10 Rose Cottage

Locals were flabbergasted when the estate agents found a buyer for Rose Cottage. It had stood empty for years - due to a catalogue of structural defects - and every year that passed only made it less likely to sell. The wind had loosened the slates, and the roof was sagging like a saddle-backed horse. It was a heap, frankly; you could have doubled its value simply by screwing a satellite dish to the wall. Locals wouldn’t have touched the place with a six-foot barge-pole... unless they’d wanted to be the proud owner of a six-foot barge-pole with dry rot. The ‘For Sale’ sign had disappeared beneath an exuberant growth of virginia creeper, which, according to the surveyor, was the only thing holding the place up. The best way to sell Rose Cottage, locals agreed, would be to demolish it and auction off the bricks as individual lots.

Convinced, like P T Barnum, that there’s a mug born every minute, the seller bided his time. So it seemed like Christmas had come early when Gemma came to Whimsey, saw Rose Cottage featured in the 'slums for sale' section of the Gazette & Advertiser, and immediately fell in love with the place. Love is blind: a condition that’s not improved by wearing rose-coloured glasses.

Gemma has a trusting nature, and doesn’t like to be on the receiving end of bad news. She missed the explicit warnings in the surveyor’s report, despite them being highlighted with a fluorescent marker pen and strings of exclamation marks. The report made such depressing reading, in fact, that she threw it the bin. She decided to back her feminine intuition instead, which proved to be an expensive mistake. Gemma had a warm feeling about the house; it had a welcoming aura. All it needed, she reckoned, was a lick of paint, some wind-chimes and a few dozen house-plants. She walked into the estate agents office with the proceeds from a generous divorce settlement, forgot to haggle and paid cash.

Rose Cottage is a black hole of a house: able to suck in as much money as anyone would think of throwing at it, and still be barely habitable. When the wind whistled through the cracks in the window frames, it sounded like Larry Adler tuning up. Gemma 'cured' the leaky roof by the simple ruse of not venturing into the loft any more, and masked the more malodorous smells with incense. She coped with the grime and neglect in the only way she knew how - by using dimmer lightbulbs. By the time she was down to 4-watt bulbs, she was bumping into the furniture.

With the help of a local builder who knew which side his bread was buttered, Gemma put the kitchen where the bathroom was, converted the box-room into an en-suite bathroom, raised the roof by two feet and created an extra bedroom. She had the house sand-blasted - though, intriguingly, only on the inside. A plan to move the entire house three feet to the south ("to get the morning sun") was abandoned, but only with the greatest reluctance. After all the upheavals Rose Cottage now looks a picture; unfortunately it's a picture by Hieronymous Bosch.