ANYONE who has ever packed away their worldly possessions to redecorate a room will know what a time-consuming and stressful experience it can be.

Spare a thought, then, for the team of National Trust experts who were given the unenviable task of dealing with the 22,000 items of Snowshill Manor's remarkable collection.

In October 2003, the manor closed its doors to the public as the painstaking task to clear the historic house began.

Suits of Samurai armour, old musical instruments, model ships and a wealth of other items all had to carefully cleaned, restored if necessary, wrapped in acid-free paper and put away ready for rewiring and other essential maintenance to begin.

Now, the collection has been returned to the manor, which opens tomorrow, Good Friday.

Visitors who were familiar with the manor before it closed 18 months ago may not notice any changes - but work has been done to bring the collection closer to Charles Paget Wade's original vision.

Trust spokesman Alex Brannen said the differences were mainly to do with subtle changes to the lighting and background colours.

"Similar to other practitioners within the late Arts and Crafts Movement, Wade wanted to create 'total environments'. His objective was that all objects within a room should harmonise, allowing the visitor time to study an object without the distractions found in high Victorian interiors.

"To assist this he used subtle backdrops of paint, panel and lighting to allow objects to merge with one another".

Charles Wade was an architect and craftsman from Yoxford in Suffolk, who inherited sugar estates in the West Indies from his father. This enabled him to devote his life to amassing his enormous and varied collection of craftsmanship, which he acquired mainly from antique shops and dealers in the UK.

He spent many hours in the manor house arranging and restoring his collection, while living in the old priest's house in the courtyard.

Much of the collection was bought between 1900 and 1951, when he gave it, along with the Manor, to the National Trust. He said that he hoped people would learn to appreciate and love good craftsmanship from the objects he had collected.

There are 22,000 items in the main collection, plus about 2,000 costumes, all of it having in common the concept of honest craftsmanship that Wade admired so much.

He believed that every object was invested with the spirit of the craftsman and the age in which it was created. He raised even everyday functional objects like butter stamps, cow bells, and locks to the status traditionally given to paintings and sculpture.

Snowshill Manor itself is the epitome of a traditional Cotswold house, built of golden yellow stone and set on a hillside overlooking the Vale of Evesham.

Although the south front displays classical details of about 1720 the main part of the house dates to around 1500. By 1919 the manor was a semi-derelict farm, when it was bought and restored by Charles Paget Wade.

For more information about the manor and other National Trust properties in the area, visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk.