Handmade Huddersfield home

How many of us have been in this situation: you’re home from travelling, you’re working low paid jobs, you’re back living with mum and dad and you can’t afford to rent your own place let alone buy.

Well I’m about to tell you about one Yorkshire woman’s ingenious solution.

Stephanie Bertenshaw took three garages next to her parents’ house and with £12,000, help from family and friends and a whole lot of imagination and creativity, transformed them into a villa-style home now valued at £150,000.

Steph’s pretty home is at Marsden, near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. It’s on the plot of her parents’ old coach house, from where her mum also runs a healing centre. Her grandparents also live on the site, in a timber chalet.

Taking it from garage to home meant adding an extra skin to support the back walls, bricking up old doors and fitting windows and a new, arched door.

Inside, the house has a bedroom with a mezzanine level for a small bathroom and a small sitting room with gallery above which doubles as a spare bedroom. The kitchen has a store room and cloakroom at the back.

Steph, a 24-year-old artist and illustrator, has recently added an extension for her studio which allowed her design business, Felt Mountain Studios, to grow. She creates prints for greeting cards, gift tags, stationery and wedding invitations and logos for businesses.

Her own art work adorns the walls, alongside pictures, postcards and wallpaper. She puts them in vintage frames updated with colourful paint, bought by the tester pot.

Furniture donated by friends and family sits alongside charity shop finds – like her set of 1960s dining chairs that cost £12 – and Ikea classics.

Thanks to my friends at Gorgeous Yorkshire for letting me use their photos and re-tell Steph’s story here.

I was so impressed by this family’s vision and Steph’s beautiful but budget styling. (So was Kirstie Allsopp: it’s been featured on her TV show ‘Best of Both Worlds’).

What do you think to what they achieved, friends?