I spent the bank holiday weekend decorating. These are the facts I came away with:
- It doesn’t matter how much paint you buy, you won’t have enough. A weekend decorating always has to incorporate a hurried trip to your local DIY store, dressed in scummy painting clothes and with splashes of paint on your face and in your hair.
- No matter how carefully you cover the floor with dustsheets, paint will find its way onto the carpet/shiny new wooden flooring.
- If you paint with your husband, you will row. This may not be true of every married couple, but when you bring together a painstakingly slow perfectionist (my husband) and a fast, a blind-man-on-a-galloping-horse-won’t-notice slap it on type of decorator (okay, yes, that’s me) rows are inevitable.
- The colour on the tin, or even on the test patch you tried earlier, will look very different by the time all four walls are covered with the stuff. By then however, you’re going to love it, because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
- Unless you’re a regular painter, your arms will ache for the next few days.
- Cleaning up afterwards takes almost as long as the actual job itself.
- Finally, when you sit down with your glass of wine after your shower, the feeling of satisfaction when you survey your finished work is only fleeting. You’re too exhausted to really appreciate it. And the next morning, with paint still in your hair, all you can see are the bits you missed…