A Year at the Chateau: As seen on the hit Channel 4 show

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When Nicola's husband, Dominic, retires they decide not to spend their days finding hobbies to fill the time until Countdown is on channel 4. Find out about her French château life here - French House Chic by Jane Webster and about the Australian Walters family who are restoring Château de Gudanes here.

All the characters have different expectations of life in France and different ties back in Britain. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. A Year at the Château covers just that—the first year of ownership and renovations and, finally, their first event. Throughout A Year At The Château, the dark bold text is Angel telling the story and the normal text is Dick.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Dick has a very soothing, melodious voice therefore, in my opinion, he is better at narration but Angel is so lovely that I enjoyed her parts just as much. Too much detail in some places (bathing and caring for children and food consumed) and not enough in others. Yes there is lots from the show, but I didn’t mind reliving that and there is still a few behind the scenes bits too. The book is also very written, with each of them writing alternately, adding their own account of the day to day work, as well as their experience of living in France, the great food they enjoyed and the joy of parenthood.

So I’ve written a post on how I make my wreaths from foraged greenery around my village and flowers from my garden. After recently posting some photos of my handmade wreath on my fireplace at Christmas time, many of you asked for more information on how I made my wreath. After extensive renovations on a shoestring budget, the couple married at their family home in November 2015.Not only do I admire their spirit and hard -working ethic, it is so lovely to see their respect and love for each other and those held dear to them. I'm hoping that Living the Château Dream will also be more widely published so that I can read about the adventures and renovations that followed. Soon after, we discovered that, in our part of France at least, you don’t pay to park over lunchtime. Things don’t always work first time and as Dick finds out; something as simple as drilling a hole in the wall is a momentous task that takes him days as opposed to hours.

Like many Brits, Dick and Angel had long dreamed of living in France, but where others might settle for a modest bolthole in the French countryside, the Strawbridges fell in love with a 19th-century fairytale chateau, complete with 45 rooms, seven outbuildings, 12 acres of land and its own moat. A quoted exchange between different people prevents a book from becoming a mundane recounting of, “I went here,” “We did this,” “I thought this,” “We bought this.Keeping a huge home warm takes lots of heating and the drama of finding a suitable boiler, numerous radiators for numerous rooms, making holes in metre thick stone walls and laying hundreds of metres of water pipes - yes, literally hundreds of metres, for running water are not problems that the average home owner has to deal with. I have watched some of their show but their attitude really puts me off, I guess that should have been a warning against this book but was hoping they would be more humble and kinder in print.