The French house tour continues...

hi i'm tracy [Music] my husband nick and i come to france every year to enjoy french life we search the markets for antiques and treasure for our business in new zealand recently we have bought a house in the south west of france that we are renovating [Music] follow us on our journey as we take you through our weekly adventures [Music] hi there i'm going to give you a tour of the ground level uh where the living areas are today because we've been working on the downstairs bathroom laundry area where we knocked out a few walls to join the shower and the toilet area together we hired a french plumber to install the hot water tank who ended up being fantastic he worked really hard and we'd offer him coffee for afternoon tea and morning tea and he'd down it in about two seconds and off he'd go back to work which was terribly unfrench we thought come a long way for when we first arrived this is the laundry now the carriage just put lino down here which is hides an amazing amount of pink splatters we found this gorgeous 19th century cupboard in a bricant which we thought would be perfect for the laundry it had been painted brown and was very scratched but with a quick undercoat and a fresh coat of paint a perfect towel cupboard so then we've come into our last year's lou and shower which i'm thrilled with now it was just a hole in the wall and a toilet in one area and a shower in the other but now it's one cavity one whole piece just done these lovely tiles great water pressure yeah we hardly ever use the shower downstairs now that was the only one we had for about three years so now really we've got our own upstairs and this is just maybe when we've had a swim moving through to the kitchen which was basically just a cavity when we viewed it moldy and beer [Music] let cut out the two arches to unify the three tiny separate spaces it's a galley kitchen so space is of the essence we found the original brick and stone wall under a moldy old concrete facade it would have been one of the original doors which has now been converted into a window space probably more practical for us but thrilled to find the original wall in such good condition apply the power as you can see these are um unusual these are all new all this bottom part of the hall was built by the previous owners unfortunately they had the panels and we asked them to leave them for us as part of the contract because they're all outside stacked up and we thought we'd we would put them back in but unfortunately it got lost in translation and when we came to inspect the house on the you know a few months after we bought it we traveled back to france um we couldn't find them and we rang up the real estate agent and she said i'm so sorry they thought that you meant to leave the panels on the wall so we've got these uh fabulous plywood pieces that we um try and do something with so we'll paint them up and probably do a bit of detail on them to try and get them looking a little bit older than they look now yes and it was very disappointing also a very large door got thrown away as well which i think was part of the living room but anyway everything else is intact [Music] finally starting the war we still haven't got colors i'm just playing with gold gold's easy yeah it'll stay in a bit more so you might start with cold and then move on it's really the entrance to the house so it has to be it's the first thing people see yeah quite nice to have it finished full of beauty quite interesting looking through the camera well at least if you fall off i've got it on video michelangelo looking at us so we're getting up to the first landing in front of us is the storage rooms i guess that they were for the brooms and linen quite tiny but sort of useless to us at the moment we're not sure we weren't sure what to do with them on the right is the master room and on the left the princess room which we head up to is people staying in it last year this is all sort of ruined from the last i was pulling off i think electrics and being a bit rough but it's still beautiful it's all hand painted up there and it goes up again to the next landing so [Music] pretty room we've re-done the bed it was a dark old shiny varnish and so we've painted it and restored it to make it look a little bit more uh feminine i suppose fit enough for a princess original wallpaper and original ceilings all frescoed there's a big crack there but it's old age like most of us two french doors out to a balcony that's the carpenter across the road this one on the left-hand side hasn't been fixed yet we it was bought like that i just sort of locked it up until we can restore it floor had been damaged in the flood it got a bit of dry rot so the last one has pulled it out and just left it as is so next just put a temporary pine floorboards on until we can put the old floorboards that we've got similar to the ones here in but that's just another job so at the moment it's just hiding a lot of mess and we don't want to go through the floor mirror that was here and gorgeous marble fireplace i think it's my favorite little marble tiles we're not sure whether it goes or not yet we've got the chimney man coming this week i found this gorgeous old um in a second hand shop i've never seen another one but um unfortunately it had sold on it so i asked the owner if ever the person would like to sell it i'd love to buy it and he said well it's been here too long so you can have it for the price that the other buyer bought it for so now we're in possession of this stunning italian armoire it even came with little tassels i guess i'm so thrilled with that a bird cage i found in a book but she was in a market painted door i think it's back outside it still doesn't have power on the ceiling we've just got a dangling chandelier at the moment but there's uh little lamps that go and a few plugs so that's been fine for now they decided it needed a toilet and a shower so we decided to put one in the closet which is just which is just a jump we haven't finished obviously you can see we've still got to paint the wall we put in the lovely old wash stand and took out the floorboards for the princess room and have added tiles here which will be better for water splashing from the shower strong shower lovely tiles so once it's fully beautified i'll show you again a very high ceiling chandelier might go up there but for now just a one more night so that's a little last year when we had friends to stay we didn't have any ensuites upstairs um except in our rooms so we decided to put them in there but we didn't have a bed head per se so we painted one on the wall we love it we've still got it there until we find some magnificent one which might take us a few years but yes so it was a lot of fun [Music] while there's good light i thought i'd take you and show you the master bedroom this is nothing's been done to this room in terms of decoration that's exactly how we how it was when we saw it the only thing we've done is clean it and bought some furniture temporarily um so this is the wallpaper that we will it will have to go it's a little bit busy as you can see it's got a stunning ceiling and it's a huge bedroom ourselves we have a couple of temporary little side tables and we found this in a demolition yard last year that we will paint it's far too dark and heavy but it's a lovely big piece so it was perfect for this room and still got those curtain rods terrace going outside to the little deck we have our coffee sometimes in the morning we found these frescoes under all this gray paint we haven't quite got it all off here you can see there's still remnants up the top there but we're slowly taking all that awful grey paint off there's not much left of the frescoes though really but it's so lovely to see some of the crystal still there imagine it would have been very uh formed out here it's got more frescoes here that are hardly any left you can just see the detail up there under that gray paint but most of it's flaked away it's lovely and sunny this is four o'clock sit outside here with a glass of wine it's got most of these little shutters here from the bathroom we haven't put them back up yet because we tiled the floor and of course we have to cut a little bit off the bottom and this is beautiful old doors with hand painting we'll leave them as much as we can touch them up a bit when they've all chipped away on the edges and the most stunning mirror one of the many gorgeous mirrors in the house and a lovely working fireplace we found this hilarious dubai cats the original master suite bathroom was very basic it had a leaky old toilet and heart the plumbing really wasn't working so nick ripped it all out and created a gorgeous bathroom i love the walk-in shower there's always a little bit more glamour each time we we come back [Music] sweet [Music] lovely terrace which we're just doing at the moment next waterproofing it it's got a whole lot of interesting cracks they've been sealed up by tape so he's busy trying to um get that and that overlooks the gorgeous pujol cocktail you

Channel: Romantique French Life

Views: 6,737

Rating: 4.9864864 out of 5

Keywords: Francebrocante, brocante, frenchmarkets, antiques, upcycling

Id: G4tEQurqwuk

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020