Metro

Cuomo girlfriend Sandra Lee renovated home without permits

Domestic diva Sandra Lee has been renovating the tony Westchester County home she shares with Gov. Cuomo while blowing off the town’s permit process — and possibly dodging higher taxes, officials say.

The millionaire Food Network star got a relative steal on her six-bedroom home at 4 Bittersweet Lane in New Castle when she bought it for $1.2 million in early 2009, not long after home values crashed.

Since then, she’s been fixing up the property, known as Lily Pond, with virtually no consultation from town Building Inspector Bill Maskiell, The Journal News reported Sunday.

Maskiell said it took six months of “chasing and threatening’’ Lee in 2012 to get her to apply for a proper building permit for the $11,000 gazebo and shed she had already installed.

“I got no response from her people,’’ he told the Journal News. “I finally spoke with [Cuomo’s] people. They sat down with me and said, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Then, they didn’t get back to me. I finally sent a violation and got a response. Finally, [Cuomo’s spokesman] Larry Schwartz got in touch with me.”

He said Lee — who is worth an estimated $20 million, according to the Web site Celebrity Net Worth — eventually got the permit, although the town’s assessor said that ultimately, the gazebo and shed did not affect her property assessment or $28,312 annual tax bill.

But there has been a host of renovations inside Lee’s home — and proudly shown off to the press — that were done without town approval, meaning she could be skirting higher taxes, the paper said.

The town’s property taxes are based on home values, so any upgrades could increase the amount.

In touting her home improvements in the past, the “Semi-Homemade’’ star described for USA Today how she “ripped out an ’80s-era powder room and its ‘icky’ bunny wallpaper.

“She put parallel white marble islands in the kitchen. She joined two smaller, darker spaces and installed a wall of windows to create one big, bright living room,” the paper said.

She also told New York magazine that she had remodeled her basement.

But Maskiell grumbled that the interior work described “would definitely require a permit’’ and, “I haven’t heard about any remodeling there.

Anything that involves removing walls or reconfiguring doors would require a building permit,” he insisted.

A rep for Lee could not be immediately reached by The Post on Sunday.

Schwartz told the Journal News that the work done in the home involved “all decorative renovations, and they don’t require building permits.

“It was re-tiling, painting, wallpapering. It’s like her line of work — decorative. I’m not aware of any rooms that were combined,” he said.

“Again, the key word is decorative. Window treatments.”