Five Years of The Chateau Diaries! (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

Tonight we're celebrating the fifth birthday of The Chateau Diaries. I can't believe it's been this long. Back in June 2018 I decided to make a video (in portrait mode) on IGTV, and in that moment I unwittingly created the first chateau vlog. From the very beginning, I vlogged quite prolifically, uploading several times a week, to create a diary of life at Lalande with the lovely people around me. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that not only would I still be vlogging after five years, but that my little vlog would have transformed Lalande and created a new genre of Chateau vlogs on YouTube.

This half-decade has been a glorious rollercoaster. The Chateau Diaries were definitely not an overnight success! During the first two years I was vlogging as a hobby, for only a few hundred viewers. That changed in 2020 with the first Covid lockdown, when the world turned to YouTube after having watched every box series in existence. The next two years were a very steep learning curve for me, as I went from vlogging for fun, to juggling vlogging with running a French business and quickly needing to learn to be a grown up, much to my mother's delight. But one thing has remained unchanged - my love of capturing every moment in this breathtakingly special place with these wonderful people, and seeing the transformation of Lalande.

This transformation couldn't happen without you, and I think of you and your contribution to the chateau every single day. I can't describe how thankful I am.

To celebrate we had a pizza and champagne night, which I'll show in tomorrow night's Chateau Diaries. Everyone came as one of the Lalanders. Can you guess who everyone is?

Lots of love,

Stephanie 

PS As the party is still going strong, I'll upload this week's Patreon video on Friday. It's a sneak peek at the secret projects that we're filming for this season of Chateau DIY. As usual, I'm filming everything that we're working on, and will show you the full process at the same time as it airs on British television early in the autumn. But the sneak peek will be on Friday! I'll also upload the chapel report then - I was hoping to have shared it with you at the weekend, but we didn't have a pdf version (Mummy told me she had it, but it turned out she had an email with an expired link to the pdf, so I understand her confusion). If the pdf doesn't arrive by then, I'll scan my copy. Goodnight all x