The Repair Shop’s Dom Chinea: ‘Living in the country was great, then the housing estates arrived’

“My life’s collection: all my precious tools and machinery were out in the elements going rusty, whilst I was desperately, desperately trying to get some walls built, the floor poured and the roof repaired so I could bring them inside. They’re my babies almost, you know? And they were just getting ruined.” He shakes his head. “After a year of digging and moving concrete blocks and repairing the roof, I’d just about got things watertight and was starting to unpack stuff to get the workshop running. Then, bang, I hurt my hand. It got pulled into a drill when I was making a wheeling machine for my YouTube channel.” It looks like it’s healing up, though? “It’s not the cuts that are the problem,” he says. “It’s more the deep bruises. I’ve got sausage fingers and I can’t move these two yet.”

Witnessing the evident stress, I want to know what motivated his move to the South West. From the pictures posted on social media, it seemed the 39-year-old star and his wife, producer Maria Domican, had a pretty idyllic rural set-up in a former post office in Kent. It was also much closer to the Chichester barn where The Repair Shop is filmed, so why up sticks?

“It’s hard to explain, because Kent was amazing in many ways,” nods Chinea. “I lived in London for 10 years before moving out to Kent, and at first it was great to be in the countryside.” The couple bought a dog, Wendy, and enjoyed walks. But they were not expecting to see the fields around them being “redeveloped, everywhere, with new housing estates springing up even in the short time we were there”. He and Maria were throwing their all into a garden that they realised they probably weren’t going to stay long enough to see mature. “I was spending so much time and money building outdoor structures and thinking about planting trees that I knew I was going to be handing on to somebody else, because it just didn’t feel like our forever home.”