HOW YOUTUBE SAVED MY CHATEAU!!!

hi and welcome to the kitchen in the chateau de la land where today i want to talk to you about how youtube saved my chateau as you can imagine this is something that i'm pretty passionate about and it's a good time to be talking about it because it is the first anniversary of our patreon account so it's our birthday here at la land for this whole change of life that we had those of you who've been following my channel will know that the past year has brought about the biggest change imaginable to life at the shattered leiland and has completely changed its prospects we are suddenly going to be having so much building work done there are three different teams of builders who are booked in to start within the next month on different projects and even saying that out loud is a dream come true because i've been living here for nearly 16 years and it's not always been very easy so i want to tell you a little bit about what happened when we first moved in how we ran out of money and how youtube saved our life it had always been my dream to live in a chateau ever since i was a little girl it just seemed the perfect fairytale life and i wasn't scared to restore something that was completely run down because i'd seen my parents do that with several houses over the years and completely transform them and bring them back to life and i knew that this was my path and for those of you who want to know exactly how i came to buy the chateau here you can see my video how i bought a chateau when i was 29 and that explains i bought with my friend nick we each sold two-bedroom flat in london because we're both living in london at the time and with the proceeds of just those two flats we were able to buy the shuttle la land which cost 890 000 euros and at the time there was a good exchange rate that was about 590 000 pounds my parents and nick moved in with me and my parents completely fell in love with leland and it wasn't as it is now it really was not as comfortable at all and it had pretty much everything to be done with the major exception of the roof which isn't a great state i mean it's just an amazing roof on the main body of the chateau however everything else needed tackling and my parents saw that this was going to be a very big struggle i had planned to just do it incredibly slowly over the years but they sold at the same time their house in england which was a seven bedroom house and they were downsizing to a one-bedroom house and they decided to give me my inheritance whilst they were still alive because they wanted to get behind this project and see this chateau coming back to life and they thought it'd be a lot more fun to do that whilst they were still alive than after their death so i was in the incredibly fortunate position of having a lump sum that i could use to restore that land and i decided to use it in two ways some of the money i used to get a flat in london which i would rent out to help cover our monthly costs because i didn't see how we were going to be able to pay for the electrics for the water for the taxes all of the things that we need to do each month then the rest of the money was spent on actually renovating the chateau we spent the first few years doing the most boring parts of the renovation the things that don't make a big visual difference but that are needed to save the structure of a shadow like this and it's probably easier if i take you for a little wander around the chateau to talk to you about what we did let's go for a little walk in the snow and i'll show you what we did in the chapel it's so magical i love it it actually snowed a tiny bit on christmas day here but other than that this is the first snow we've had this year and it didn't settle then it doesn't look as though it's settling now i'm hoping soon we'll have the shadow covered in white the first thing that we did to protect the chapel is you see this huge tree stump here this was a vast tree that would have taken the chapel out in a single go if it had fallen that way or most of the west wing if it had fallen this way so we had to take that tree down and we had to completely re-roof the chapel the water damage inside is terrible as you'll see when we go in so that roof was the first thing that we did it was put on in 2006 we arrived here in 2005 and we immediately ordered the work and you see there's a little lighter bit of stone on the stone guttering that goes along the top that was also broken so we found a stone mason to repair the stonework outside so the roof was in good repair then we thought it doesn't matter how quickly we get onto the interior renovation at least it's not getting any worse but there were quite a few broken windows you'll see one window is missing and that's because it's gone away for restoration we can have a look at the ones that we did on the inside so as you can see there's terrible water damage from the ceiling that was just letting in water this is the worst bit of roof where the entire corner vault collapsed it collapsed before we arrived but this is what we inherited and in fact when we bought the previous owners said to us please please if you buy could you do the chapel first because they felt terrible scenic in this state as well and we promised that we would and that was the very first thing that we did was at least saving it and then bit by bit we went through each of these stained glass windows these have all been restored already the only other thing we've done in the chapel is we've run electricity to the chapel so we have these beautiful fontini switches the same same makeup switches that we have in the chateau so we now have electricity inside that's just outside and a socket so we are able to have a little electric piano in here and we're able to use it much more it's amazing i am so happy to be outside right now generally at leland we're extremely lucky with the roofs which really is the most a chatelaine can ever ask for is a good roof the roof of the chateau is sound in fact we haven't had any leaks touchwood a tiny one on the window of one bedroom but the whole shutter roof even in a torrential downpour it doesn't leak that wasn't the case with the outbuildings obviously we've talked about the chapel that was completely re-roofed and we also had to repair this roof behind us that one was leaking rather badly and the only other roof we had to do was the roof of the greenhouse so let's go around there now the greenhouse was in a lamentable state but it's so beautiful and we didn't want it to collapse all together because this is an important part of the history of the chateau and it's also a wonderful usable space that my mother is madly in love with so we re-roofed the entire greenhouse and these were the original windows they already had a kind of plastic in but it had it had gone over time it was just too old it was cracked we replaced it with something similar because it makes it much lighter than glass and we added something quite ingenious if i say so myself we added a hydraulic system because these are very heavy windows this one