If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in rural France, restoring a small château, and currently learning that nothing here happens on the timeline you imagined. Paid subscribers follow the renovation in real time in Castle Diaries, which is where this one lives.
About a week ago, Sean and I stood in the middle of the coach house, surrounded by half-built furniture and cleaning supplies and a green carpet I have personally declared a war crime, and looked at each other, and I said:
What have we been doing this whole time?
We have lived at this château for six months. Six months. And we are only now, in a sweating panic, trying to get the coach house ready to rent in July. If we had started the day we arrived, we would be finished. We would be sitting in lawn chairs. We would be relaxed people.
Instead, we are people surrounded by Allen wrenches, cardboard boxes, and years of accumulated dust and grime.
Here is how we got here.
The plan that wasn’t the plan
When we bought the château, we knew we wanted to renovate the coach house eventually. We did not know in what order any of this would happen, because nobody hands you an order of operations when you buy a 17th-century building. You just start, and the building tells you what it wants, usually at the worst possible moment.
Early on, we decided the coach house should come first. A full renovation, done properly, to turn it into a place we could rent and actually support this life. Smart. Responsible. The kind of decision that makes you feel like an adult.
Then we met with the contractors and architects, and they explained, kindly, that the renovation could not begin until roughly seven months after we signed. Seven months of permitting and scheduling artisans before anyone so much as picks up a hammer. Which meant the real work might start this winter. Maybe early next year.
So we had a choice. Let the coach house sit empty and beautiful and earning nothing through an entire summer and fall. Or spruce it up enough to rent it now, before the real renovation, and make some income while we wait.
The coach house, it turns out, is in great shape. It needs updating (see: the carpet, my nemesis), and it has not been properly cleaned in years, so we have done deep cleans that I will not describe in detail out of respect for you. But the bones are good. It’s genuinely rentable.
So we decided: we rent it this summer, as-is-but-prettier, and renovate it properly after.
Which sounds simple. It was not simple, because of a decision we made on purpose, knowing it would make our lives harder.
We could have just thrown it all together
The easy version of this is obvious. Jump on Amazon. Fill a cart at IKEA. Furnish the whole place in a weekend with cheap things that look fine in photos, rent it for a season, then throw it all out when the real renovation starts.
We couldn’t do it.
Partly because it felt like a waste of money, buying a houseful of furniture we’d discard in a matter of months, then buying all new things after. But mostly because it felt like a waste of things. Furnishing a place solely with cheap, mass-produced things and then sending all of it to a landfill (or a charity shop, where it becomes someone else’s eventual landfill) is exactly the kind of disposable churn we moved here partly to get away from.
So we made the harder choice. We’re furnishing the coach house with pieces we actually love. The forever pieces. The ones that will stay through the renovation and beyond, because we chose them to last.
This is, to be clear, the slow and more expensive and time-eating choice. It is the reason we are in a mad dash instead of a leisurely stroll.
Here is where I take you inside the coach house, and show you what we’ve actually been building (and the piano we did not plan to buy, and the pool that nearly didn’t happen at all).
