Designer Dee Coleman - alongside builder Peter Finn and their team of fitters, painters, chippies and clutterbusters - are back on our screens tonight for a new season of Home Rescue: The Big Fix, where every second spent on decluttering and renovating beloved homes matters.
This year, the Home Rescue team brings the Big Fix to a variety of homes in Louth, Kildare, Dublin and Co.Clare.
Having made her television debut last year with the previous season, Coleman says that she's learned much about the fine art of decorating for television, working on ambitious projects in just five days and with cameras following your dusty footprints through the house.
Coleman is used to juggling, she tells me when we speak over the phone. Briskly making her way back to her own home, which is still undergoing renovations, she laughs at the memory of the last few months of work: "It's not easy as a interior designer to have people to your house and it not be finished."
"I'm very aware that I'm very lucky to be in the condition that I have a house in an area that I love", she says, eager to list how fortunate she and her family was to stay with her dad while navigating this project, but adds, "The logistics of life became so complicated. It was just really hard.
"So it's given me a fresh understanding of the pressures that my clients are under. So I'm hoping I'm a more empathetic designer now."
It was an experience that gave her enormous empathy for the first home featured on the series, which she worked on while carting her and her family's life from home in Malahide to her dad's in Drogheda. Working with Doreen, who had recently had her daughter, son-in-law and their young son Odhran move into her cramped bungalow, felt especially close to home.
It was more challenging by Odhran having "quite extreme additional needs", with Coleman firmly fixated on ensuring he had a calming environment amid the chaos.
"Instead of being in a situation where he had his own sensory room and had a routine and a set up, a life that he was comfortable with, he hadn't left his room at one point for seven months because he was in so much distress", she said.
With Odhran sleeping in his parents' room, all members of the home were in some state of disruption. "When I look a bit deeper, they hadn't had a full-night sleep in over a year", she says.
Achieving such a revamp of a family home - as Coleman would know personally - takes months, if not years, but the Home Rescue team have just five precious days to pull off such a feat. And it's not even five, Coleman is quick to point out.
"The first day is declutter and demolition. And then the last day is styling and handover. That's the reveal. It's three days. And at the tail end of the third day, Keith and his crew are exhausted because they've done 12, 14, 16-hour days. And they're heading out the door. And that's where it becomes really important to become laser-focused on the priorities."
"Plus then there are the irritations of being on a TV show. You want me to talk to the camera now? Really?" she laughs. "I have to remind myself that the only reason I'm here is because there is a TV show being made. Because it's easy for me to just get really frustrated with the process of the TV making at this point, because my focus is so clearly on the design and build."
These "unreasonable demands" lead to "immense satisfaction", and it's one of the many reason Coleman keeps coming back. "It's the buzz of being able to achieve what looks unachievable on paper and doing it to such a high standard. And that's only achievable because of the team that we have in place."
Although referring to the Home Rescue team, Coleman is also vocal about the support her family gives her during these stressful months of work. "In those weeks, very rarely do I have to make school lunches", she says.
"Rather than to feel guilty about it, which you could, I've decided to actually really relish that time to be completely focused on the task at hand."
Of course, getting comfortable with such demands means that you can step back more and connect, something that Coleman relishes on set. She recalls speaking to Doreen, whose husband was a firefighter and who herself longed to be a firefighter when it was only men who could do so.
"[There] was a little figurine of a female firefighter, and she was just wistfully looking at this figurine, and it was like that was the life that she had wanted."
Naturally, that figurine won pride of place in her newly revamped home.
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