doesn't have it because it's every other window that we did so here you can see i'm having to struggle to do this and then it's held like this but if this is knocked then the whole thing comes crashing down and i was worried for the safety of my mother who was doing this every day opening and closing them okay see my glove has already been attacked by it so we changed every other window in this way ah does it by itself so opening is incredibly easy closing is actually the hardest part but at least that means it's safe when we first moved here the entire walled garden was just a meadow the whole thing except for i think two or four small beds here exactly where we're standing and that was it everything else was just grass this high so one of the first things that we did was to start to add more vegetable beds and bit by bit it grew oh look at our chickens look at that exploring in the snow they're having a whale of a time that cockrell is catwoman because when he was born we didn't know it was a he we thought it was a she so we named him catwoman because it was all black just darling he actually hatched in our incubator because he's a special breed a cotswold leg bar that we couldn't get in france so he brought fertilized eggs and then he grew in the incubator and he was living in my bedroom and my bathroom when he was first born so i feel very close to catwoman though if i'm honest i don't think he remembers i think he just cares about who's throwing food down we're now standing in the middle of the walled garden and when we first moved in and we started working on this area we decided to split it into three sections an orchard at the far end and then a flower garden in the middle and then the vegetable garden the vegetable garden is now complete the flower garden we planted it was one of the first things that we did my friend nick whom i bought with came up with this design we're eventually going to have a large fountain in the middle but that's not just yet and they're filled with roses each of the beds so we planted this box hedging and it's done so well it's really big now for years we lived with tiny little ones as we now have around the fountain but it just shows that given a little bit of time it looks like this i'll be honest it's not the best time of year to show you the rose garden you can see that we've put manure down ready for the spring but yes this is what it looks like on a snowing february day the last section is the orchard which we've now split into two smaller areas where we'll be keeping the chickens and in the middle selma's made a fire pit and we come out here quite a lot in the autumn we were here regularly for bonfires in the evening and barbecues do you want a little peek to see what mummy's greenhouse looks like now it's like hello mtv and welcome to my crib yeah welcome welcome to mommy's crib i mean as it says on the door right right actually it's just wonderful in here we have charred so we have several things in here that we can still be eating at the moment we're eating the chard these are the onions that my mother picked and put together earlier this year this is our lemon tree which comes in here for the winter we have winter lettuces here and parsley which i love some onions i think next to the parsley these are marie's ranunculus and we know that because it says marie's when unkiller so there can be no confusion so these will be beautiful flowers next year and this whole area is ready for us to start sowing seeds we received so many wonderful seeds last year and also at christmas we had an advent calendar with just seed packets in so we are ready to go at the end of this month or beginning of march we'll be planting the seeds here ready to start the year again we'll go and look at the courtyard now look thor and sifur up there staring at us thinking why these crazy people out in the snow they've got a much better idea they're taking shelter when we first moved in the courtyard was very drab very uninspiring very gray and we immediately made it much much worse because we fit a septic tank here and we turned this whole courtyard into the battle of the song it was horrific my father whilst he was still alive had bought me this beautiful fountain in pieces at an auction in england and after his death i thought that it'd be wonderful to remember him properly by installing the fountain that he had bought and proving to him even if only posthumously that his dreams for this place were going to become reality that he was right to believe in it so we had the courtyard redone very simply with sand and we had the fountain installed and the entire basin around it made specially for it because it was only the central fountain that we had every time i see it i think of my father and i think of how far we've come then we started the major work inside the chateau which involved tackling one major hurdle before we could do anything else and that was the removal of asbestos cladding on every exterior wall downstairs we knew about it before buying so we knew there was a problem and we had to get a special convoy to take it all the way to special asbestos disposal and it meant that we were left with walls that had just been sprayed with concrete back in the 60s or 70s and had no decoration left so we were down to zero straight away the next thing we had to do was to put plaster boarding up on every single external wall both downstairs and upstairs because we took the opportunity to insulate all of our walls there's massive amounts of insulation on every wall of the chateau except for some of the bedrooms where we had beautiful vintage wallpaper we didn't want to lose the wallpaper so those don't have the insulation once we had all of the exterior walls dealt with we had a shadow that was quite dark a bit dingy there was very little natural light because extra walls had been put up throughout the 19th century probably to make smaller rooms that would feel more comfortable and will be more easily heated so we thought we'll never mind that we'll put heating in we'll take down all of those extra walls and put the rooms back to good proportions and allow the light to flow straight through the chateau from one side to the other you can imagine that during that time we were living with such builders dust everywhere walls were coming down all the time my father and i were so happy every time a wall came down you'd see the light suddenly flooding into the room it was incredible our dining room was originally three rooms so by taking those walls down we created the current dining room we spent a lot of time thinking about what heating we would go for we didn't want to use any fossil fuels we thought the good thing about starting from scratch is that we can find something that's much more ecologically sound so we chose geothermal heating so we have five boreholes outside the laundry room of the chateau going down 100 meters each and they bring the heat from the ground into the boiler in the chateau which acts as a reverse fridge to draw the heat out of the ground and then send it around the chateau