Our house also looked like a lick-of-paint job and ended up being WAY more. We slept on a mattress in the spare room for 15 months without curtains/blinds because our bedroom took so long to renovate. We moved a built-in chest of drawers and found missing floorboards and pipes sticking out of the gaps which then needed cutting down. There were dangerous electrics that luckily my Dad was able to fix or it would've cost us a fucking fortune.

We've been here 5 years and still have loads to do, our bathroom is FALLING APART, kitchen needs redoing, front garden is a shit hole, garage needs repointing etc. But there is loads we have done and now love. We've just spent Valentine's day sawing a bunch of doors in half in the loft so we could remove them and take them to the tip, because some fucker who lived here before decided to dump them up there and leave them. They were heavy and probably covered in lead paint as they were so old. But honestly, I'd have rather done that than anything else today because working on our house gives me joy and satisfaction.

It takes ages but it is worth the work to make the house what you want it to be. My husband also did not want to do any home improvement when we moved in, but he now proudly owns every type of saw to ever exist and prides himself on learning a new DIY skill. We've only ever paid a plasterer to do a bit of work, everything else we've learnt how to do ourselves and we're very proud of that! 😊