The panic of another season bore down on me as the builder boyfriend painted the breakfast room with the green paint I’d chosen. But he couldn’t paint fast enough for my liking and we started to have the most terrible rows. Despite us being fully booked last summer, I had come to the view that the whole thing wasn’t viable and we were bound to go under. I started looking up estate agents who market big old piles in Ireland to stupid people in America.

This house is like a monster devouring my money faster than I can feed it. I fed the beast by filling the oil tank to the brim at Christmas and it was a quarter gone by the new year.

The plumber turned up one night to tell us he really was going to come and finish the third bathroom he had walked away from after taking so much cash from me that I lost track of how much he had swindled by not finishing. In any case, he wants more money to finish it.

He said he would be with us the second week in January. And then he didn’t come. Of course he didn’t. So we have the same two B&B rooms, not three for the summer ahead. We are not expanding as planned, and with all the maintenance piled up from last season needing to be done before the first guests arrive in two weeks, it feels like we are going backwards. At this rate, the place will be less finished than last summer.

Trying to get........

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