BBC restorer Suzie – ‘It’s my own home that is in need of repair’

As part of The Repair Shop team, Suzie Fletcher helps bring damaged family heirlooms back to life.

But the expert restorer has admitted that away from the cameras, her own home could really use some TLC.

While grateful owners leave the popular BBC1 show with their prized possessions brought back to their former glory, Suzie’s modest home does not even contain a bed.

“I have a mattress on the floor,” she said. “But that’s fine, I only have myself to please. It’s very easy to get weighed down by a lot of responsibility and the bigger the property, the more you have to do.

“I like being able to do something on the spur of the moment and not have to worry about the lawn being mowed or a bedroom decorated.

READ MORE The Repair Shop experts ‘make fan’s day’ with restoration admission

“I have one bedroom – that’s all,” she told presenter Kaye Adams on her How To Be 60 podcast.

Suzie, a leather worker, joined the Repair Shop in 2018, having moved back to Britain from America the previous year. She said: “I came back with two suitcases and a box of tools. I didn’t have a home, I didn’t have a workshop. I didn’t really have an awful lot.

“Mum and dad had left me a little furniture and my grandparents’ arts and crafts table and chairs and that was it. Everything that I’ve bought for the house has been second-hand.”

Suzie, 61, had moved to the US to work as a master saddler but stayed after meeting and marrying husband Rob. She recently claimed he was abusive and coercive, but she still loved him and nursed him through his cancer until his death in 2013.

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“It was hard to watch him go through it and I never let him feel that I loved him any less,” she said.

“My life has been a series of happy accidents. I came back to the UK and just wanted to be quiet. The Repair Shop were already asking me to join the team before I left the States and I said no. I knew I needed to heal.

“But five weeks after getting back to the UK I ended up at the Big Barn.

“That was six years ago and that was all part of the journey I was supposed to follow, because it’s been a massively big part of me healing.”

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