Original subtitles

In the heart of the French countryside,

a magnificent chateau stood uncared for and abandoned.

Then five years ago, everything changed...

EVERYONE EXCLAIMS

Wow, look at that!

..when an intrepid British couple...

Turn, turn, turn, turn.

Wow!

..unlocked its front door... Everything is gorgeous.

..fell in love with its grandeur and embarked on an adventure.

Oh, boy! SHE LAUGHS

Now, over three unique episodes,

engineer Dick Strawbridge and

his wife, designer Angel, look back at how their dream became a reality.

We never went into this project thinking it was going to be

an easy project. It was a massive, massive job.

The years of epic engineering.

Engineering happens before beauty.

The monumental transformations.

I'm taking, like, everything that I think is eye candy,

and bringing it back to life.

And their decision to move their family to France.

I love that the kids are so happy.

CHEERING

When Dick and Angel first thought about living in France,

a rundown chateau was the last thing they wanted.

Let us live in France where it is very simple.

We can buy a little house, have children and no mortgage.

No worries at all.

We'll just go and live the perfect dream in a little, tiny house. Yes.

There is a bit of irony to this because that was how it started.

That's how it started. Yeah.

But an abandoned chateau captured their hearts,

and they dedicated their lives to restoring it.

HE LAUGHS

From engineering and electrics...

But whoa, whoa, whoa!

We have electricity.

..to salons and suites...

I think we've done well on not a lot of money.

..the chateau slowly but surely came back to life.

Hello.

Aaargh!

And today they have created an extraordinary

home for their children...

Thank you, darling.

..six-year-old Arthur and five-year-old Dorothy.

Dorothy first.

SHOUTING OK, now, now.

What we have to do, feet together. Hands by your sides, look forward.

Look all the way forward. See the castle on the other side.

Very good. I think that's us, Dottie.

There we go. Move away.

Oh! That's Dorothy's Mark. She's too big. She's beautiful.

Arthur and Dorothy - they know nothing else other than living in France.

Yeah. Living in the chateau.

Arthur pretends he remembers London but he don't.

That is phenomenal, Arthur. Look! You and Dorothy have both grown.

But to appreciate just how much has changed, we journeyed back with

Dick and Angel to the very beginning of their French fairy tale.

In the summer of 2014, Dick and Angel were living in a rented flat

in Southend-on-Sea, Essex.

Are you ready? Yep.

Arthur was just 18 months old and Dorothy, a mere babe in arms.

ARTHUR SQUEAKS

I'd been working hard for about 15 years.

And I realised there is a little bit more to life than just working so hard.

I'm a country boy. Angel's an East End girl.

What we want to do is we want a quality of life,

and having a happy family.

We just couldn't think of anywhere we wanted to live in England.

We went on holiday to France together.

It was in a beautiful gite, it had four storeys, a big stone staircase.

A big log fire. It was so French and so charming.

And then you said, "Why don't we move to France?

"If we can buy a property this cheap."

So, straight on the internet.

To be fair, it didn't take you long

before you were looking at chateaux, did it? About five minutes.

That's the, erm, the book de vente.

Once their plans had expanded from cottage to castle, it was

clear that Dick and Angel were preparing to take a huge risk.

We're actually in search of living the dream that

everyone actually does want,

but everyone is a little bit scared to do it.

..and this is an orangery.

It's an orangery, stable, double garage and an office. Yes.

So it's a lovely building.

We are thinking, if we are going to have a place that's lovely,

we are going to be able to continue working and we can run courses,

we can do weddings, we can do various things.

Ideas we are not short of. This is the staircase, staircase of castles.

It just allows you to have all the things you dream of.

Decent wine, decent food, a really nice place to live

and smiling a lot. That's what it's about.

A chateau in France, it's too fairy tale, isn't? But it's achievable.

It could be an endless pit of money.

That's my biggest worry.

To find their future family home, Dick and Angel travelled the length

and breadth of France.

Fromagerie is to the left. Right.

What's fromagerie? Cheese.

Almost 100 individual chateaux were checked out and assessed. That's it.

Wow. Wow, wow!

But none perfectly fitted their strict criteria,

nor their rather limited budget.

This isn't the French kitchen that we had in our mind.

