Our grand plan was this: Buy a house, renovate it, sell it for a motza and then do again - five more times. I pictured us; mortgage free, equity rich, able to relax in our late forties and dining out regularly on our brilliant idea.

Sadly, we are shit at it.

This is not our first renovation. But it is the most major.

We just totally underestimated the scale of the renovation. To be honest, I had just had a baby, the house was dazzling us with its orange shag pile carpet and the vicinity to the Broadwater gave us the type of false sense of security that we could live in a tent as long as we stayed close to the water. Naive' or stupid? You be the judge.

I have just had 3 weeks “holiday”. Apart from the previously mentioned hellish and repeated visits to the hospital with the 3 year old shit magnet, we have also, most every day, either performed the renovating, or visited warehouses and factories to get the stuff required for said renovation.

I liken the process to getting married. OK, bear with me.

From the moment we set a date for our wedding, it was on. And I mean fucking – on. Every Saturday and Sunday was taken up with visits to bridal shops, venues, churches, travel agents, wedding expos, cake makers, balloon shops and yeah, you get the picture, it was weddings a go go.

Then the wedding came and went. It had been a full scale military exercise to bring that day together, not to mention, squeeze into my dress and then, poof, it was over. I was bereft and cast adrift on my Saturdays. What now? Spend actual time with my new husband?

And money, Jesus don’t get me started on the so called “budget”. Please read that and make the stupid quotation marks as you do, because the sentence above is pure bullshit. The thing is, my husband actually does a hell of a lot of this himself and we are still leaking money like a kid with gastro. Plus we just have such different ideas on what needs to be done and at what cost.

Tip for would-be renovators: unless you freakishly agree on everything in your lives, you can expect at least one conversation when you tell your partner to shove a particular tool up their arse. It is almost guaranteed.

So my analogy of marriage and renovating a house I guess is this: Every single spare moment we have at the moment is taken up with our new project, renovating the unrenovatable. The project has changed, but it still requires the same amount of passion and input as a wedding does.

I mean, what will we do when the house is complete? I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We will make the word renovation a swear word in my household, never to be mentioned again. Oh and live happily ever after.