Sometimes I think I was a Viking in a past life. If I have a gory karma of slash and burn, it would explain why I am doomed to spend my health, strength and cash doing up impossible wrecks.

Look at the photos — would you spend £450,000 on no roof and not many walls? I was sketching an outline of the kitchen and said to my friend, who is Jewish and into food: “Where shall I put the oven?”

“There isn’t anywhere to put the oven,” she replied. “There isn’t anywhere to put the kitchen. There isn’t any anywhere here.”

I agree I need a roof and some more walls before it can be painted, but at least this ruin, unlike my house and shop in Spitalfields, London, didn’t come with a dangerous structure notice.

I love this building. Before I owned it I had it propped to stop further collapse, and I had my builders salvage the stone tiles and cover the roof-ribs in sacrificial felt. In a building trade world of RockWool and Kingspan, this biblically named material had both romance and warning to it — it’s me who is the voluntary sacrifice on this wonderful and crazy project.

The building is called the Gasworks, and I live in Gasworks Cottages, which is in one of the beautiful parts of the Cotswolds, but makes me feel like I am back home in Accrington in some industrial hovel.

The cottages housed the workers who made and pumped carbide gas to the Brassey Estate — one of those vast Victorian new-money fantasy piles. Thomas Brassey (what a name) was a Yorkshireman who made a fortune building railways, including the Great Western, and spent huge amounts of money on the best that technology could offer — which, before the First World War, was carbide gas for lighting.

Brassey was also a proud estate planner and the Gasworks is a handsome, big-boned, masculine building, sitting near the modest cottages, with their vegetable plots and outside privies.

I had been hoping to buy this building for a long time. Its previous owner did not want to sell. Then, by some stroke of luck, he saw the extension I had built on to the cottages and investigated my listed buildings history via my Spitalfields house, and decided that I was “the one”. There was no negotiation on price or condition, and I had no power in the deal, but what I did have was a sense that he is as eccentric as I am and that we understood each other. He threw in half an acre of woodland, and — bingo! — I have the last remaining unrestored Cotswold ruin, with planning consent, and it’s next to my house. So it’s not completely barmy.

But then the planners got involved.There was me sitting in the Mercer Hotel in New York with Lee Hall, who was about to win ten Tony awards for Billy Elliot, when in pings an e-mail from Cotswold District Council to throw out my plans completely — and I’m thinking, “wow, half a million quid and I can’t have an upstairs . . .” Then I realised I was so worried that I wouldn’t sleep again anyway.

The planning permission extant was from 1985, and had been drawn up by the previous owner on graph paper, and included bathrooms and bedrooms so low that even a 5ft-tall person such as myself would feel Gulliver-like. It simply didn’t work. But the planners were saying no increase in height, no extension, no digging down, no altering the roof line ... no more windows (sorry, additional fenestration), and yet it was the existing permission that had pegged the price so high.

I decided that I could either commit suicide or arrange a site meeting.My builders, who have worked with me on every project for the past 16 years, put on clean shirts but refused to take off their hard hats — this meant business. When the planner and the conservation officer arrived, looking grim, I could see that I had been marked down as a Viking vandal who wanted too many windows. Then, suddenly, Simon Cairns, the senior conservation officer at Cotswold District Council, looked at me and said: “Verde’s! SPAB!”

The others assumed that we were Freemasons and had dropped into a private language. In fact, the breakthrough came when Cairns realised that I had restored one of the best listed buildings in Spitalfields with the help of the architectural historian Dan Cruickshank and SPAB — the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings.

At last we had a common language. Cairns came up with the best possible solution to the problem of respecting the building and letting me sleep at night: restore the Gasworks as it was, with a big, roomy downstairs only and vast high ceilings, and build on the land-space a funky modern structure for sleeping and whatever.

“Straw bales, if you like,” he said. “Steel, glass, something absolutely contemporary and ecological.” Reader, I would have married him.

Enter Chris Dyson, a Spitalfields architect who is inspired when it comes to finding a language between old and new structures. While the builders are giving me a few more walls and a roof, Dyson is coming up with ideas in tin. I will probably, inevitably, build myself another bit of my Accrington past and end up with a tin tabernacle in the garden.

Dyson’s sense of the spatial relationship between the Gasworks and what will be a modern courtyard behind it should mean that the single-storey outbuildings, which will be bedrooms, bathrooms and work spaces, will combine the certainty of the original building with the ad hoc approach of Victorian outbuildings.

Of course, we have to convince the council that this is the best solution. But however tricky, it now feels exciting, rather than impossible. It has been an interesting lesson: the first time I have started a building project and felt that the “other side” — the planners — had come up with an idea that was much better than the original proposals and my modifications.

I have financed this building by using my pension, so if the whole thing becomes an insane folly, I will have to turn it into a B&B. Which is why I’m still sketching the kitchen — and wondering where to put the oven.

Jeanette Winterson will be giving regular updates on the progress of her project in Bricks&Mortar

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