Katie Humble: I can have lots of ideas but I do find doing them quite difficult

Kate Humble helps a team of people pick up litter.  Photo: Isabel Infantes/PA Wire

KATE HUMBLE is tackling home restorations and mini build projects on The Weekend Workshop.

DESCRIBE THE PREMISE OF THE SHOW IN YOUR OWN WORDS

“Well, it’s basically a show embracing the concept of upcycling, so, rather than just throwing something away that either feels dated or is broken in some way, this show is about kind of looking at old things with new eyes and coming up with ways of refreshing them or repurposing them into something that basically is new and useful and beautiful hopefully.”

IT FEELS LIKE THE UPLIFTING THING EVERYONE NEEDS RIGHT NOW...

“I think it is very uplifting, it feels very timely really. And oddly, it wasn’t planned to be a lockdown show and although we obviously filmed it in lockdown. My husband, who is a film-maker, he filmed it.

IT WAS SOMETHING THAT LOTS OF PEOPLE WERE THINKING ABOUT

“Lots of people suddenly with a bit more time had this kind of urge to be a little bit creative and make things for their homes or their gardens, so it does feel quite timely, like it has tapped into a bit of a zeitgeist and a bit of a... response to a difficult situation, allowing people to get creative and have fun doing it.”

WHO ELSE APPEARS IN THE SHOW WITH YOU?

“It’s three of us - Max and Zoe - who are, it has to be said, a lot more talented and creative than me. I’ve been a long admirer of people like Max and Zoe who seem to be able to create things out of nothing with seemingly no effort at all.

“For me, I can have lots of ideas but I do find doing them quite difficult so it was a big learning curve for me to actually, instead of sit and think, ‘Oh, I could maybe do this with that one day’, actually having to get on and do it.”

WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE CLAY PIZZA OVEN YOU BUILD AS ONE OF THE PROJECTS ON THE SHOW?

“We had the idea because, before this project was even talked about, we were building a new pond (at home) and so we dug it out with a digger and we’ve got really heavy clay soil and I was like, ‘We’ve got all this clay, it just seems like a waste not to do something with it’.

“And then this project came up and I said to the production company, we’ve got all this clay, we could use it to make an oven. It was just a really nice way of using, the perfect thing of we’ve got this stuff lying around, we’re not quite sure what to do with it, let’s try and make something beautiful and useful.

“It’s a long project and it’s quite complicated but it was lovely that at the beginning of the filming process it was the very first thing we started to do because we knew it would take quite a long time to build... but on pretty much our last day filming we were eating pizzas, which was great.”

* The Weekend Workshop airs from July 20 on HGTV.