You know that feeling when you accidentally buy the wrong house? No, me neither. Thirty-one-year-old Cal Hunter does, though – and it was to prove quite the most fortuitous error of the young carpenter’s life.

The blunder – attributed to a fast-talking auctioneer and a mix-up with lot numbers – left he and his partner Claire Segeren, 29, with a derelict Victorian villa 35 miles from the apartment in Glasgow that they’d been targeting. 

They’d wanted a project; they got a property described as “on the point of collapse”, a state presumably shared by their respective families when they saw the couple’s purchase.

Not to be disheartened (and because Scottish auction bids are legally binding), the pair set out on a 4.5-year restoration so daunting and improbable, it garnered global media attention, spawned a warts-and-all documentary, and saw them accrue an army of 300,000 Instagram followers.

Sitting with the couple in the open-plan living room/kitchen of one of the two holiday lets they’ve fashioned from the ground floor of the villa, Jameswood, they give off a faint air of incredulity. The paint’s barely dry. We’re their first visitors. I don’t think they can quite believe what they’ve achieved. 

My young offspring are equally dumbstruck; it’s a rare holiday indeed in which you watch your hosts in a four-part BBC series on the journey there, then find them waiting for you on the doorstep. (“Look – it’s the sweary one!” announced my youngest, yet to be initiated into the boundless frustrations of DIY.)

The sweary one, for his part, is looking relaxed after a morning shifting soil in the garden, which extends 80ft to the rear and will soon boast a pizza oven around which guests and their two hosts can mingle. “Despite everything, I knew quite quickly that this was the house for us,” he says. 

We’re treated to a quick tour of the property. Our two-bedroom apartment is served by what was formerly the main entrance and has a boot room, a bay window with views down to the water, and French windows leading to the garden. The neighbouring apartment, of similar scale, is accessed via a side door, and the home Cal and Claire have created upstairs for themselves has its own steps and entrance at the back. 

All three are spacious, high-ceilinged and mix Victorian solidity with contemporary decor, augmented by commercial tie-ins leveraged from the couple’s huge social-media following. The fire-engine red of our living room door has us pestering Claire for the paint manufacturer. And where once it was the legs of a chair in the room upstairs descending from the ceiling, now it’s a retractable projector screen for watching movies. The apartments are immaculate but also (parents give thanks) hardy. “Dogs, mud, sand…it’s all good!” says Claire.