CASE STUDY


THE FRUITS OF DETERMINATION


Nothing was going to stop resourceful self-builder Gill MacLeod achieving the house of her dreams, a major renovation in rural Scotland


TEXT JAYNE DOWLE IMAGES EMMA GRAY C


lambering around a delivery depot in a hi-vis vest and hard hat, clinical psychologist Dr Gill MacLeod realised that her mission to raise a new home from a cluster of tumbledown farm buildings had given her powers of determination she didn’t know she possessed.


What was she doing there? Her voice warms with passion as she recalls the story. Planning the interiors for her self-build project, she had fallen in love with some engineered wood flooring – at a cost of £63 per m2


. “It was lovely, but it was too expensive,” she 50 www.sbhonline.co.uk


explains. “So I went on the internet and ordered a similar floor for much cheaper. Then I was reading various online forums and people were saying that this particular flooring company would take your money, but send you a different floor to what you had ordered. I was really worried, because once you accepted delivery, there was no way to send it back.” That’s how a middle-aged professional woman ended up crawling around in a delivery depot in Livingston, in a desperate search to divert an order before it was dispatched to her half-built new home, eight miles away in Linlithgow.


LOW POINT


“When the wrong flooring was delivered” – Gill MacLeod


january 2020


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