There is work here, there's a lot of work here. There's the heating.

There's the electrics, there's the plumbing, there's the en-suite.

I think it might be a bit overpriced.

How long had we been shopping for chateaux for?

Well, it was near on four years. We looked at an awful, awful lot of chateaux as well.

That sort of a trip... It's interesting how much you learn about

what you want and what you don't want.

I think the thing I find the funniest is the fact that you

wouldn't have been happy if you didn't have an orangery.

And then...but several weeks before,

you didn't even know what an orangery was.

Of course, when you're growing up, you've got the fairy-tale castle

with turrets and it's all very nice but you never really think,

as a kid, "Oh, I'd really like an orangery."

In October 2014, a chateau came onto the market

that on paper at least appeared to be everything they wanted.

You'll see a chateau coming into view in second.

So the whole family, including

Angel's parents, Jenny and Steve, piled into the car.

It's Chateau-de-la-Motte Husson.

Can't turn in there. No. What's here? What does this say?

Something! I'm going to go...

..pony club. No, no, it's the next one.

Ahhhh...

HE MUTTERS FRENCH NAMES

This is... Yes! Oh, wow!

ALL EXCLAIM Look at that.

Well, I think... Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Did you have any doubts you were going to live here?

No, I honestly, I lost my breath.

I mean all of us, I remember just going, ohhhhh!

It was a beautiful moment, wasn't it? Quite special.

It's a bit fantasy, look at that moat.

Look at these, that's my workshops.

Ahhhh!

And this one was a good price, had the orangery,

it had the walled garden, it had a moat cos you know,

you don't like people.

And it was just beautiful, it was fairy tale.

Located 160 miles south-west of Paris,

the Chateau-de-la-Motte Husson

was built between 1868 and 1874 for the Count and Countess de Baglion.

First impressions are ridiculously positive.

Angel wants to make an offer and we haven't even seen anything yet.

This is truly beautiful.

Darling, darling, I love it.

I love it, I love it more.

But having said that, we haven't looked inside yet.

Common sense, just think for a little bit.

But from the moment the key was turned,

there was no going back. Right.

When we walked through that front door, it was love at first sight.

There was so much detailing that was original and hadn't changed.

I'd never ever seen a floor like this, the parquet floorings in my life.

I could go on forever about all the... The stairs going up.

The lines on the stairs.

It went all the way to the servants.

Basically, the chateau sold itself to you as you came through

the door. Ah, there was... Apart from

that you know, it had no electric water, heating... Sewage.

..sewage, it was perfect.

This is the main salon.

Oh, it's amazing.

Aaah, it's pretty incredible.

I've no idea how I'm going to get up there to water the flowers.

The amount of light that is in here and the view and things.

OK, master bedroom. 45 rooms were spread over five levels.

Each floor an enormous 215 square metres.

The whole chateau could fit nine modern British homes

within its four stone walls.

It also meant there was plenty of space to entertain,

and as Dick and Angel were hoping to set up a wedding and events

business, exactly what they were looking for.

Hold on. No way!

The dumb waiter. Yep. Darling, we're in business.

SHE LAUGHS

BELL RINGS

Dick and Angel were head over heels in love,

but they also knew the chateau was far from perfect.

I'm trying to be sensible.

This is a huge house, it's got the orangery, the walled garden,

it's got all these things going for it

but we are talking a lot of money to get back to where it should be.

It is so doable and it is so beautiful.

It's almost too good because we've seen a lot of chateaux,

we've seen a lot of houses,

I think both of us are like little children being excited.

When you're looking for wives and husbands and houses, you know,

really important things in your life, there's lots of...

I don't know what you're going to say next.

There's lots of times when it could nearly work.

But then you meet the one.

Dad, can you take picture of us? Go on, nice big smile, please.

I hereby declare that we have found our property.

I had a similar feeling to when I met Dick

and I felt a bit sick with excitement so...

THEY LAUGH

She's found the one she wants, we're in trouble.

Within a few weeks, they were the chateau's new owners,

its purchase the beginning of an epic adventure for the whole family.

We're going to start a new generation of

Strawbridges in France.

Do you think they are ready for us? Les petits Strawbridges.

