We designed a house for strangers – and it completely changed how we think about our own home

Committed home renovators David and Andrew Harrison-Colley (better known on Instagram as The Home Boys) are part of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing their thoughts on making a home together and living through the tricky parts. See the rest of their articles here.

Every breakage, delay and awkward layout at Owls Cottage has taught us something about our own home – because a house that has to work for strangers can't hide behind good intentions.

Changeover day at Owls Cottage always starts with the same walk-through: strip the beds, check the bins, count the wine glasses. Last month we got to six out of eight and stopped counting. We didn't need to see the pieces in the recycling to know what had happened. We just walked to the garage, opened a box, and put out two more.

Owls Cottage sits next door to our own cottage, and for the last few years it's paid its way as a holiday-let while we've worked on the house we actually live in. Same postcode, same taste, completely different brief. Our own home only has to survive us. Owls Cottage has to survive whoever's booked it that week – and unlike us, they've never been told which floorboard creaks or which tap needs a firm hand.

That's the real difference, and it's taught us more than we expected. A well-designed room shouldn't need its quirks explained to you. Every choice we've made at Owls Cottage has had to hold up without us standing next to it, translating.

Lesson one: replaceable doesn't have to mean disposable

The wine glasses that came with the cottage originally were a fairly delicate, matching set – the kind you'd choose for your own dinner table without thinking twice. They didn't last. After replacing a few, we gave up on matching altogether and switched to vintage cut-glass instead.

It turns out our local charity shops are full of the stuff – heavy, faceted, no two quite the same, usually 50p to £1 a glass. We pick up little hauls whenever we spot a good one and keep the spares in the garage, which now contains what is probably an unnecessarily well-stocked emergency wine-glass department. When one breaks, we swap in a replacement from the box, and nobody notices it wasn't part of the original set – because there never really was an "original set" worth being precious about.

The glasses look better than the ones they replaced. They also cost less than a pound to replace instead of a tenner and a wait for delivery. We hadn't expected those two things to line up quite so neatly.

Lesson two: the least disruptive option can still be the durable one

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The cottage bathroom came with grey patterned wall tiles that had dated badly, though they were still stuck fast to the wall. Pulling them off would have meant a much bigger job than we could risk – tiles that well-attached tend to take plaster with them on the way out, and we didn't have an open-ended timeline to deal with it if they did.

We considered painting over them, but weren't convinced a painted finish would hold up to daily use in a bathroom we wouldn't be keeping a constant eye on. Because the existing tiles were sound and firmly bonded, we used Kerakoll Keragrip Eco, a primer that rolls onto suitable existing tiles and creates a key for the new adhesive to bond to. It only works over a stable base – you're not skipping the prep, you're skipping the demolition. That meant no risk to the plaster underneath, and a job we could finish in the gap between bookings. We found green zellige tiles heavily reduced at the Topps Tiles Outlet and tiled straight over the old grey ones.

It's not really a holiday-cottage problem. Anyone with a bathroom they can't take out of action for a fortnight – which is most people, most of the time - is weighing the same thing: the most correct fix against the one that actually gets finished on time. We liked the result so much that when it came to our own main bathroom, we used the same zellige tiles again.

Having already lived with them at the cottage, we knew exactly what we were getting into our own home, instead of guessing from a sample tile.

Lesson three: build in flexibility before you need it

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The second bedroom at the cottage has two single beds that get reconfigured most weeks – twins for one booking, pushed together into a super-king for the next, depending on who's staying. Two separate headboards would never have read as one piece once the beds were joined, and unless they were fixed to the beds themselves, they'd have been genuinely clunky to shift every changeover.

So we built one padded headboard that spans the full width of the wall instead. MDF panels cut to size at our local B&Q, upholstered in fabric from a local fabric shop, foam and spray adhesive bought online to keep the cost down – nowhere near what a custom-built version would have cost. It's hung on a French cleat, so in theory it lifts straight off if it ever needs recovering or repairing. We haven't had to test that part yet, but with beds changing over weekly, it was never going to be a headboard we could afford to make fiddly.

Whichever way the beds are arranged, the wall itself effectively becomes the headboard. It's a small bit of joinery, but it's changed how we think about our own bedroom too – we're planning something similar there once we finally get round to finishing it, useful for any room that has to earn its keep two different ways, not just a guest room booked by strangers.

Designing for the unfamiliar

None of this came from working only on our own house. When it's just the two of us living somewhere, a mistake is an inconvenience – an ugly tile, a job we'll get round to eventually.

At the cottage, the same mistake shows up on someone else's holiday. That's forced us to design for people who don't know the house's quirks, which turns out to be a genuinely different skill from designing for people who do.

It's changed what we're willing to risk closer to home, too - though not in the way you might expect. Owls Cottage hasn't taught us to buy worse things for it; it's taught us to tell the difference between irreplaceable and hard-working. The irreplaceable pieces tend to stay at home. The cottage gets things that can take everyday use, be replaced without fuss, and still feel like they belong there.

If you ever come round for dinner and your glass looks a little more interesting than ours, there's a reasonable chance it's on secondment from Owls Cottage. It may also be nicer than ours – which is perhaps the clearest proof that practical doesn't have to look practical.