“We’re renovating our Victorian home on a straitlaced budget”

Victoria Measure reckons her £40 kitchen makeover is the best transformation so far that she’s carried out in her three-bedroom Victorian terrace in Milton Keynes.

The 29-year-old marketing executive and her insurance salesman partner Gavin, 35, bought the property in September 2019.

They are renovating one room at a time, picking up bargains along the way and documenting their experience on Instagram.

“The kitchen wasn’t pretty – it had ugly tiles and an ugly worktop. I wanted to add value without refits. We managed to stick to our budget and make it Instagrammable!” she explains.

Victoria hasn’t paid full price for any new furniture or fixtures.

“The most useful bargain has probably been the brand new sofa, bought on Facebook Marketplace for £150 – when it was still in the shop for £999.

“My best recent buys are some old-style taps for £20 – also on Facebook Marketplace – which cost over £100 from [the online retailer] Victorian Plumbing.”

She says she has always been interested in interior design and enjoys blogging about it at Victoria’s Vintage.

However, partly because she works for an estate agent, she also has an eye on adding value to the property.

“I always wanted to buy an old house and renovate it without spending much money.

“We paid £260,000 for the house and planned to stay for a few years and sell – but after enjoying spending time in it during lockdown, we think it could be our ‘forever home’.

“However, if we do sell, I am confident we would make a profit after the renovation we have done.”

So far the couple have spent £2,000 on the house including on redecorating, furniture, kitchen appliances and the garden.

“A few products have been gifted to me by retailers as I’m a blogger, including a bed, mattress, rugs and curtains. And some pieces of furniture were also given to us by family members.”

The couple have renovated most of the property including, during lockdown, the garden – which had been used for car parking.

“It was just a big piece of very ugly and dirty concrete with a hideous shed.”

After spending £100 and getting creative with Moroccan-inspired stencils, she now has the stylish and relaxing haven she craved for summer days.

“It’s got a very Mediterranean feel to it. I’ve had so many compliments – people went wild for it on Instagram. It would have cost thousands if we had paved the area.”

It hasn’t all been enjoyable. “The biggest hassle so far has been the bathroom. We stencilled every tile. It took a few hours every day – for 14 days.” 

Victoria and Gavin have not dipped into savings or used credit cards. Lockdown has also allowed them to increase their savings – no commute, no money spent going out – which has helped.

“We just spend a little bit each month on the house from our salaries. And as I was furloughed for a while, I had plenty of time to do DIY work, decorating and the garden.”

What I did

1. We saved as much as possible for our house deposit so that we could get a good mortgage offer and keep monthly payments low. This means we have money left over to spend on the house each month.
2. We started the renovation by looking at the kerb appeal. We repaired the crumbling wall with original bricks, sourced second-hand brass knockers and bought an abundance of plants. 
3. We keep one eye on inspiring Instagram accounts and the other on Facebook Marketplace and eBay for bargains. We do a lot of DIY and upcycling, and buy low-cost furnishings and accessories.

What worked

• I genuinely enjoy using my spare time to do up the house and find bargains. 
• I am also generally good at being thrifty and upcycling products such as this £10 bench. I also bought a solid pine farmhouse table and chairs set off eBay for £37 and upcycled it using chalk paint. 
• You need patience when trying to get everything second-hand. Wait if looking for something specific – it will turn up. It took me two months to find our statement mirror for the living room; all the nice mirrors I liked were more than £100. Even second-hand, I couldn’t find a mirror I liked at a good price. I eventually found a huge mirror – which barely fitted in my car – just down the road for only £15 on Facebook Marketplace. It was wood but I wanted a gold mirror, so I spray painted the edge with gold paint and now it’s just perfect and exactly what I was after. Waiting really paid off as the mirror always gets compliments from visitors and it’s perfect for the space. 
• Our living room furniture is all second-hand. Apart from the mirror, the glass cabinet was £30 from Shpock, the ceiling rose was a plaster one for £20 from Amazon. The television unit was £10 – I upcycled it – and the blue chair was £50 from Facebook. The curtains and curtain pole I found in the clearance section of B&Q, and the accessories are all from cheap shops such as Poundland and Matalan. We did all the decorating ourselves using B&Q’s own brand of paint. 
• I gave the fireplace in the dining room a makeover for £35 – it was previously just an empty hole. 
• The bathroom suite was in good condition but the room needed decorating and modernising, so rather than getting a new fitted bathroom, we kept it and just redecorated and changed the fixtures and fittings. The shower was £30 from Lidl, the cabinet from Argos and faux plants from Ikea. I hated the beige bathroom tiled floor, but rather than putting new flooring down, I painted the existing tiles and stencilled them for a luxury look. 
• An open mind also helped. The £40 makeover for the kitchen included a lick of paint and stick-on tiles that I didn’t think would last – I thought they were naff initially! But it looks fresher. 
• For power drills, I called my dad.

What didn’t work

• Not knowing where the main cables were – one day my dad unknowingly hammered into the fuse box. There was lots of smoke and we lost power. It was genuinely scary.
• Make sure you measure the space properly before buying the furniture. I hadn’t correctly measured the spaces either side of the chimney breast in the bedroom where the wardrobes were meant to go. My dad had to saw one wardrobe down to size and reassemble it, as I hadn’t realised the alcoves were different sizes.