Help us restore a part of history

As you can probably imagine, renovating a 1,000 year old chateau is a time-consuming and expensive endeavor (especially when such an ancient building has been left to decay for decades). We plan to plow our savings, blood, sweat, and tears into this project to bring our vision to fruition and breathe a new lease of life into this ancient chateau (you can learn more on the chateau's website). While we are looking to undertake and pay for much of the renovation work ourselves (this is a dream we have been working towards for many years), our original plan of securing a loan in France to help finance a large proportion of the works is proving extraordinarily challenging, which is why we need your support to help preserve piece of history and stop it from deteriorating yet further.

The challenging road ahead

As a first step, we need to protect the building from the elements so that the other major works can commence. The roof has been left to decay for far too long (the previous owners were made up of 13 siblings and cousins, with little to no consensus on what money should be spent to ensure the chateau's upkeep). As a result, ivy has been allowed to creep into the wall and roof structures causing significant leaks and damage to the roof and walls, and to the floors below. Furthermore, the roof has never been insulated, rendering a significant proportion of the building unusable in its current state.

We moved into a small part of the chateau in April 2023 (that project is set to feature on Channel 4's Chateau DIY in the autumn) and have already had several major leaks which have damaged the hard work we have put in, and with a baby in tow, we desperately need to make the roof watertight to enable us to continue with the works and live safely and soundly.

We have received various fairly eye-watering quotes for the roof, ranging from 190,000 Euros to almost 250,000 Euros. Having built a reliable and hard-working team (who we now consider our friends) of independent local tradespeople we are looking to undertake the first part of the roof renovation ourselves in November 2023, if we can raise sufficient funds to go ahead.

The entire roof is almost 500 square metres (5,000 square ft) and we estimate that we can redo it for a fraction of the cost of the estimates we have received to date. The first section which we plan to tackle in November 2023 is 350 square metres. We have calculated that we will need circa 67,000 Euros for materials and labour. The remainder of the roof renovation which we hope to tackle in 2024 should cost less than 40,000 Euros, meaning we will save almost 50% by undertaking this mammoth project ourselves.

Help us realise our vision of restoring the chateau!

If you are inspired by what we are looking to achieve and have the means to donate something towards our efforts, then Nicole, Noah and I (and the chateau) will be eternally grateful. All funds raised will go towards and be spent exclusively on the cost of the renovations (whether paying contractors or purchasing tools or materials for us to undertake renovation works ourselves).

We will be keeping a record of all the works we undertake and the transformation of the chateau as it progresses on our website, Instagram (and as of autumn 2023 on YouTube) as well as on future episodes of Chateau DIY (we currently appear in episodes 2 and 20 of season 3, released in August 2022).