Swing Set Disaster (Part 1) - The Littlest Chateau

[Music] and when we come back i'll do some garlic bread with it what do we eat it with a spoon are you saying that we'll put our children on the swing set and then kick them off and roll them down the hill if you put them here they'll be at 45 degrees in terms of division of labor i've definitely done most of the physical work in this mission i'm the brains of the operations [Music] welcome to the littlest chateau [Music] built in the 18th century on the top of a valley overlooking a small village in the south west of france [Music] this is paul and i'm helen and with our two children and three cats we moved to france in the middle of the chaos of 2020 to follow our dream of living in a french chateau come join us at the start of our journey as we share the beauty of this forgotten building and follow our progress as we restore it back to what it once was one job that we're going to be doing now is putting up a swing and slide set for our little boy he's four years old and he's in that transition period of starting to get himself to sleep we always used to sing and cuddle him to sleep but he's getting that little bit bigger and wanting to get himself to sleep but not quite getting there yet so we've had a real struggle um over the past few weeks few months in fact of him still needing to be cuddled still needing to be sung to but going to bed at seven and us being in the room with him until about half past nine some nights on the worst nights and there's been tears on both sides he's been overtired and frustrated we've been frustrated and we know that he can get himself to sleep because there's been nights when he's done it before but not consistently so we came up with a plan we put together a tick chart for him and we said to him if you can earn this many ticks on your tick chart then we will put your swing and slide set up for you he knew that we had it but he knew that there were the jobs that we had to do in the house first but we said if you can get your ticks we'll do it straight away for you and he did it and he's managed it and he's still managing it which is great we've had a few blips here and there but he got his ticks and he's doing really well so now we're going to put the swing and slide set up for him and he's going to be really really thrilled what are we doing well we've got the digger ready and there's some chainsaws various different types of chainsaw all prepared we're just loading them into the trailer oh my we need those yeah because there's a tree in the way of where this swing set needs to go so i gathered these things i think i did a good job i followed my picture and i got the things we need no you're not going in you're not going in no you're not okay good and now we've got a cat to help us as well yeah it's probably best to get out of there too no no i don't think so this is the heaviest bit this stuff and then we're good after that it is in the way let's just go why wouldn't we i tire of this conversation you did pick up at the end or in the middle are you deaf capes or what what the hell look at the end woman you've got the whole thing you can just knuckle it back just get it through the door basically doing nothing all right okay here we go oh no it's just long enough good we've got a property that is at the top of a valley and all of our land is pretty hilly so we see loads and loads of other shutter owners on youtube and on different chateau shows who have these beautiful flat confused gardens where they can put up playsets for children dining areas all sorts of amazing things and the digger has to come down with us because we actually have to make a flat area first and get rid of some overgrown foliage before we can put the swing set up here comes the arrival of the slide we made it we made it no one died that would have been intense no tipping no crashing at five miles an hour that would have been a really really poor outcome yeah so everything's here the tree that's got to go it's more like a weed actually it's a cherry plum tree and they just grow like weeds we've got hundreds of them all the way along here this is right in the way of where the swing set wants to go so see i wanted the swing set to go over here but i've been vetoed because apparently that's too slow for you to deal with yeah let's just have a look look i'm gonna use this physics experiment here commonly known as a ball just to demonstrate the problem with where you want this to where do you want the swing set uh kind of keep going keep going yeah kind of there it's fine are you saying that we'll put our children on the swing set and then kick them off and roll them down the hill if you put them here they'll be at 45 degrees with this area you've got an entire tree to cut down the stump to remove all of that clearing to do huh huh yeah but it's flat and this tree is uh stupid anyway i hate it [Music] i'm just trying to uh oh get rid of as many of these big upright branches as possible so that i can drag the fat bit over to where we've got everything else we wanted to share some of our favorite recipes with you for lunch times at the chateau chickpea curry chickpea curry is on today's menu dice up one red or brown onion and add one clove of garlic you can add more to taste [Music] add your onion into a pan with about a tablespoon of olive oil and let it fry gently so that it softens part way through crush in your garlic and then add to this a generous tablespoon of medium curry powder or balti powder if you're in france [Music] a teaspoon each of coriander ginger and cumin you can use ground or cumin seeds [Music] add in about a teaspoon of salt you can add more or less to taste and give everything a really good stir to coat the onion and garlic in the spice mix [Music] toss in your chickpeas from a 400 gram tin which have been drained and washed and again give them a really good stir in the pan to coat everything in the spice mix add one tin of chopped tomatoes [Music] and 200 ml of black tea you can see here i'm using the tea to rinse out the rest of the tomato juice [Music] finally add one squeeze of