If you're a landlord, you'll know the temptation. A property needs freshening up between tenancies, you're watching the budget, and a tin of basic matt emulsion seems like the obvious choice. It's cheap, it covers well enough, and it gets the job done.

Except it doesn't — not really.

Outhouse Creative Upcycling is Russell's workshop and shop in Southill, Weymouth — a one-man operation built on the idea that the wood, glass, metal and mechanical bits everyone else skips still have a job left in them. The name isn't just a play on words: the building itself used to be a public toilet block, upcycled into a shop.

Russell's own sign on the wall puts it better than we could — "our world is so wasteful in things we throw away unnecessarily," he writes, and the Outhouse is his answer to it.

Somewhere around 11pm, scrolling Rightmove for the fourth night running, most people ask themselves the same question: is this really the answer?

You know the routine. The house you're in doesn't quite work any more. The kitchen belongs to a previous decade. The layout fights you daily. So you do what everyone does — you start looking at other people's houses. And if you're feeling ambitious, you might even flirt with the big dream: a plot of land and a self-build.

Here's the thing nobody in the property industry will tell you, because there's no commission in it:

The best house on the market might be the one you're already living in.

At UIL, renovation isn't a sideline — it's the heart of what we do. So let's take a serious, honest look at your three options: move, build, or improve.

Eight years, sixty-six reviews, and one line on a website we've now read about forty times just to be sure.

Every trade business in the country says it's the best one. It costs nothing to say, it can't be checked, and most people have long since learned to hear it as background noise.

So we're going to be careful about how we say this.

On FreeIndex — an independent UK business directory that has verified our listing since September 2018 — Upcycle Interiors Ltd (UIL) is now ranked 1st out of 117 UK Home Improvement companies.

Not fourth, where we were sitting. First. In the country.