But to make their new home habitable,

Dick was faced with an enormous amount of engineering.

So we chose France for all the long lunches, the relaxed lifestyle,

the having a small house without much work, what else?

LAUGHTER CONTINUES

From the moment they bought the chateau in 2015,

Dick and Angel faced an enormous challenge.

We're looking back at how Dick's engineering feats

have miraculously transformed the chateau over the last four years.

Come out this way a little bit, Steve.

At the beginning of 2019, he and builder mate Steve

turned their attention to his 150-year-old pissoire.

There's more water than I expected.

And it's clear. And it is clear. Well, it's pretty still.

It's not been disturbed.

I want to look for treasure.

I just want to see if there's anything at the bottom of this.

When we arrived, this old building,

this old room, had two side-by-side loos on it.

That means it was two holes,

which over a period of a century and a half...

Somebody could have been here and thrown anything down there,

dropped anything down the loo.

So in this little bit at the bottom,

if you look down, amongst those stones, could be anything.

Sadly, I'm looking at the gap between there and the wall,

and I may not fit in that gap. Steve.

Ha-ha, give up!

Whether it contained treasure or not, the outside loo did

reflective the chateau's original, but rather basic, facilities.

When we first arrived, our plumbing involved going to the

bottom of the tower, downstairs to a tap, filling a couple of jugs up...

..and bringing it up and filling up the loo.

That was our plumbing.

Getting from that to being a fully plumbed-in chateau with...

Hot water. ..hot and cold water, it was a massive, massive job.

In January 2015, Dick and Angel got the keys to the chateau.

It's -4 outside, it's not very warm inside.

As their new home was far from habitable...

There's been an electrical fire here.

..a nearby cottage was rented.

While Dick worked out the quickest and most economical way

to heat a 45-room building.

For 150 years,

the chateau's 13 fireplaces had been its only form of heating.

Running hot and cold water had been introduced at some point,

but the plumbing was rather rudimentary, to say the least.

This is good. It's practically a bathroom.

That's going to need a good, good scrub.

Then we can actually... Ugh!

That's very, very unpleasant.

One of those things that always makes me smile is just

remembering you, when you had a look in our only loo for the first time.

It wasn't the first time I saw it,

it was the first time I saw it and you lifted the lid up, actually.

There's a difference, isn't there? There's a massive difference.

As they were moving in during the winter...

Wow!

..Dick's priority was installing a reliable

hot water and heating system.

The hot water coming out here.

Dick's cunning plan was to use two wood burners

and a gas boiler to heat up the water,

and then a thermal store in the attic to keep it warm.

It all comes down from the thermal store.

For baths, for showers, for sinks for the kitchens.

And as well as that, the heat in the thermal store

provides the hot water to run around our radiators.

The difficult thing here is the scale of the job.

The chateau is huge.

As Dick needed to start somewhere,

he turned his attention first to the chateau's chimneys.

Over six feet high

and decorated with the de Baglion family's initials,

the 19th-century brick chimneys had been out of use for years.

Now, Dick wanted to bring them back to life by lining them

with a flue for the wood burners.

Ha-ha! Bonjour, ca-va?

Pascal, a local heating engineer, was hired to help.

Les trois chiminees. Ouais. La cuisine...

But Dick soon discovered planning the plumbing was one thing,

speaking French, quite another.

OK? Merci, monsieur.

The last time I studied French was 39 years ago.

I speak a lot more French now than I did.

And your vocabulary is quite reasonable now.

The grammar may not be great,

but you speak a lot more than you used to.

I know a lot of words, and I just don't know how to put them together

in an accent that doesn't sound like it's not from Only Fools And Horses.

Nous avons une grande... Erm... Store!

C'est une thermal store, en Anglais. Mais, c'est... Erm... Chaud...

Ah, un chauffe-eau.

Chauffe-eau? Un chauffe-eau. Un chauffe-eau!

OK, allons! We're going to have a chauffe-eau.

Dick only needed to line three of the chateau's six chimneys.

But when they're 17m up, it's definitely a job for the experts.

No problem, no problem. No problem.

I just assumed there was going to be some sort of a cherry picker

or a lift going up there. Or lots of scaffolding.

