A couple added £230k and curb appeal to their home after renovating and painting their roof tiles with paint – costing just £400.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Ellie researched and discovered tile paint existed and bought £400 worth to coat their existing brown tiles twice.<br /><br />The pair - along with Ellie’s dad, Gary Rimmer, 60, a sales direction - cleaned each tile one by one with a wire brush and spent around four 10-hour days painting the tiles.<br /><br />Ellie and James couldn’t be happier with their handiwork and say doing the DIY themselves is “satisfying”.<br /><br />Ellie, a project manager for the NHS, from Brighton, East Sussex, said: “I have done a lot of upcycling in the past.<br /><br />“I just thought ‘surely you can paint tiles.'<br /><br />“I Googled it, and it did exist.<br /><br />“To save money on new tiles we cleaned them all by hand.<br /><br />“The first coat – the tiles drunk the paint.<br /><br />“We did two coats and all with brushes.<br /><br />“It fits with the rest of the house.<br /><br />"We saved thousands.”<br /><br />The couple bought their two-bed bungalow for £400k in September 2021 and have been renovating it ever since into a four-bed house – spending £120k so far.<br /><br />Ellie said: “We started stripping it all out straight away.<br /><br />“It wasn’t habitable.<br /><br />“It was built in the 50s and I don’t think it had been touched since.<br /><br />“We ripped the entire house back to the bare bones.”<br /><br />The savvy couple created a loft conversion to create two extra bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs.<br /><br />With the cost of their renovation rising, they wanted to find a way to fix the marked and moss-covered tiles cheaply.<br /><br />Ellie said: “We had always planned to give them a clean.<br /><br />“I saw painting tiles is done quite a lot in Australia.<br /><br />“While the roof was off for the extension, we cleaned them.<br /><br />“They were all mix-matched and marked.<br /><br />“When the tiles went back on the roof had changed size, so we were a few tiles short.”<br /><br />Ellie managed to find the remaining 500 tiles on Facebook marketplace from an old church for £150.<br /><br />With the roof back on but the scaffolding still up from their builders, Ellie and James worked tirelessly to paint them in April 2022.<br /><br />Ellie: “It’s very windy where we live so we couldn’t use spray.<br /><br />“Some of the neighbours would stop by as we were doing it to tell us looked amazing.<br /><br />“You’ve got to trust the process.<br /><br />“A year on it looks the same.”<br /><br />The couple have nearly finished the renovations and have been living in their home for the last eight months.<br /><br />They recently had their house valued and were told it was worth £630k - £230k more than they paid for the property originally.<br /><br />Ellie said they are starting the decorations for the last bathroom and will then have the patio to complete next summer.
