Bowmont, in Pencaitland, was taken back to its basic four wallswhen Rosalyn and Alex Donaldson moved in six years ago

“When we started, I remember telling one of the builders we needed to move all the doors,” Rosalyn says, and with good reason, as the door into each room was in the middle of a wall, which made furniture placement tricky.

The Donaldsons didn’t stop with the doors: as with many old houses the more work they started, the more they realised was needed. “Basically, the whole place was taken back to its four walls,” Alex explains. “We had to install new beams to move the doorways; we took away walls to open up spaces; we removed the old staircase and put in a new one.”

The list goes on as the house was rewired, replumbed and replastered. New double-glazed sash and case windows were installed (except at the front of the house which has single glazing) as was central heating, underfloor heating in the bathrooms and in the expansive dining-kitchen-family room to the rear, where concertina doors open into the garden.

This rear section is new: in its original form, Bowmont was a single room deep, and a previous extension had created a ground floor study with a guest bedroom above. The Donaldsons – who have three grown-up children – extended the house further on two storeys, which added 40 per cent to the existing floor plan, creating the dining-kitchen-family room downstairs and a similarly expansive master suite above.

Alex and Rosalyn had kept an eye on Bowmont for years. “We always thought it was an attractive house, and we were always drawn to having an old house as they have so much character,” Alex explains. Alex, who runs a computer company in nearby Macmerry, and Rosalyn, who works as a massage therapist in Haddington, had lived only in new houses prior to Bowmont, and had designed and built their last home. They liked the idea of a project, and it helped that they employed the team of contractors they had worked with previously.

“We don’t mind getting stuck in,” agrees Alex, who embraced a hands-on role here, working alongside the joiner and tackling everything from cutting the new doorways to working on the roof, where he was helped by the couple’s three sons, Gary, Neil and Ryan.

In hindsight, however, living here during the process was a bad idea. “We thought we could as it’s a big enough house, and we just moved everything from room to room,” recalls Rosalyn, but the place was a building site. When the extension was being constructed the roof was taken off the rear of the building and replaced with a tarpaulin, while, at one point, they had only a single electrical socket for the whole house. Rosalyn recalls the night she returned home late after a day of rain and heard running water, only to discover the following morning that the bathroom ceiling had collapsed, bringing a giant wasp’s nest with it.

They didn’t rush into things: the couple lived in the house more or less as it was for the first 18 months. “We did it up superficially when we moved in, which is when we realised how bad it was,” Rosalyn explains. Their ideas evolved during this time. “Initially we considered adding a conservatory and maybe extending the kitchen, but the more we lived here the more our ideas changed,” she says.

The couple worked through various layouts. Relocating the staircase was a challenge. Originally, when walking into the hallway, visitors were faced by the back of the staircase – you had to walk under it to access the living room. This was stripped out, creating a wide hallway upstairs that Rosalyn has designed as a study area, and the new staircase was inserted in the middle of the floor plan, behind the bay-windowed sitting room (which was also opened up by combining two rooms). In order to make the stair fit, a layer of brick had to be removed from the external wall and a steel beam was inserted to support the roof. “That was quite daunting,” Alex acknowledges. “We looked at other options, but the space didn’t flow and we’d realised from doing our last house that the flow of rooms was very important.”

While Alex spent this eight-month project working on the nitty gritty of the refurbishment, Rosalyn threw herself into sourcing the various fittings required to transform the shell into a comfortable home, taking her cue in part from the property’s history. Bowmont was built for the Rev James Coullie on his retirement from the ministry in Pencaitland in 1924, so this would never have been a house for fussy detailing and falderals, and Rosalyn reflected this when sourcing the fireplace for the sitting room, for example, which came from Holyrood Architectural Salvage.

The cornicing was copied from what was already here, and Holyrood Joinery made all the new architraves and skirtings to appear authentic. They also made the new vestibule, for which Rosalyn’s sister, glass artist Izzy Millar, made the stained glass, while The Edinburgh Window Company manufactured all the new windows.

The dining-kitchen-family area is a highlight. “We did consider going really modern for this new part, but it wasn’t working for us or the house,” says Rosalyn. The couple opted for a classic look for the kitchen with panelled units by English Rose and a gas-fuelled Aga, and with Travertine tiling underfoot.

Various elements were tweaked to fit by the joiner, including the Travertine-topped dining table (from Sterling Furniture) that was ‘slotted’ into the island. With the doors open into the garden, this is a great, year-round space.

The couple also made an impact with the bathrooms, and Rosalyn acknowledges that she struck a hard bargain when sourcing some of the fittings – the walk-in shower in the master suite had an eye-watering RRP of £7,000, but she negotiated a healthy four figures off that price.

Other elements were bought online, from shower trays to interior doors, and returned when the quality wasn’t right. As Alex says: “You can buy cheap doors, but they look cheap.” Rosalyn was as canny when choosing furniture, accessories and wallcoverings, sourcing lighting from John Lewis, wallpaper from Laura Ashley, and curtain fabrics from Mandors, and always keeping her eyes peeled for a good find. She kept a notebook in her bag throughout the project with the measurements for each room, along with an array of colour swatches and a measuring tape in case she spotted something that might work for a space.

But then, with a project of this scale, Alex and Rosalyn had to be canny, investing their budget where it counted and saving where they could without compromising on the quality or aesthetic of the finished product. As a result, this handsome house now looks as appealing on the inside as it does from the driveway.

Offers over £850,000; contact Rettie & Co (0131-220 4160, www.rettie.co.uk)