but the thing we hadn't really thought about is that although we'd insulated all of our external walls we hadn't double glazed any of our windows and there's over 100 windows here and i just didn't have the money at the end of the renovations to do that sadly because it goes round at the low temperature geothermal heating works best as underfloor heating now we couldn't do that upstairs because of course we have the beautiful original wooden floors but downstairs we'd had to replace a lot of the flooring anyway our billiard room had so much dry rot that we had to take up the entire floor and burn it to save the building our castle had originally been three rooms so had three different floors the same was the case in our dining room so we thought we would take the opportunity to move all of our antique tormets which is the word for terracotta tiles in france down from the attics and also by many more which were bought at salvage from all over france and make beautiful new tomet flooring and all of these floors have underfloor heating below them all the way from the putty salon through to the billiard room every single reception room has underfloor heating so that was a great thing that we managed to do in the early years here we also replaced all of the electrics in a 19 bedroom chateau and we chose beautiful fontini switches which i think marry very well they don't really stick out as too modern in the chateau at all and the entire chateau needed new plumbing we installed 13 new bathrooms so almost every bedroom has its own bathroom now and of course installing new bathrooms means the joy of installing new septic tanks so we put in two new septic tanks and an absolutely huge soak away system in those early years the most exciting thing we did by far was transforming this kitchen and making it really a beautiful kitchen that's been the heart of the home ever since so we had done all of this work all of these initial renovations were paid for by the inheritance that i received from my parents and we spent all of the money in the chateau but i was feeling very positive my father and i loved every second with every wall that came down every piece of asbestos that left the building we were getting happier and happier and we just kept imagining what it would be like at the end i was happy to just put all of the money into this renovation and i know my father felt exactly the same way and we spent over three hundred thousand pounds on those original renovations and then i was out of money but by that time i had fallen completely in love with lalanne we were very happy and i was living my dream even though it wasn't the glamorous dream that i'd envisaged i loved it every bit as much as i thought i would when i was three years old i just love being surrounded by history and this sense of beauty and all of the architecture around me and being close to nature all the time everything about life here i loved especially living surrounded by the people that i love because the great thing about chateau is is they're so big you can have all sorts of family and friends living with you sadly that happiness didn't last it was a beautiful beautiful time but my father got very sick and died in 2009 and everything changed for me then especially emotionally because it was my father who always said don't worry steph you have made the right decision shuttled la land will be absolutely beautiful and it will be a huge success and he just kept saying that to me whenever we had another freezing cold winter or things seemed a little bleak daddy always said this was the right decision never forget that and when he died i lost a lot of that optimism my mother married my father in her early twenties they spent her whole lives together he was her best friend and she was bewildered without him um and i felt i felt that my rock had gone my father had gone and my mother who was an absolute rock in my life was not the person that i'd known before because she was grieving as well and luckily she then met just the most wonderful man percy who many of you will have seen in the vlogs and thankfully he brought such joy into her life which was a joy for me to see as well and helped me enormously but it did mean that she moved to south africa to be with him for quite a lot of each year and so i was left alone here nicholas had also moved back to england for work this whole team that i've been doing the project with had fragmented and i was left alone holding the chateau i was living here with guardians in the gardener's cottage but often alone in the main body of the chateau and it was very hard for me to deal with the loss of my father having completely run out of money and feeling that i wasn't doing justice to the chateau because i was overwhelmed honestly i was i was low and i was overwhelmed so after my father's death work on the chateau slowed enormously we did still move forward we hadn't done much decoration before his death because we've been working on all of those huge jobs the plumbing the electrics the heating and after his death i did manage to decorate every room in the chateau all of the reception rooms all of the bedrooms bit by bit the most recent works that we did before making youtube and patreon my full-time job were to create two new apartments in one of the attics of the chateau one for michael potts and the other for my mother so things were starting to move a little bit more quickly but nothing like the sort of forward momentum that we have now when i talk about this period in my life now it sounds as though it was something that lasted a few months but but in fact i was low for about eight years um on and off i mean i had a lot of incredibly happy times here i've always had very loyal friends who come to visit regularly and the chateau had lots of parties and a lot of laughter but at the heart of it all i was directionless and i didn't know how i was going to save this place i had completely run out of money and thank goodness for the london flat and for my friend nick because those two things were the only thing keeping the chateau afloat but i couldn't carry on relying on that i needed to find a way of being able to live here long term and so i did what many chateau owners do i started a bed and breakfast but nobody knew about us we're in a very isolated region of france and there wasn't that much business and then i got really lucky because i know a lot of local musicians in the area and they brought friends to me who were looking for places to host music workshops and i started hosting these workshops where i would cook for everybody in the house for a week at a time i enjoyed hearing the music in the house i enjoyed having people around me i enjoyed seeing how happy la land was making others and i thought well this will be my future i'll have bed and breakfast and music workshops i'll be able to meet my monthly costs i probably won't be able to do any big renovations for many many years but i'm happy and i'm living in the home that i want to be living in one day i received an email saying hello i work for a production