Chateau de Savennes Renovation Project: Quick Progress Report

Apologies for not blogging for a while. This is a quick progress report so you can see what has happened in the last couple of weeks then I will add another blog later today to tell you about a great day with the Brocard-Saidi's at Giat agricultural Easter market, a fun meal with all the family at the local bar and a nice day out that Em and I had in Clermont Ferrand after Easter.
Ok, so I'll start at the top of the house and work my way down. Captions are below the photos:

This is Suite 4 Bathroom which Mr Gayton is working on. If you flick down to an earlier post you will see that this had nothing in it before. It is now tiled and half painted.

This is Suite 3 bedroom that my sister, Katie, stencilled and hand painted over Easter. It is easily the most impressive room in the house at the moment. (Wrong bed mind!)

This is Suite 2 which is now completely finished. However as you can see the decorators are using it as there store room so it was tricky to get some nice photos.

Beleive me though, it looks stunning.

You can't quite make it out but our decision to put the wallpaper above the sink and bath was a good one. It looks much better now.

This is a detail shot of the wallpaper so you can see how it reflects the light.

At first I thought the staircase colours were a bit boring - French grey below the dado and off white with a hint of green above.

However, now that the white wood work has been done they look really smart and grown up!

They are using a massive scaffolding structure to paint it.

This is the floor in Suite 1 Bathroom that has now been fully sanded and is about to be varnished. However, you may remember there was some nasty white filler between some of the floor boards. Well it is still there, however it has been given a paint effect by Simon to make it look like wood - incredible! Also, the old green bath is now a nice cream colour thanks to Simon and Emily who did a coat each.

The floor in Suite 1 bedroom has been sanded too.

And so has the sitting room.

The hallway in suite 1 was in a dreadful state.

God knows why I decided to take it on instead of letting Mr Laine do it.

I have to do the loo as well.

Well I have started and it is coming along nicely. This it with its first coat of primer.

And another view.

In the big living room over Easter Richard hung all 5 new chandeliers.

And Emily and Betty hung all of the crystals on them.

I finished painting the whole room at long last. I filled all of the cracks and gaps in the beams and have given all the woodwork a final coat of white satin. It is now looking the part.

And the fruits of Mum's Easter labour are now on display. Her wonderful curtains!

It has been very difficult living without the kitchen these past 2 weeks but this room probably has the most work to be done out of all of them.

They started by pulling down the old foam tiled ceiling.

And taking off all the wall shelves

They are going to put 2 brand new walls up on either side of the fireplace.

The old ceiling was now exposed in all of it ugly glory.

A really bad botch job was done around the top of the chimney

As can be seen more clearly here

A new wall is going up on either side of the window too so there was a lot of demolition to be done. Mr Laine saved the old sink next to the big sink in the window though!

The little window on the same wall as the big window.

A mess of ugly piping and wiring that had clearly just been chucked up was now exposed.

Mr Faye, the electrician had a job just working out what half of it used to do as most of it was now redundant.

The old spot lights were really badly hung.

On the commercial side of the kitchen it was a similar story

Though worse. That is a big metal beam holding up the wooden beam in the middle that is wrotten at the end.

Needless to say we are covering it all up again but this time with a nice plastered ceiling. Which went up really quickly.

All new electrics too and much more uprated with sockets on every wall.

Mr Faye is doing a real pro job. He is bringing all the electrics over to this one point in the commercial side and he is going to install a fuse board with an emergency cut off button - hopefully big and red!