A couple added £230,000 and kerb appeal to their home after renovating and painting their roof tiles with paint – costing just £400. Ellie Rimmer, 27, saved £4,100 by cleaning and painting her tiles black instead of buying a brand new set for an average cost of £4,500.
She and her partner, James Lawrence, 28, a company director, came up with the idea to paint them while strapped for cash during their house renovation. Ellie's research led them to buy £400 worth of tile paint to coat their existing brown tiles twice.
The pair - along with Ellie’s dad, Gary Rimmer, 60, a sales directior - cleaned each tile one by one with a wire brush and spent around four 10-hour days painting the tiles. Ellie and James couldn’t be happier with their handiwork and say doing the DIY themselves is “satisfying”.
Ellie, a project manager for the NHS, said: “I have done a lot of upcycling in the past. I just thought ‘surely you can paint tiles'.
“I Googled it, and it did exist. To save money on new tiles we cleaned them all by hand. The first coat – the tiles drank the paint.
“We did two coats and all with brushes. It fits with the rest of the house. We saved thousands.”
The couple bought their two-bed bungalow for £400,000 in September 2021 and have been renovating it ever since into a four-bed house – spending £120,000 so far.
Ellie said: “We started stripping it all out straight away. It wasn’t habitable. It was built in the 50s and I don’t think it had been touched since. We ripped the entire house back to the bare bones.”
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The savvy couple created a loft conversion to make two extra bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs. With the cost of their renovation rising, they wanted to find a way to fix the marked and moss-covered tiles cheaply.
Ellie said: “We had always planned to give them a clean. I saw painting tiles is done quite a lot in Australia. While the roof was off for the extension, we cleaned them.
“They were all mis-matched and marked. When the tiles went back on the roof had changed size, so we were a few tiles short.”
Ellie managed to find the remaining 500 tiles on Facebook marketplace from an old church for £150. With the roof back on but the scaffolding still up from their builders, Ellie and James worked tirelessly to paint them in April last year.
Ellie: “It’s very windy where we live, so we couldn’t use spray. Some of the neighbours would stop by as we were doing it to tell us looked amazing. You’ve got to trust the process. A year on it looks the same.”
The couple have nearly finished the renovations and have been living in their home for the last eight months. They recently had their house valued and were told it was worth £630,000 - £230,000 more than they paid for the property originally.
Ellie, from Brighton, East Sussex, said they are starting the decorations for the last bathroom and will then have the patio to complete next summer.
She said: “We project-managed it ourselves. We did the research to find things cheaper. Doing the bits yourself – it’s satisfying. We’re finally being able to enjoy it. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”
