How to rebuild a house in six months,

Everytime I buy a house and do it up I say that I will never renovate again. Never again will I go through the scary money drain, the endless dirt and dust, the moving of all my worldly belongings, the complaints of my kids, the waiting for builders to turn up. So what was I thinking of when I bought a large French derelict house on the side of a canal? In fact two - one large, one small. Last year, the gite was renovated with my boyfriend and it was a tricky year. BF did loads of fantastic work and so did I and now it's lovely, but we fell out over lots of things, like who had the best idea for anything, and how we wanted to live - him favouring long periods of not speaking to me, me favouring something a little more fun and relaxed - and then we fell out properly. Way before then teenage daughter decided enough was enough and went back to live with her Dad in England. There were lots of tears, mostly, it seemd, mine, and still I didn't get a horse, or sepend more time with the kids, or get less stressed - all the reasons for being here in the first place.

On the other hand living off my savings whilst renovating a house in the sunshine of the South of France was better than going out to work for a living, although there were a couple of inherent problems. One was that there was no money coming in like there is when you go out to work for a living, and two, that when you invest lots of time and money renovating a house to rent you run the risk of not getting your money back if you can't, after all, rent it and then you are forced to sell, in which case, hopefully, you get your money, and maybe all your hard work back, but then you don't have a home.

All the time we were renovating what is now our gite, I didn't know what the answer to these questions (would it rent, would it sell, if so for how much?) would be. In times of wealth and prosperity when you are single with no kids the whole risk thing may not so terrifying, because you can sell, you hope, at a profit and then have loads of money and so you just go and buy another house, or a round the world plane ticket. But when it's credit crunch, the house market has collapsed everywhere and you are single and with kids who need, ideally to be in one place for a while so that they can go to school and stuff, it's hard to be quite so lighthearted about moving around a lot and losing all your money, your hard work and investment and possibly not having much money to feed and house them with.

And then there is the whole process of renovating. When I did works to my last home, whilst I lived in it with the kids I swore I would never do it again. Now I am just about to start works on the big derelict, and I am already swaying between optimism and hope and sheer terror at the amount of money involved, the decisions I'll need to make while builders stand around, tapping their feet, costing money, with a 'I knew she hadn't thought this through' type of sigh, and the fact that we will be covered in dust from dawn til dusk, and will I go bankrupt?

So this is an account of renovating a house, from the roof downwards, turning it from a grim sad place through which the wind blows and the rain leaks down two floors, and which drops endless dust, and which gives us electric shocks in the shower (this house is telling us to move out and mend it), into a home of beauty and joy.

And the reason I am writing this account is to tell everyone else how not to do it, and to remind myself why I always say I'll never do it again - and hopefully perhaps why I always do.