company in england and we're looking for chateau owners to take part in a new series about the restoration french shadows this really intrigued me um i wondered what it was about so i contacted the company and i just sort of did it without thinking i wasn't even particularly nervous because i thought that this would be for a tiny production maybe would never even happen i had no idea at that point that i would be on escape to the chateau diy i love the filming i liked being part of it all and more than anything else i loved the fact that this chateau which is so isolated i mean we're in a very very rural part of france with the lowest population density of france suddenly was being seen all over the world and people were contacting and asking about leland and this whole sense of community was building up and that felt amazing and it gave me the impetus to start an instagram account but i quickly realized that still photos are not really my medium i love taking them i love editing photos i like the look of my instagram feed uh it's a way of reflecting the way you look at life i like it to be very colorful and bright but i didn't think that it was perfectly capturing shadow life because a still image really needs to be perfect it's just this perfect little glimpse into something and when you put all of these perfect images together it's not really shadow life with its ups and its downs and it's mess in one corner and beauty just over the other side and i felt much more drawn to video because i think with that the whole of chateau life can come across and i was also feeling that there were so many fun and exciting things happening here so much laughter with the volunteers and with my friends that i was sad that i wasn't writing a diary keeping a journal because i was worried that i would forget i have a really bad memory which i'm always being teased about and called a goldfish in the house and i was worried that i was going to forget all of these precious moments and especially after the death of my father i was kicking myself for not writing down so many of the hilarious things that he did and said so i thought right i can change that i'm now a little bit less shy because i've been seen on british tv i'm going to start to film daily life here and i remember that filming that first video which i made for igtv in portrait mode was really nerve-wracking but i think already in that first video which is still available to see on this youtube channel it's really chateau life i have got a big party coming up which is the party which i first met michael pethrick from doing it ourselves and lots of the other chatter owners from the show i'm trying to get a historic costume ready in time at the last minute with no idea of how to make whale bone my mother is being ingenious and is telling me i can use packing tape to make whalebone which he was right about by the way and jerry is fixing a broken loose eat so even from that first video it was just normal chateau life and in fact that little almost daily vlog that i made back then which maybe five minutes or so a day which took me hours and hours to edit became quite a passion of mine and i think i was the first person to vlog chateau life i never thought that it would be more than a hobby but it was this way of sharing with the outside world and keeping that sense of community that i had had a taste of with escape to the chateau diy after a while michael patrick who i've become great friends with from that very first party said to me you know you need to move to youtube that's the platform for for videos and you you can't keep doing things in portrait mode for some reason i was really shy and afraid of moving to youtube because i saw it as this this huge thing where people might write really nasty comments and i was in my little safe zone my little portrait videos but i saw that phil and angelina had put a vlog onto youtube chateau life and i thought well i'm going to try i'll do i'll do what michael says and so i moved all of my old videos over onto youtube and realized that it wasn't this big scary place it's this wonderful place where i've made friends in this community of chateau lovers has grown and grown so by 2019 i was in a much healthier position the workshops were established and the bed and breakfast was going from strength to strength because suddenly whilst we're in the middle of nowhere lots of people knew about us both through escape to the chateau diy and through my youtube channel and people were coming here to meet us to see the chateau to see what was happening here and i started to see a glimmer of hope 2020 was going to be the very first year that we were going to break even here and although we were going to be breaking even that was just enough for our monthly costs and for our maintenance it would never be enough for these huge renovations so i needed a different strategy needing to find a new way to survive is something that big country houses have had to do for a very long time historically they were owned by the aristocracy who lived off land rents they would have vast estates and tenant farmers and they could live a life of leisure embellishing their home which was a symbol of their importance in society but that all changed with the advent in france of the revolution and then napoleon continued to give a death blow to the aristocracy by announcing that all children must inherit equally which meant that the huge estates could no longer be passed on to the eldest son because of that many of the states were broken up as each child wanted to sell their own little parcel off in england a similar litany of disasters befell the country house the first world war made land rents collapse there was no longer the influx of money coming in to support these bmos that really do require huge monthly costs and on top of that there was rising inheritance tax so is each generation inherited even though it was just the eldest son inheriting he had huge taxes to pay and nothing to sell to pay it because he couldn't sell the main country house he had to keep that for future generations and that is what killed the country house in the course of the 20th century over 1 000 country houses were destroyed in britain at an inestimable cultural and heritage cost to the country and a lot of these families were ill-equipped to deal with these problems because they had been taught for centuries that to be in trade was tremendously vulgar so they weren't really allowed to look for other ways to support their homes but luckily there were pioneers amongst them in 1949 the marquess of bath was the first member of the aristocracy to open up his home longleat to the public this caused a sensation can you imagine the gossip behind closed doors as people were saying but it's so vulgar allowing people into one's own home and taking money from them to run your own house that is the way that it was perceived but luckily two very important british families followed suit the dukes of marlborough opened up blenheim palace churchill's family home to the public and the dukes of