To some it might be just another TV makeover - but for Stuart and Amy Preater it's the answer to their prayers.

The couple, who both grew up near the sea, are desperate to move back to the coast from their Ben Rhydding home.

And they are hoping that a little help from Channel 4 will make their dreams come true.

Mr and Mrs Preater have been trying since June to sell their home on Valley Drive to enable them to buy a Victorian house in Devon or Cornwall.

So they jumped at the chance to have their three-bedroomed 1920s semi featured in the popular series Selling House.

Experts from the series will spend a week refurbishing the £158,000 property, which will then be thrown open for viewings on November 7.

The Preaters have lived on Valley Drive with their ten-year-old daughter Corianne since moving from America to England four and a half years ago.

Mrs Preater, a 49-year-old artist, presently working as a cleaner, grew up in Key West.

Her husband Stuart, 54, who has dual British and Australian nationality, spent his early years in Sydney and has worked as an oil rig diver and scuba instructor.

Mrs Preater said: "We love this house and we love Ilkley but we really miss the ocean - we are real oceanholics. That is why we are moving."

The couple, who describe themselves as Anglophiles moved to this country because they wanted their daughter to grow up here.

"Nowhere can compare to England and Wales - but the English don't appreciate it," she said.

Mrs Preater, who had run a successful hand painted clothing company in Key West hopes to resume her artistic career after the move as well as providing lodgings for foreign language students.

She said: "Houses are so expensive up here. You can get a five or six bedroomed Victorian house in Torquay for £180,000."

The Preaters applied to have their house featured on the programme after reading about it in the Ilkley Gazette, but they never really expected to be selected.

Mrs Preater said they couldn't believe it when they were told they had been chosen.

"It is fantastic - it is the answer to my prayers. I feel as though I am newly born," she said.

The Preaters, who will move out and stay with family in Burley in Wharfedale while their property is being revamped, have been forbidden from allowing photos to be taken inside their home until the official viewing on November 7.

But Mrs Preater revealed: "Being an artist the interior of my home is not what would normally attract the buyers in this area, because Ilkley is a very beautiful area and you have some discerning people.

"The bohemian, Robinson Crusoe effect did not really work," she laughed.

She said the house had only changed hands twice in the last 30 years and was stuck in a 1970s time warp.

"It is clean but extremely outdated," she said. "It has an outdated look and my artwork all over it - and people cannot look past that."

The Preater's will have no input at all into how their property is changed, and may even have to put their "eclectic" furniture into storage.

But she said: "We are very excited and very happy to let them move in and change it."

l Potential buyers who would be willing to be filmed for the programme should call Claire Whitaker at William H Brown on (01943) 600456.