestone here that's been grown over again. So we have to pull that up. It'll be another big job for Ian. Mowing, pressure washing, scraping. Arkea doesn't mind the clover. And finally, the last building on this side of the gate is the Hunter's Lodge where we live. So Daphne and I are really excited about repainting the Hunter's Lodge. And it's actually the first thing on the list of what I'm going to do this summer. Started taking a closer look at it. We realized that framing the doors and windows was this old limestone that had been covered up by cement. And so I chipped away at it to bring it back out. This green that you see here, we're going to make that all into a nice, lighter olive green, which is like my favorite color. Over here on the left side of the Hunter's Lodge, we have our little hobbit garage, which is super cute, but it's kind of falling apart and even has flowers growing on the top of it. But Daphne loves it, so we don't really want to get rid of it. This is the Hunter's Lodge. It's got these beautiful beams coming across the ceiling. And we also have a really big fireplace. My grandpa added this wooden mantle to the fireplace. It's from 1871. It says, Guillaume, au soeur de bon secours, reconnaissance. My grandpa did a lot of things to personalize the house. One thing was the fireplace mantle. Another is this beautiful stained glass window that you can see under the staircase. I believe he got it at a brocante. Now we're in the master suite. Ian and I just finished repainting this a few weeks ago. And this these beams here were quite a lot of work for Ian. I did not participate in this part. He spent like several days just sanding these down from a really dark brown that was basically black to get this like light natural wood color again. And we still need to stain them. But I couldn't help myself. I had to add a little bit of furniture to the room because it's so nice in here. We have three bedrooms on this floor, and all of them have little marble fireplaces like this one. We don't use any of them anymore, but they're really nice accents in the rooms. Over here, you can see the wall that we painted in faux finish. It was quite the learning experience. The color that we painted on this wall is going to be similar to the color that we're going to paint on the front of the lodge. We want to end this video with a big thank you to everyone who's taken the time to watch our YouTube channel, especially our friends and family for being so supportive and to the other Chateau channels who have paved the way. The Chateau domain has a very long list of repairs and renovations, and we want to get started on the bigger projects as soon as possible. We'll be using the Patreon platform to provide our viewers with exclusive videos, Q&As, Chateau memorabilia and lots more. And all the finances generated by our patrons will be directly used for Chateau renovations. If you prefer not to use Patreon, then you can still support us by subscribing and telling a friend about our videos here on YouTube. Thank you all so very much, and we'll see you again soon.