devonshire opened up chatsworth these are some of the greatest houses in britain and they were saying the most important thing to us is to save our home and we will do what it takes to do that those pioneers who weren't afraid to do something new to do something that would be gossiped about and ridiculed saved the country houses in england they paved the way for others to do the same thing in their homes and that is why nowadays it is perfectly acceptable to open up your home as a bed and breakfast to host weddings to open up the gardens and to make money to restore these houses that way that is now the norm and it's the path that i was following a well-trodden path that's been shown to work by other chateau owners and then covered hit it was as though the rug was being pulled out from under my feet suddenly in one go kovid removed my bed and breakfast income and my only backup which was the income from the rental of my london flat because my london flat is rented through airbnb for holiday laps i use it with nicholas for one week every month and the other three weeks it was rented for holidays and it rented really well and that stopped entirely i did not want to give up if there was a silver lining to be found i would try and find it i found myself at leland with no bed and breakfast so no need to spend my time running that and instead i thought to myself okay i have this opportunity of time i will use it to see what happens if i put my heart and soul and all of my time into making videos what happens would that be enough to help keep the chateau afloat in this difficult time so i made the quarantine diaries those quarantine diaries did really well i got a lot of new subscribers my channel was definitely starting to grow and the monetization was going up every month my patreon numbers were growing very very quickly and i realized this could be my full-time job at around the same time i was speaking to micah who might be asking to start a channel for absolutely ages and i was really pushing him to start a channel because i knew he would be so talented and he told me that yes the time had arrived he was going to launch doing it ourselves so i told all of my subscribers who went across our mass and immediately subscribed to him and some magic happened he made the most beautiful video with a great intro and he had a lot of very sudden subscribers and the algorithm just went crazy and the explosion of his channel which happened in that first lockdown sent an enormous amount of new subscribers to me and i went from about 10 000 subscribers to about 60 000 and we now have over 114 000 subscribers so over the course of the year my channel exploded and youtube and patreon have become my full-time job in a normal month i make four or five 30 minute videos per week two of those are the chateau diaries they're on tuesdays and thursdays and are the original concept which is just following our daily life here at la land they are the most important part of my channel because they are sharing our life with everybody around the world i also make one patreon video per week and i love making that because it's very different from the chateau diaries because i give little extra behind-the-scene things that people wouldn't otherwise see for example i have in-depth interviews with the people that i live with and anyone involved with the chateau some weeks i also do from the cutting room floor where i have a lot of extra footage from the chateau diaries and increasingly recently because of the great success of the patreon account i'm able to give updates about exactly where we are with the renovations and what the plans are so a lot of the behind the scene chats with people who are going to be working on the chateau are shown on that channel the fourth video that i make per week is on a new channel that i created called shadow unwrapped this came about because we were receiving many many gifts from our viewers and i think this is something that happens to a lot of youtubers but that we were totally unprepared for and in that first week when i was making the quarantine diaries although all these wonderful gifts waiting for me on my return to france and i'm going to be opening them so i'll film that and i filmed it it was also a way of thanking the people that had sent the gifts and showing how much i appreciated them and that was very popular so i started sharing the gifts that were arriving each week but it was growing and growing as my channel grew and it was taking more and more time in the chateau diaries but it wasn't really what my channel was about and i also felt awkward and nick my friend whom i bought the chateau with also felt extremely uncomfortable about it he said i don't understand why people are sending these gifts and by opening them publicly it looks as though you're asking for more gifts but it was my way of thanking people it was very confusing we didn't know what to do about it and we talked about it a lot in the house how are we going to deal with the gifts that are arriving do we just not mention them as many youtubers do just open them in private there were two reasons why i wanted to continue talking about them one is that i wanted people to know that we were receiving all of these presents i didn't want somebody to think oh i must send a shawl because they'll be cold because they have no shawls i wanted people to see no we're fine really look we have we have so much we're so blessed it's unbelievable how lucky we've been this year i wanted to be very open with the situation as it was which is also incidentally why i have kept the amount that i received monthly on patreon visible because it's possible to hide that amount and i decided no i don't want anybody sending money because they think that we cannot cope without their contribution i want them to know no this is going really well if you send money it's not because we can't cope it's because we're going to do amazing things together we're going to renovate this chateau and because you'll be getting extra content for that contribution the second reason is that people were really enjoying watching the gift openings a lot of people enjoy unboxings and i think far more than the unboxing itself they enjoy feeling that they're sitting down in a room with their friends having a drink and a chat opening presents it feels like christmas day each time we do it i think people like joining us for that so i saw an opportunity to pass on this great fortune that we were receiving from viewers all over the world to try to pass that good on to others who needed it far more than we did so we came up with a solution of starting the channel chateau unwrapped which is a charity channel and we just started it last summer and i'm absolutely delighted to say that it's already raised over ten thousand dollars for charity and not only that but we've been able to use some of that money to start a scholarship the leland scholarship at the village fashion institute in south africa for an underprivileged student to be able to study fashion for the next three years and i i