Be warned Stacey Solomon, your Victorian do-er upper is a ruinous money pit that will test your marriage and take years longer than planned. I should know, says SERENA DOBSON

When Stacey Solomon revealed that she’d bought a £2.5 million Essex doer-upper earlier this month it sparked particular interest among those who understand the highs – and lows – of transforming a property firsthand. 

In fact, Serena Dobson, who’s been renovating a Georgian farmhouse in Lincolnshire for three years and still has no idea when it will be finished, warns the Sort Your Life Out host how difficult, expensive and stressful a home renovation really is.

Serena, 45, who’s married to husband Michael, 46, admits that the works in the period property have tested their patience as a couple, swallowed up family weekends and put them under constant financial pressure.

And their children have been impacted too: their daughter, then seven, found the realities of moving very difficult to comprehend and reacted with ‘lots and lots of tears and a fair bit of anger’ after losing her old bedroom, friends and school.

The sheer cost and scale of building work has defied even Serena’s expectations – with their spend at £50,000 so far – and nightmare scenarios including the couple having to shovel 15 tonnes of gravel by hand.

She advises Stacey and husband Joe Walsh: ‘Don’t rush it. This is not a first-to-the- finish-line scenario – the house has stood here for over a century and will stand here for centuries more.’

Serena and Michael, who both work in executive search and are parents of Finn, now 12, and Beth, now 10, have been renovating Hillside House since buying it in 2023 for £825,000 after it had stood empty for two years.

They gave themselves five years to complete the project – sharing the experience on Instagram at @renovating_hillside_house) – but three years in they haven’t even finished upstairs.

Serena admits she and Michael have at times discussed cutting their losses and selling.

‘Three years in, we’re nowhere near finished,’ she says. ‘The downstairs rooms are still waiting for their turn, and we have multiple barns and outbuildings to convert. There will always be another floorboard to sand, shutter to restore or garden project to tackle.’

But she says taking the time to make considered decisions, rather than racing through a never-ending list, is one of the biggest lessons she has learned.

She says that Stacey will also need huge amounts of patience to deal with weeks of dust, teams of tradesmen in the house day in day out and for coping with the unexpected.

The Dobsons have had to deal with unexpected challenges such as suspected asbestos in their loft, and face having to pay for a bat survey, which costs £3,000 to £6,000 – something that is stopping their plans to convert the barns.

‘Our experience of taking on and renovating a period home has been a slow and considered one,’ says Serena, who was 2025 runner-up for her family bathroom design in the uFurnish.com Home Awards – held by uFurnish.com, the UK’s leading furniture finder website – to honour the best interior design projects and renovations around the UK.

‘We bought the property directly from the estate. We viewed it for just 15 minutes and put in a cheeky offer £25,000 below the asking price, not really thinking anything would come of it,’ she says.

‘We were living in a new build at the time and hadn’t really been looking to move, but the house offered so much potential: more space, inside and out; and the opportunity to put our own stamp on something.

‘And of course it was going to be an adventure for all of us to embark on as a family – we were juggling family life, work and a top-down renovation.’

Unlike Stacey, who charted her transformation of her old Tudor-style home, Pickle Cottage, to her six million followers on Instagram, Serena and Michael had no building experience of any kind.

‘We don’t have an enormous pot of money, so that has meant doing much of the work ourselves, which has been a huge learning curve.

‘We rolled up our sleeves and there are so many resources available, such as YouTube, that over the three years we’ve been here we’ve learnt far more than we expected.

‘We’ve got stuck in building pergolas in the garden and restoring the original front door. Even the children have joined in, stripping walls, digging the garden and pulling up carpet. It really has been a team effort.

‘We’ve also had to be inventive – we rescued the original door-pull by putting it in the slow cooker for 10 hours to remove decades of thick black gloss paint.’

 Serena also uses uFurnish.com to compare prices when she’s looking for a specific home accessory or piece of furniture.

When the family moved in, the house was structurally sound and habitable with running water, electricity, a functional kitchen and bathrooms.

‘In our first year, it was about making unglamorous changes that would set us up for the long term,’ says Serena. ‘We replaced the boiler, insulated the loft and installed a pressurised water system.’

The Dobsons’ plan was to complete the top floor before tackling their downstairs living areas, but three years on the bedrooms still aren’t complete and Michael and Serena are still in the spare room.

‘Our current project is the master bedroom suite, which will be the final room upstairs,’ she says. ‘It will eventually connect three rooms, one of which housed a snooker table and darts board when we moved in, into a bedroom, dressing room and bathroom sanctuary.’

But along the way, the Dobsons have made some wonderful discoveries about their new home.

‘In each of the bedrooms we have uncovered fireplaces that had been boarded up for years,’ Serena says.

‘We’ve discovered wooden shutters in the reception rooms which we plan to restore, and we’ve restored the original front door, spending weekends and evenings stripping decades of chipped paint, repairing the original door-pull and cleaning the glass.

‘There is glorious coving in the two main reception rooms, and we’re slowly sanding and treating the wooden floors that have been hidden beneath carpets for years.’

Stacey’s home is set in 30 acres of land, with its own stables, and Serena and Michael faced a similarly huge challenge in making their outdoor space something they could enjoy without breaking the bank.

After they were quoted £60,000 to turf a dilapidated tennis court with chain-link fencing, Serena says they just hired a digger to remove the tarmac and sowed the grass seed themselves.

Their new DIY skills came in handy in the garden where they built a seating area and three pergolas with tiling, furniture and a hot tub. Serena and Michael also dug a ‘sweeping’ flower bed and edged box hedging with bricks reclaimed from the house.

At the front of the house they removed the old tarmacked drive and laid 15 tonnes of pea gravel during a heatwave.

Serena says: ‘Doing the work ourselves has certainly saved money, but the bigger reward is knowing that the view we now have is the result of our own hard work.’

But Serena’s the first to admit when a task is more than she and Michael can do – even with the help of YouTube.

‘We’ve been lucky to find some exceptional tradespeople, and with an old house, finding people who understand its age and history is particularly important,’ she says.

‘My advice to anyone embarking on a project like this is to live with the house, understand what makes it special, repair what can be saved and make changes that feel as though they belong. An old house doesn’t have to be transformed overnight to feel like home.’

The winners of the uFurnish.com Home Awards 2026 will be announced on October 19.