Room to Improve

Room To Improve features challenging and innovative new design projects, the man with the plan is Architect Dermot Bannon.

Featuring a diverse mix of renovations, rescues and extensions, as always, each build is fraught with human and financial drama: overstressed budgets, last minute changes of heart, unexpected disasters, unpredictable weather and the vagaries of an architect desperately, sometimes unsuccessfully, trying to convince his clients that he knows what's best for them. With a range of budgets and demanding clients, Dermot Bannon balances his role as designer with that of diplomat, mediator and project manager as he fights his corner with feisty contractors and has his diplomacy skills tested by clients who know exactly what they want.

Quantity surveyor Patricia Power is Dermot's budget-wrangling project manager and financial advisor: reigning in the designer's more ambitious plans, cutting deals and adding a layer of sober fiscal practicality to the proceedings.

Exposed power lines, extensions built without foundations, unstable roofs, parasitic fungus, spiraling budgets, design dilemmas, slipping schedules, necessary compromise, unnecessary delays, absent homeowners, flights of fancy and frayed nerves - this series has it all.