that's been overwhelming for us we've been sent letters from the applicants we have opted not to choose the applicant ourselves i'm leaving them to make that decision but we've been in tears reading the application letters in the chateau i cannot describe how moving it's been and to think that we can make a difference like that has been very inspirational and i'm hoping to start more scholarships or to fund more educational programs in the future because i think that education is the most powerful tool we have in the fight against inequality that is something that we'll be doing a lot more of in future on chateau unwrapped and then on top of that i sometimes make a sunday video like this one where i chat about an aspect of chateau life or go to visit a local town or another chateau and share those with you at the moment they only happen once or twice a month now a lot of people don't see youtube as a job but i take that as a compliment i think i'm doing my job well if it seems just a transparent medium to see chateau life if you don't think about the hours of editing and filming that happen to do that takes about 70 hours a week on average in a normal month so at the moment that's what i'm working it was very different in advent because at christmas we do a daily advent diary leading up to christmas and that was very exciting but very hard work we averaged 100 hours of work per week not only me but the people around me who are helping to make the videos that were working extremely long hours uh like phillip who's holding the camera thanks for admin and it was a lot of fun um so i do recommend this route to people i think that this is an amazing job to have but be aware that it is a job and it's a full-time job if you really want to make it into something amazing like everything in life it takes a lot of luck and a lot of work and if you put those two together you have a golden combination to success one year after the first lockdown one year after launching our patreon account i'm able to look back at what we've achieved and realized that even if we had been fully booked every single night that the b b is open which is six months of the year here we would not have done as well as we have done through ad revenue and patreon and if we'd been fully booked in that way we wouldn't have been able to do any renovations over the course of the summer because we would have been busy running the bed and breakfast and wouldn't have been able to disturb our guests so this is an unbelievable change in the funding structure of the chateau leland that's happened within one year we are reopening the bed and breakfast this year and we will continue to do so but not as a full-time business as our only way of keeping the chateau going more so that we can meet the people who support us the shampoo doc rooms are no longer on booking platforms they can only be booked directly through our website because we want to be people who are coming because they're watching the chateau diaries because they would like to join us and join our lives here because that's always been the big important thing for me it's bringing life to the chateau and building this community around restoring the chateau the bed and breakfast at leland is open from thursday to monday every week and on friday and saturday night we all sit together around a big table so that we can meet each other and chat about the future only our two sheets remain on booking.com because they're self-contained so people can come for a whole week look after themselves and not be coming because they want to meet us or to be part of life here we now have over two and a half thousand patrons who together send over twenty four thousand dollars a month to the chateau de la land and huge renovation projects are starting the very first months of patron money went towards continuing to improve this walled garden because i wanted to really work on something in the spring as it was then that would please my mother my mother supported me all along here and the gardeners her pride and joy so we completed the symmetry of the vegetable garden we put in new beds over the other side so now we have 32 beds for vegetables for fruit for cut flowers we had a lot of cut flowers this year and we've also added these really lovely arches which we're going to grow things over in the spring behind us in the distance you can see that there's a fenced off area which will have soft fruits grown against it to hide the fence so gooseberry is etcetera along there and that is where we will keep the roosters on one side and the chickens on the other side they're two huge areas at the moment they have a much smaller pen in winter we just let them roam everywhere in summer they have to live in their pens because otherwise they eat all of the seeds i planted this little inner circle of box hedging that goes all the way around and i was very pleased with myself it was really hard to do it was me and one volunteer here jamie's a great friend of mine and he's one of the funniest and best people i know and he and i were alone here when we did this and we had pickaxes in the boiling heat of summer making a trench to put this box hedging in and then i was really surprised because i knew it was tiny but it would get bigger one day when people were berating it on the chateau diaries in the comments saying there's just that straggly box hedging it should be removed it just looks ridiculous i felt very protective towards it but i did realize in the end that everyone was right but i wasn't going to get rid of them there was only one thing for it and that was make a bigger garden and a lovely garden designer contacted me from canada saying that she'd come up with a beautiful design for the courtyard and would i be interested in seeing that and then maybe putting it into practice and she sent this idea for making the box hedging areas bigger and planting lavender within with a rose bush in each corner and that's what we went with the patron money this year has paid for the new planting of all of the box head gym and then to really complete the courtyard all of this new gravel which is exactly the same as the sand that we had before and the lovely thing about it is it has this pinkish hue which is very apparent when it's wet like today and then it becomes pale and almost beige in summer we then installed amazing outdoor lighting which changes different colors it's just beautiful i think in summer it is going to be used a lot the fountain is so beautiful the peacocks love it they often sit here which is amazing in summer we use it as a swimming pool in summer until we finally get a pool we'll continue to use this but in winter it's empty because we don't want it to be damaged with any frost so it'll be empty until easter when choosing the gravel for the courtyard we asked an architect to come and advise us and she told us to look at the mortar between the stones in a building because that was always collected locally even if stone was brought in from further the mortar was local and as you can see it's got quite an orangey pinkish