Dominic Chinea, a star of BBC's The Repair Shop, has admitted he faces constant worry at night over one of his projects. The 40-year-old, who has been on the show since 2017, moved from Kent to Cornwall with his wife Maria and their dog Wendy.
Since the move, Dominic has taken on a new home and workshop where he focuses on his mainly automotive-related projects, including an Edwardian-era car and a Land Rover. However, it has been the workshop that has kept him up at night as he worries about the leaking roof and whether changes he has made, including guttering, will keep his prized possessions dry.
Relief after storm
In a video posted on his YouTube channel, Dominic opened up about his concerns after a night of driving rain and 40mph winds in Cornwall. After finding out his workshop had survived the night, he spoke of how relieved he was that all was safe and well.
He said: “I can’t explain how nice it is to come down to the workshop in the morning after a storm and it all be quite dry inside. Everything’s safe, everything’s dry.
“I literally lie awake in bed at night hearing the wind howling across, panicking, worrying all night that half the roof’s going to be taken off, the rain’s going to be coming in, the rain’s going to be flooding down these pillars, ‘What have I left out? Any electrical stuff that I’ve left on the floor?’
“It’s a constant worry. That worry is starting to lift as the building is getting better, so there will be some more roof progress coming very soon.”
Land Rover woes
Although the roof had survived and remained broadly leak free, Dominic still had concerns about what lay within, as he admitted his beloved Land Rover TD5 still needed serious work after failing its MOT. He explained just how much work he needed to do that day to get his off-roader fixed.
He said: “The priority today is to get my TD5 welded back up because it failed the MOT on some rust on the chassis and luckily, that’s one thing that I can do.
“I think from what the MOT guy said it was three out of the four outriggers are rotten [and] need some patching up, and there’s a little bit, I think, the footwell somewhere. I’m fully planning to replace the chassis with a galvanised chassis.”
However, things were about to get much worse for Dominic when he looked in the footwell of his Land Rover, where he found yet more rust that had impacted the car so badly, there was a hole in the floor.
He said: "Removing this floor mat revealed the horrors. I was not expecting it to be this bad.....the passenger side is actually worse. This job has just got a lot bigger so I'm going to have to take out most of the interior to gain access to the rusty bits."
The gearbox cover has to come out and both of pieces of the floor....Not only did this reveal more rot on the bulkhead and the floor panel, but also on the outrigger that I'd just repaired.
Determined to finish
This meant Dominic found he had a lot more work to do than he'd realised. The Repair Shop expert added: "I thought I was over the hill with the repairs and very nearly [ready] to drive this out of here and go for its MOT, but unfortunately, the bulkhead and the footwell on the floors are really not good."
Despite these challenges, Dominic said he was still determined to get the car through its MOT and then consider a complete "tear down" and restoration of it in a few months time.
Dominic returns to the UK’s screens tonight (October 7) in The Repair Shop: Beyond the Barn at 8pm on BBC One.
