While on holiday Chau Lee stumbled across an inspiring story about May Savidge who moved her own home piece by piece from Hertfordshire to Norfolk. Chau is a designer and green builder. One of the projects she and her partner, Andy Singleton, are currently undertaking is to move a shed, piece by piece, for a client.
 
"We travelled from Knebworth and randomly ended up at Wells-next-the-Sea for Andy's birthday. In an old Ostlers house in the town was a little old lady selling her homemade wares."
 
"I got talking to her about May Savidge after I found a book about her for sale on a table. She said she knew May Savidge and she was an incredible lady. It was a story which called to me because it chimes with our life right now."
 
"May Savidge relocated her house from Hertfordshire to Wells next the Sea, took it apart herself and labelled every piece. We are currently taking apart a system-designed shed to build in someone's garden. We have also been labelling each piece so we can put it back together in another location."
 
May Savidge was interviewed by the BBC in 1980. A folk song has been written about her called 'The Blue Lady' named after the caravan she lived in for decades. Her story was featured on Antiques Road Show in 2013, after her niece Christine Adams, who currently lives in the finished house, brought to the Holkham Hall show letters, photos and artefacts belonging to her aunt.
 
Born in 1911, May bought her medieval home in Ware in 1947. She renovated the house single-handedly over many years. In 1953 the local council told her the house needed to be demolished to make way for a roundabout. For 15 years May battled the authorities, and in 1968, when she was 58 and with the bulldozers at the gate she insisted that she would move her house to a new location. With the help of local scouts she labelled beams, bricks and roof tiles.
 
"So began a life of hardship. She had no electricity and worked by the light of Victorian paraffin lamps. She used an alarm clock to set herself targets each day, noting how many nails she extracted from oak beams per hour, as she dismantled the house and prepared for rebuilding." Daily Mail article 21 May 2009.
 
She loaded lorries with the old materials, hired a builder to lay foundations and fix up the wooden frame on a new plot in Wells next the Sea and then set about laying bricks, climbing scaffolding and fixing the roof.
 
Decades later in 1992 she had installed a wood burning stove, and the house was watertight with many walls plastered but still in reality just a shell. A year later May Savidge died leaving her house to her nieces and nephews on the proviso that they finish the building.
 
Christine Adams wrote a book about her aunt's life, completed the building and now lives in 'Ware Hall House' which she runs as a B&B.
 
Chau Lee was inspired by May's story and stunned at the connections between their small current project and May's lifelong undertaking. "What a load of coincidences. I really wish I could have met her."
 
A Lifetime in Building : the extraordinary story of May Savidge and the house she moved by Christine Adams with Michael McMahon, published by Aurum.