Je sors mon echelle sur le toit. Ouais? Et je monte.

Pascal's going on the roof.

It is a bit scary, because I don't think anybody's

been up on that roof for a very long time.

He's gone out the window, he's got his special harness on, he's going

to attach himself and if he falls, it stops him hitting the ground.

Depending solely on a rope and good balance, Pascal was soon

out of the access window and on top of Dick and Angel's chateau.

He just stands on our roof quite happily.

He's actually dropping a rope down, and his friend, Sylvain,

he's down there, he's feeding it up the chimney,

that's why he's lifting it up there. Right.

DISTANT WHISTLING

That's the singing Frenchman. Or rather, he's whistling.

He looks great. He's the Roger Whittaker of the French world.

Once the chimneys were lined, the heating system could be installed.

As the removal van was due at the end of the month,

Dick called in the troops.

You need mates, and mates who are plumbers

and electricians understand what's going on.

Friends of the family Lee and Kyle came over from London

to offer their expert advice.

But even they were phased by the scale of the endeavour.

Effectively, you're re-piping this house from top to bottom.

I think they're crazy, because it's very real. The deadlines are a mess.

Nevertheless, Dick's epic plan was put into action,

and over half a kilometre of new pipe

fitted between a tap in the basement and the attic.

Today, this is one of Dick's proudest achievements.

Look, there you go.

So, this is our first tap.

Our main input to the chateau.

Then comes through here.

Up we go.

Across the next workshop.

When it goes into the cav, it goes up.

The salon's got the wood burner.

Basically, provide most of our heat from the wood.

Then, children's playroom.

It's a playroom, it's supposed to look like this.

And the pipes have to disappear, so they're boxed in.

They go all the way up.

Pipes come up the other side of this wall.

There we go.

Nobody knows it's here now, but for a long, long time,

there was just pipes and cables and all sorts here.

But from here, they go up.

So, here we go, the pipes keep coming up.

This is only about 75 steps to this point.

Ta-da!

The pipes go up.

There's a vent pipe there,

there's also pipes and electricity going up to the hot water tank.

But this little bad boy, the junction comes off it

and it joins in the suite,

which was the last battle we did.

It's so satisfying, connecting to the very first thing you did.

The fact it works is all I really care about.

Who would have thought these colours?

But back in 2015, with just days to go

until the removal van arrived, Dick hit a snag.

These walls are thick.

Going through the wall is going to be a major nightmare.

To feed the pipes into the rooms, holes had to be drilled

through three-foot-thick stone walls.

See, that's what we need, isn't it? Come on.

So Dick brought in the big guns.

I came to France and I bought the biggest drill

they had in the equipment store.

If this works, it'll make our life easy.

But the 21st-century drill soon met its match

in the 19th-century stonework.

I'm going to call a stop on this.

You know, best will in the world, the wall won.

Declaring defeat, and with no time to spare,

Dick's only option was to chisel out the holes by hand.

The clock's ticking, the removals are coming, there's no heat.

So all in all, erm...yeah.

Soon though, Dick's deadline was up.

HORN

It's all happening now.

It was time for the Strawbridge family

to move into their new French home.

Is it really going to fit through?

I've got to say, absolutely amazing.

It's a bit rudimentary inside, but it's good, it is good.

Umbrellas, they stay just over there.

There's an umbrella stand.

Darling, do you want this full-size?

Yep, lovely.

Bird cage is going in the petite-salon, please.

And when the delivery men come, every time I said,

"Oh, can that go in the salon." Or the salle-a-manger.

I just felt like a 12-year-old.

Speaking French? Yeah, speaking French,

but also a little bit giggly that I'd said those words.

Yeah, it was great. It was just a real novelty saying those words.

Baby, all our stuff's here now.

We live in France.

Now his family had safely moved in,

there was just one more thing for Dick to do...

Here we go!

WATER FLOWING

I can hear it coming.

..check whether they had hot water.

OK.

Brilliant.

First fire done. Wow.

Heat!

Look at that! Ha-ha!

And it's warm water, hooray!

This floor is the comfortable floor for the family.

And our suite is important.

But the temperature actually falls off as you go up.

There's no reason to keep the top at 20 degrees all the time.

I've learned about jumpers.

