It's My Dream Come True!

Beth, 45, had avivid dream about a dated and neglected house she’d viewed becoming her cosy family home, so she set about making it come true...

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We had no idea exactly what we were letting ourselves in for when we started renovating this house,’ says Beth. ‘I don’t think I could go through it again, but that hasn’t stopped us loving it!

My husband Colin and I had been living in a maisonette in southwest London, but realised that once we had children, we would want more space and a garden, and also that we’d get so much more for our money if we moved out of London.

So we started thinking about relocating and looking for somewhere that was within easy reach of Bristol, where Colin, a TV director, is based some of the time, and Chiswick, where I work as a TV production manager. We had come to love being near the Thames in Chiswick, so we looked along the course of the river, and settled on Marlow, where we had some friends.

Colin and I started going there at weekends to get to know the area, then decided to lease our maisonette and rent in Marlow for a while to see how we felt about it. We could get a four-bedroom Edwardian house for the same price as the maisonette, so we signed a year’s lease in February 2011 and started the process of seeing if it was right for us. Deciding it was, we extended the lease and started looking at properties in September the following year, viewing around 30 houses, all with at least three bedrooms and a garden.

Mammoth task