tone and she said that this is the color that we need to ask local quarries for so we know that it's still coming from the same area you see how pinkish it is it's like a salmon pink if i wet this stone you can see the stones themselves are local and very pink see it's exactly the same that's so satisfying when we found the right thing it's just amazing it's little things like this that make all the difference as you can see from this we are going to need to redo the facade at some point and i'm hoping that that will be sooner rather than later now this is something that we're going to be talking to the up i could just pull that bit off that's so tempting don't pull that bit off this is something that we're talking to the architect about at the moment getting the entire facade of the chateau redone dreams that i couldn't imagine coming to fruition just last year we're already able to be talking to an architect about now it's been the most extraordinary year in 2019 we had the chateau revalued because my friend michael potts who'd been my boyfriend when i first moved in was finally able to buy into the chateau this is something that he'd wanted to do from the very first moment we bought but he couldn't back then so we had to get it revalued so that we would know how much that came to and it was valued in 2019 at wait for a drumroll 890 000 euros exactly the same price that we had paid for it in 2005 before spending over 300 000 pounds on the renovations and it didn't change my attitude to the chateau at all because i want to live here for the rest of my life i want to restore it it pays me back every single day in the joy of living here and in seeing it improve this is the most recent one that was restored saint cecilia this was done last year very very excited about her saint aloysius was done at the same time and now we'll be working on these two one of them's gone at the moment the other will be next the rose window and the window of the vestry so this window is also missing it's a circular window of st john the baptist and they're the next ones to be replaced as you can see it is a gem of a chapel and next month hopefully if the restorer turns up at the right time we will be starting the restoration of the interior of the chapel for the first time since we bought in 2005 and that is all because of the youtube channel and the patreon account so thank you to all of you because this gem is about to be restored the terrace is one of the next jobs we've booked it in and the workmen are coming in the second half of march because it needs big structural repairs this terrace is very old it's from the same date as the original wing of the chateau from the 15th or 16th century it has two rather little mysterious arch rooms inside it we don't know if they were ice houses or if they were just used as garden storerooms possibly and you can see inside them but things are pretty bad we just have to scoot round the christmas tree which is waiting to go on the bonfire through here arteris is currently being held up with acro props you can see the key stone is going from this vault and inside the ceilings aren't looking in great condition and there's big cracks as well here you can see the entire wall is bulging out this is very bad here this whole corner section is extremely precarious and this an old damage we're definitely noticing it deteriorating each year before the patron account i could never have found the money to do this so this is one of the most exciting things that the patreon account will have done so far is really look after the fabric of the building next month once the terrace is completely secure we'll be able to do far more exciting things with the terrace for example we're going to pave it with antique stone slabs and create a proper outdoor living room there but none of that exciting stuff can happen until it is completely safe something that isn't included in this phase of the terrace restoration is the redoing of the stairs now obviously we want to keep all of the original stones so this is a huge job it means dismantling the entire staircase and putting it back together again in the right order and you can see here the reason that we need to do that this whole wall is going over to one side now in fact the worst thing that will happen if this wall collapses is that this wall will collapse it's not going to take the terrorists with it so we're focusing on the structure of the terrace first then we can move on to the steps but they're quite precarious at the moment now that we're standing on the terrace you can really see the problems that there are this is actually the top of the vaulted room below us that we just looked at you can see the stones coming out now that should absolutely not be visible and on either side the floor has sunk away the only thing holding the terrace up at this point is the top of that vault here you can really see the difference in level i mean it would never have been a step like this to get in without paving the water is just seeping directly into the terrace and straight through and affecting the stones beneath so we need to get proper guttering which we suspect was here in the past we don't know what happened to the original flooring of the terrace but you can see that there are drainage [Music] and there's a remnant of a stone gutter here and in fact if you look at this step you'll see there is a hole underneath it so originally there was stone guttering that channeled the water straight under that step and out the other side what happened to the original flooring what happened to the stone guttering we don't know it's not been here whilst we've been at the chateau but it's time to put it back and that will help the whole building by removing all of the water away most importantly away from the floor of the terrace so this is very exciting this starts next month because of patreon thank you thank you to all the patrons this is what you're making happen here one of the best things that is going to happen because of the patron account is that we are going to get the lake back now it is a long journey to get the lake back there are a lot of decisions to be made with the water police as to how exactly it goes back but we are finally able to take those steps because of the patron account we're able to get the survey done in fact the preliminary survey just showing all of the different levels the size of the lake was completed last week so we're moving forward now and for those of you who don't know why there is a completely dry lake behind me with a marooned boat house standing on dry land i've made a video about this called the mystery of the lost lake but getting this lake back has been one of my main missions during all of my time la land i always believed that it would happen one day but i could not work out how because this is something that's going to cost at least 100 000 euros to get back and now i feel that that dream is within reach so we're finally going to be able to restore all of the historic water features of la land because this chateau was built as part