And layers.

We're getting more heating.

We don't really need it.

Do you hear that? That's what she said.

Sometimes it's too hot. Sometimes I have to take my jumpers off.

We've got some massive...

Over the past four years,

Dick and Angel have made some major structural changes at the chateau.

Yay!

Now we're looking back at one of their most ambitious projects -

transforming a 19m high turret into a 21st-century lift.

Putting the lift in was huge. It was a lot of work.

We had to start at the bottom,

get a horizontal floor and go up to the top,

which meant you went all the way, floor upon floor,

cutting holes, making more mess, more holes, more mess,

more holes, more mess. Yeah.

Messy up, clean coming down and froufrou, make me pretty.

What's difficult with that?

It was in autumn 2016 that Dick came up with the plan.

Our lift is going in this tower.

This is to the west.

And it's going to go from the basement

all the way up the tower.

The lift is actually in the tube.

This is really simple.

At the top, there's a big fan and this fan sucks air out of the tube.

This is a very simple thing to demonstrate. Look at this.

This is my tube.

This is my lift capsule.

VACUUM CLEANER WHIRS

"Are you ready to come upstairs, Angela?" "Yes, Dick."

To create Dick's vacuum elevator,

the turret itself had to be turned into an almost 14m high lift shaft.

That meant first clearing the basement room

and then cutting through the three floors above it.

To save money, Dick and Angel decided to do it themselves.

Whenever we work together... Manual jobs together are hilarious.

I love it.

Giving her a sledgehammer, saying, "Take down this wall,

"break up these pipes," it's nice, isn't it? Oh!

And I love it because... She's got her lippy on.

And looking gorgeous knocking down walls and breaking up pipes.

Well, when we work together, it's like a date,

so I like to make an effort.

Oh, it stinks! THEY LAUGH

Once the floors were cleared,

Dick and builder mate Steve had to start cutting holes,

or at least try to.

It has to be exactly perpendicular.

Which means if we're slightly out here,

it'll look a bit silly in each floor.

But perfectly aligning holes on three different floors

is rather hard.

I've got 75.

I've got 695.

700. 695.

About 693.

That is the right place for it.

Isn't it?

Yeah.

Once they'd measured and measured again for luck,

there was nothing else to do

but start cutting through the solid oak flooring.

Past the point of no return. No return.

As they moved higher up the tower, though,

the more jittery Dick became.

I hope that's where we were supposed to cut.

DICK LAUGHS

It's giving me the willies at the minute.

I really hope we line this up properly.

By the time they reach the top floor,

Dick's blood pressure was almost as high.

This is not taken lightly.

It's a serious job, I've got to tell you.

I remember going up to the top and looking.

It's almost like vertigo

when you sort of feel like you're drawn to the edge

to fall in the hole.

DICK LAUGHS NERVOUSLY Bloody hell, Steve.

When you're looking through a hole, looking down,

you're sort of, "I'm going to fall, the world's sucking me."

Before the lift was delivered, though,

the elevator company sent one of their technicians Jesus...

Good to see you. ..to check their hard work.

I think we've done everything we have to do.

Drop down a bob line. OK.

OK.

So, let's take it.

First, Jesus measured the angle of the dangle.

Yeah, it's OK.

Oh, yes, he said it's good! He said it's good!

As an engineering job,

Jesus said we had to be absolutely 100% accurate.

Steve and I, never mind the plumb line,

we had lasers out, all sorts of things,

to make sure that it was perfect all over.

And we were millimetric sort of accurate.

I think we were probably within 2mm on the plumb.

For Angel, though,

the lift shaft was never just somewhere to keep an elevator.

To her, it was always going to be the tower of curiosity,

where, with the help of friends Sam and Sophie,

art and items from the chateau would adorn the walls.

There was a very basic brief,

and the brief was it's a botanical suite tower

and we want to incorporate something from the garden.

On the top floor,

the walls echo the botanical guest suite's horticultural theme,

whilst outside the dining room,

some rather familiar figures could be found.

The night before the lift arrived, though,

Dick and Angel were still busy preparing for it.

And there would be no sleep...

..until everything was sparkly clean.

Jesus told us that the house had to be totally spotless

because when they put the lift in,

one bit of dust could stop it all from working.

