If you read the article in press features on my cottage in Cheshire, you will have learned about how I was originally searching for a Georgian house with tall sash windows, shutters etc., well, I found the house!  Browsing houses for sale on the internet, I spotted a beautiful property with a classic doll's house façade. It was Queen Anne, Grade II* listed, and had been empty for several years and in dire need of some tlc. I viewed it the next day, my husband viewed it the day after, we had our offer accepted and three months later it was ours! Little did we know what we were taking on...

Beautifully situated in the North Shropshire lakes, it sits proudly at the brow of hill and has a partly walled garden filled with an abundance of old fashioned flowers and shrubs. It has views from the front over the Church to the Mere, and long distance vistas to the rear, over the LLangollen Canal to the Welsh borders. A truly stunning setting. It had all the original features we had been looking for, including fantastic pantries with original slate slabs, I had visions of these being filled with home produce, (in your dreams girl!),fine ham and truckles of stilton at Christmas...

There's a saying "Love is Blind", so true, we fell in love-at-first-sight with this house, and when we finally got the keys, I walked in, and thought, 'I didn't see that terrible cracked ceiling, the seventies wallpaper didn't look that bad, the period bathroom features didn't seem quite so grungy at first sight,' but, oh boy, if 'Love was Blind' then marrying the house certainly opened our eyes! We were embarking on what was to be two years of hard work, sensitively, (and expensively as it turned out) bringing the life back to the house.

We are nearly finished, this year I decided to have a moratorium on workmen, and it is bliss, no more getting up and dressed at the crack of dawn to let the men in, no more 'can you just open the window in the loft, kitchen, bedroom for me love', no more 'we've run out of limewash', no more 'I thought you were phoning the conservation officer?'. It is just wonderful to be able to concentrate on living normally, having the space to ourselves.

What have we done? We repaired the chimney stacks, (all four), re-lined the gulleys in the roof with the correct gauge lead, (unbelievably the previous owners had done repair work with the wrong lead, over chip-board!), re-wired, replaced the ancient central heating, replaced the broken window glass with hand blown glass from the London Crown Glass Company, repaired and opened up all the shutters and repaired the sash cords. All those were the boring but essential works. We installed an AGA and a painted Chalon kitchen, replaced the grungy bathrooms, one now has a stunning copper bath from William Holland, and we have used gallons of Farrow & Ball paints!