Love it – but listed it
Couple’s ‘forever’ house goes on the market after revamp by TV’s Phil and Kirstie
SURELY you would stick around in your ‘forever’ house – especially after Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer helped you improve it? Last year, Karyn Lumsden and partner Duncan Sibbald invited the TV pair into their 1950s semi for the popular Channel 4 show Love It or List It. For the uninitiated, the programme works by exploiting the contrasting wishes for a property among its occupants. One wants to leave – to List It – while the other wants to remain and see what can be achieved by improvements suggested by Kirstie and Phil.
After months of work and a budget of £41,000, their cramped home in the Carron Valley was transformed and the couple elected to Love It by staying put.
Come early 2017, however, and the house is on the market after Mr Sibbald landed a job in London.
Ms Lumsden, a marketing and communications professional, said: ‘We are genuinely gutted to be leaving the house.
‘It’s in a great location, the neighbours are fabulous. We just hope that whoever comes in makes it their “forever” house – that’s what it was meant to be for us.’
The 1950s builders would never have believed the space that could be exploited by a 21st Century TV team, backed up by accomplished designers, architects and tradesmen.
Converting the attic turned the three bedroom, one bathroom, semi into a four bedroom, two bathroom, spacious family home.
In the programme screened last year, Ms Lumsden highlighted the home’s shortcomings which made her want to List It.
She told Kirstie and Phil: ‘Duncan can’t really fit in the bathroom to begin with. He burns his bum on the radiator.”
Not now, he doesn’t. The elegant bathroom that emerged from the renovation would not look out of place in an Edwardian villa, with its half-timbered walls in soothing pastel green.
The roll top bath is big enough to allow Duncan and Phil to sit in it together, as they did in one funny scene in the programme.
The dramatic attic transformation afforded separate bedrooms to Duncan’s girls, Niamh and Orla.
The kitchen got a makeover, too, to make it a more comfortable diner, and Ms Lumsden got her dream ‘boot room’ and log store built outside.
She said: ‘I originally wanted to List It. I told the programme I was scunnered with it and they had to put up subtitles to explain the meaning of the word to English audiences.
‘But I had no idea of the space which could be created upstairs. Now, I have four bedrooms and a lovely bathroom – that’s my favourite and I’ll hate to leave it.’
So what is a cause for regret among one couple could be reason for celebration for another. But the reworked house is only half the story at 2 Roadmans Houses, seven miles west of Denny on the edge of the Carron Valley Forest. The property comes with more than two-and-a-half acres of land across the road, enough to accommodate two or three horses, plus timber-built stables.
For horse-lovers, there are miles of hacking in the Forestry Commission’s Carron Valley Forest next door.
No wonder Kirstie said during the show that the location was ‘one in a million’.
Sadly, viewers only get to see what’s screened after the final edit. So what were Phil and Kirstie like to deal with?
Ms Lumsden said: ‘The whole set were great fun. On days when filming was taking place, they would take us out to lunch and we would have a great laugh.
‘They all went out of their way to make us feel very welcome.’
In what may well be a first for the show, this is one couple who have Loved It as well as Listed It.
Offers over £215,000 to Baird Lumsden in Bridge of Allan. Tel 01786 833 800 or email info@dmhbl.co.uk