You get electrostatic charge which means dust will come

and stick to it and if you get that on the inside of the actual tube

when you're doing it, you'll never get it off.

But there isn't anything that you can say to me

that will make me smile more

than there is a technical reason why you have to tidy

and make the house dust-free.

I love cleaning. I hate dust. Yeah.

The next morning, Dick was up, ready and waiting.

bonjour! Hello!

Jesus, good to see you. Good to see you. I'm Dick.

The Chateau's lift had finally arrived.

Made up of six aluminium and polycarbonate cylinders,

each one had to be first squeezed into the bottom of the tower...

Made for it.

..attached to a winch secured at the top...

It doesn't look wonky, does it?

..and then carefully hauled up before being fastened into place.

JESUS SPEAK SPANISH

It fits. That's all we care about. DICK LAUGHS

Finally, the elevator's base unit was carefully carried in.

In just seven hours, Dick and Angel's 19th-century chateau

had received a 21st-century upgrade.

And Angel... In you go.

..was its very first passenger.

Shut the door properly. Ooh. OK. Choose the floor.

Woo! DICK LAUGHS

Yay!

I thought it wasn't going to work there, for a second. She's gone.

Ooh! SHE LAUGHS

Been in a lot of lifts but this is fun.

Willy Wonka would have been happy with this.

That lift, albeit not the cheapest investment that we've ever done,

I think it's been priceless to us.

It definitely has.

The lift is not the only success story,

so is Angel's towel of curiosity

which has grown in size and colour since we saw it three years ago.

The room, it just... It's changing.

Every year, I've added something new to it,

it's been a little bit more painted,

things are sometimes coming out cos they've fallen off.

I remember finding this letter up in the Potagerie suite, actually,

this little envelope.

Aw, Dick bought me that.

It's a little matchbox holder which I love.

It's...

Our lives are coming together.

All of these little things found up in the attic

in the early days.

It was in a sort of lady's travelling case.

You know, I've got these memories, Dick's got these memories,

we're building memories.

You know, when we found all of the old gramophone records

upstairs in the attic.

Oh, he's done a cracking job of Arthur. Arthur just looks...

Aw, he just looks like my little boy.

And that sword, we found it in one of the outbuildings,

Dick and I, and it was a horse sword,

like a horse fighting sword cos it was twisted on the side,

and I did not know that trivia.

It's part of the Baglionis and the Strawbridges together.

It's just gorgeous.

And my very handsome husband.

In a similar outfit to what we had for our wedding.

And I bought him this back in the early days, actually,

this slightly manky sporran.

And me. Well, what do you think?

SHE LAUGHS

I'm looking quite good.

I'm looking quite svelte, my hair's perfect.

I've got a full head of hair.

You've got a full head of hair. Just saying.

Being immortalised is totally the way forward.

I love it!

Owning a 19th-century chateau inevitably means

massive maintenance bills.

And the most daunting of them all is the roof.

If you're looking at big challenges and scary things,

the roof of any chateau is always there as a big problem.

In 2014 when Dick and Angel were still looking for the perfect home,

they were already aware that a crumbling chateau roof

was a one-way ticket to financial ruin.

It was done in 1909.

So the roof was always one of the first things they checked.

If you look out the window,

you'll see that the shape of the roof, there are some major issues.

This still needs a lot of, lot of work.

So on their first visit to the Chateau de la Motte Husson,

Dick headed straight upstairs.

The roof here, part of it is very old?

The roof is the age of the chateau. So this is original roof here.

The tower roofs aren't in bad nick there.

The guttering looks new, we like that.

There was a good sign when we got here, they had actually fixed

the guttering rather than just leaving it.

Because we looked at other chateau in our time where the neglect

builds up and builds up and builds up to the point

where they're sort of destroyed.

But in March 2017 the north-west of France was put on orange alert

as a fierce storm headed in from the Atlantic.

2,000 homes lost power.

And the chateau itself was blasted by 75mph winds.

The next morning, Dick braced himself for the damage.

This is a slate that's come off the roof.

Losing one slate is not the end of the world.

The big thing is what does that say about the condition of the roof?

While the roof of an average semidetached house in Britain

is 75 square metres, the chateau's is a whopping 340.