of a series of interconnecting lakes several of which were on land owned by this chateau because this used to be a 600 acre estate even though we now only own 60 acres around the chateau there were at least three lakes in that 600 acres i suspect more and they were all working in a system together as fisheries and as huge batteries to power water mills to mill the grain we're just walking back up to the chateau and i've just noticed this the daffodils are coming up it might be snowing but spring is coming there's the evidence there are many many plans and my patrons are the ones who know what we're working towards what we're doing where we're spending the money everything i receive on patreon has to be accounted for as part of the renovation and our annual accounts will be made public every year that's the renovation side of things which is being dealt with from the patreon account but incredibly youtube ad revenue has done so well that it's led to the creation of jobs here i'm very very pleased that during a pandemic there's been the creation of four jobs at la land two of which are funded by the patron account that is selma being employed here and dan the gardener because they're both working on the restoration of the fabric of the chateau and within the house so from my youtube company i'm employing philip who's holding the camera magnificently may i say thank you and natty who is going to be running the and bnb when it reopens and in the meantime is running the entire chateau and i don't know what i would do without her i've offered maddie a job here as a cook for the bed and breakfast if she wants to stay in the summer but mahdi has very exciting plans of her own following her own social media path with her instagram and her youtube channel so sadly i don't think i can persuade her but we will certainly be finding a cook to help us this summer as well so the team is growing bit by bit and that side of things is because of you the viewers all of our monthly costs at the chateau are heating our electrics all of the food that all of us eat here everything is being kept going by you so a huge thank you to my viewers for running the monthly costs at la land and giving jobs to these wonderful people that i live with and thank you to my patrons for restoring this chateau this has been the most extraordinary year cnn published an article about the chateau diaries talking about its rise to youtube stardom and how it's changed the future of this chateau and i've been contacted by an academic who wants to do a research paper on this new funding strategy for stately homes and community projects i've been approached by a member of parliament and by a heritage society to give talks about the funding of leland so that we can inspire other people to do the same thing with restoration projects all over the world i cannot wait to see what the next year has in store for us at la land i feel that there's such a huge team of us now both inside the chateau but all around the world supporting it that wonderful things are yet to come it has been a rollercoaster ride getting here this overnight success has taken 16 years the lows were pretty crushingly low but the highs have been unimaginably good and i wouldn't have had it any other way it's been the journey of my life and a journey that i want to continue my life is this chateau it's the restoration of beautiful homes like this and more than anything i hope that the success of the chateau diaries and of michael's channel doing it ourselves can inspire other chateau owners to look towards vlogging as a possible way of saving their homes there are more and more chateaus that are coming into the world of vlogging joining us on youtube of course phil and angelina have been here all along with their channel chateau life there's also philip and anna that we went to visit recently with their channel how to renovate a shadow without killing your partner great title of course there's michael's family with the pethorex at the chateau de la baminie there are many many more and i'm going to link to all of the chateau channels that i know of and several shadow instagram accounts below we're all in contact we're all connected and we're all in this together so many exciting things are happening and we're all dreaming the same dream all of these chateau owners want their shadows to come back to life to be restored to their former glory to save these homes for the future it's not an easy journey and if you don't laugh along the way you'll go are craving mad so that's the story of how youtube saved my chateau it's not youtube that did it it's you it's the people who have been watching it's the patrons who've supported us thank you to each and every one of you you have transformed this chateau i'm sure that many other shadows are going to be transformed in the same way together you are the most powerful force imaginable and that powerful force can be used to do so much good around the world with other renovation projects with charities with all sorts of community projects and to the rest of you who are facing your own challenges your own plans don't be afraid to think of new ways of tackling problems don't be afraid to stick your neck out because people will criticize you for it people will say that's not the way it's supposed to be done never lose sight of your dream lots of love to all of you from la land a huge thank you to all of our patrons at la land who are making this vlog possible especially our duffer and dauphine of la land jaedel and ether brandon and john michael dan banda lauren barnes vince barone denise behrens jill bidwell candice blackburn kandersnet borkowski clara butcher paulina calabro chloe chalikani stephen sarah cole zoe dork sakura dennis jackie ellison nicholas w fairfax tracy ferrari caroline first abigail grant fifi greenberg brenda harris delaine hallbrook kim hasselhoff david and tom henderson jacqueline holmes jimmy kemp nadia kennedy lisa laforge david and summer la land morgan lawley victoria lepine janet hoof lombard marina frank martin meredith robert miller cathy nuri jc award maureen palmer frank proposky and james snow tamara price armin rahman tonya renee rjb bettina roject hannie ross elizabeth scanlan schreiber lisa schultz jennifer shanks patty suhu susan stevens sarah thornton colleen troyer renee valelli jessica walker brandy walton laura watkins james whalen christine wilson greg wood david young and laura vicos ordonazzo and thank you to all of you [Music] you

Channel: The Chateau Diaries

Views: 746,465

Keywords: chateau de lalande, chateau diaries, chateau life, chateaux in france, chatelaine, escape to the chateau, escape to the chateau diy, french castles, french country home, french country house, french country living, life in a chateau, living in a chateau, living in a french chateau, stephanie chateau, stephanie jarvis, chateau de la lande, the chateau diaries, restoration, diy, home tour, how to succeed on youtube, youtube success

Id: 8YoXLuesR3k

Length: 59min 58sec (3598 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021