'This house has grown and changed with us'

Amanda Greaney and her husband Paul have revamped their 1930s home with DIY skills, bargain buys and an open-minded approach to design

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Amanda Greaney and her husband Paul have lived in their Cambridge home for the past 20 years, and during that time they've completely transformed it. They moved in when their elder son, Joseph, was a baby, and while the house needed a lot of work, they could see its potential as a family home.

'The house was very old fashioned back then, with no proper bathroom and a tiny, basic kitchen,' says Amanda. 'We'd settled on it because it had plenty of space and a lovely garden, and as we'd already renovated and moved a couple of times by then, we knew we could do a lot with it.'

HIDDEN DEPTHS

First on the couple's agenda was a bathroom revamp and taking up the old carpets on the ground floor, which revealed original wooden parquet flooring in the hall, cloakroom and living area. They restored it themselves and sourced extra to patch up where an old fireplace had been. 'There weren't many interesting period features, so that floor was quite a find,' remembers Amanda. 'It took us about a year to track down enough salvaged parquet of the right size and depth to fill the gap, then Paul spent about a month cleaning every piece before fitting.'