Which could add up to 4.5 times as many problems.

You should not be able to see the sky out of your roof.

It is quite a serious problem.

I need to get some advice on this.

Oh, bugger!

You've got to know where your limits are.

Dick and I both feel that we could probably give everything a go.

But there are certain areas of expertise where you just think,

leave it to the people that have been doing it forever.

Some things you have to acknowledge, it's best somebody else does it.

Yeah.

That someone else was a local expat roofer called Ian.

Watch your top end. OK, yeah.

It's a bit awkward. It's a bit steep.

Bit more. That's it.

That's it. That's it.

There's one thing for sure, I was never meant to go on that roof.

Have you seen the size of that hole?!

Dick might not have fitted through the hole,

but as Ian wore a body camera, he did get a live tour.

Careful of the slates. Yeah. Don't want to knock any more off.

No, exactly.

This is the scary mystery about buying any property.

It's a lot of engineering making a roof like this

and chateau roofs are renowned for being the problem areas.

As Ian peeled back the lead lining,

the extent of the damage was fully revealed.

That's better. we can see what we're doing.

It looks a bit manky, doesn't it? Looks a bit old.

The top slates under the lead were crushed.

We've got new slates, so I'll put them on.

When the chateau was built in 1868,

14 skilled labourers were needed to nail down over 29,000 tiles.

150 years later, Ian was using exactly the same tools

and technique to fix them.

Brilliant job. Thank you. Come down and be safe.

Dick knew though that Ian's work was just a mere plaster over a wound.

One that could one day need major surgery.

Well done.

I think when you take on something like this, you know,

you know what you're getting. And if you don't, you know.

We never went into this project thinking it was going to be

an easy project. No.

By October 2018 more slates had fallen off.

And Ian once more ventured out.

This time, Dick supervised from the other side of the moat.

I can see missing slates.

Even though Ian could fix the missing tiles,

there was no avoiding the fact that the chateau would need a new roof.

We've got a ballpark sort of quote,

people have talked about our roof and they've said £140-160,000.

That's a lot of euros to be spending out, OK?

The scaffolding is probably going to cost us 30 or 40 K.

If I said to you,

"Darling, this summer we're going to be scaffolded up,"

do you think people would mind? I think scaffolding the whole thing

would be an issue in a wedding season because, you know, you...

Out of season's not such a big issue?

Out of season, but then out of season... Nobody wants to work. No.

Well, you know, you haven't got the good weather.

And actually, the weddings and events are...

They're what's paying for the roof.

..Is what's paying it, it's our biggest revenue.

As major roof work can't be done over winter,

and they didn't want any scaffolding during the wedding season,

Dick was forced to come up with another solution.

I can see a hook.

I think I've convinced myself we need another window up there.

Because that whole face on the left-hand side

with the chimney on it has got no access to it.

You have to climb around or climb over.

Putting a window in on that side means we've got access

to every side of the chateau.

And if Ian had easy access, no scaffolding would be needed,

already saving Dick £40,000.

Now it was just a matter of finding the time.

Last wedding in September we say right, October.

Bump straight in from the last wedding in September

and see if we can do a face of this roof per autumn.

So 2019, 2020, 21, 22...

It might take six years,

but it would mean the chateau would get a new roof.

And because their wedding business wouldn't be affected,

Angel would be happy.

This, if it works, is a brilliant idea!

Yeah!

Over the past four years, Dick and Angel have slowly and carefully...

I wanted this to feel a bit different.

..Brought their abandoned chateau back to life.

But despite their hard work...

Brilliant! ..There will always be jobs to do.

A job as big as restoring a chateau with nothing, no heating,

water, electricity, sewage, it's a massive big job.

But with anything, you need a bit of logic.

It's like you eat an elephant a bite at a time.

And you have to just work out where you're going to start

and where you're going to finish.

And bring enough mayonnaise!

Next time, we look back at how Angel's creativity

has helped transform the chateau with her light touch...

..Immeasurable imagination...

My pineapple light from America has arrived. I love it!

..And her extraordinary attention to detail...

I always like doing things bespoke.

It's something that's unique, like Dick!

He's so unique, one-of-a-kind!