lemon to add some sharpness to the dish give everything a good stir and leave to simmer for around an hour can't hear you what do we eat it with a spoon we have this chickpea curry with garlic bread and here's my homemade recipe i take about 15 grams of butter and one clove of garlic that i crush in and i then mash them together i don't tend to melt my butter beforehand because i get better flavor i think from fridge cold butter [Music] i add about a quarter of a teaspoon of salt because i use unsalted butter [Music] and then take a demi baguette that i've part baked in the oven and slice all the way down evenly but not all the way through because each of those gaps will be filled with the garlic butter [Music] once it's sliced you can put an equal amount of the butter into each of the gaps this is the kind of recipe that you can make for a whole baguette if you want or reduce down for whatever is to your taste and of course add more garlic or less garlic i wrap my baguette up in a little foil nest because it's already been baked i don't want it to bake anymore so i keep the top open to crisp it but i put it into an oven that only has the fan running but has been set to around 200 to warm up with the temperature then turned off and that sits in there for about five minutes just to melt the butter so i would say that this makes really generous portions for two possibly a side dish for a family we tend to have the whole lot because it's really good it's really healthy and there you have it chickpea curry with homemade garlic bread mango chutney lime pickle and greek yogurt we're now going to try and dig up the sump uh because uh the reason for that is i've noticed over here there is in fact another um cherry plum tree which is a as i said before it's a weed that the previous owners had sawn off i don't know if you can make that out there but there's a sawn off trunk there and what's just happened is it's just sprung back up again and in fact they never got around to clearing it because that's been sat there for ages since we've had the house probably years before that so i'm to try and dig this up which is going to be fun having never done anything like this before um i'm utterly confident it will go without floor i've just noticed something amusing happening over here you unhook hooking the trailer for me yeah am i doing a bad thing well the only thing i was thinking is is on a bit of a slope so i know that i'm not i'm not entirely without merit here probably what i'll do is go down this end for you and stop it from rolling down the hill that would be helpful that would be helpful oh my goodness i can't even lift it use the wheel hold on nope that's not coming for me i'll try uh we turning it now is it you holding it in place there i've got hold of it yeah if you let go it rolls no good yeah we're good we're good it's not much of a slope anyway no it's fine honestly i'm not sure what's happening now some alignment or other oh action action is happening all at once oh donny it's fine so the trailer that we very very carefully arranged into position and said oh it's not too bad a slope it's fine it's not going to roll is now over there carry on dig up your stump [Music] stump is coming out win good work and now the inaugural hammering of the tree stump because it's extraordinarily heavy uh most of that weight is going to be in the soil so yeah it seems to be a reasonable way to get rid of it might need to employ a full for you it's easy for me yeah yeah you just sat watching up here in the safety of the digger metering out commands what are you planning to do here then i guess fill it back in and bulldoze it over uh just sort of flatten the area out a little bit fill it back in yeah and then just sort of generally try and level this ground in terms of division of labour i've definitely done most of the physical work in this mission i'm the brains of the operations really i don't know if i agree with that so we just caught a brief halt to uh proceedings because uh i was merely digging away just flattening an area down when i realized we didn't actually measure it out so we have no idea what size it's supposed to be so uh we're gonna get some stakes hammer those into the ground the right distance apart and that will be a lot better so so we've got our uh measuring stakes and we've got our piece of string have we string we've got some string and scissors and we now need to make it square which is the best part because you can measure it as much as you like but if it isn't square you're going to end up with a very crooked area so employing some pythagoras i think we need to measure the diagonals uh and i've come out at 5.06 or something so that's true look at me for help let's see if that works so we have to diagonally measure 5.06 across is that what you're saying from this from this stick to that stick it should be 5.06 [Music] oh ok i absolutely hate doing that job there must be a better way to use just pythagoras if you know of a better way to make some a measurement on the ground square please let us know in the comments i'm sure that'll be super useful next time so after we measured it out we realized our piece of string wasn't long enough so we had to go and get another bunch of string hopefully now yeah we're good it's good i now declare this digging side open we realized that uh after very carefully measuring this out that we actually need i actually need to get in here with the digger so i can level it yeah oh well you'll just have to make sure you don't run over the stakes yeah they're probably going to get dug up all that pythagoras and for nothing he'll be rolling in his grave bless him [Music] do [Music] we hope you enjoyed watching this video if you'd like to see more please like and subscribe

Channel: The Littlest Chateau

Views: 795

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: escape to the chateau, how to renovate a chateau, move to france, castle, restoration, doing it ourselves, chateau life, living in france, chateau tour, escape to the country, french castle

Id: INcbDOeFOwk

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021