When mother papered the parlour

Today

I can't believe I let Becky talk me into doing some of her decorating. I'd agreed to go up to help her with a massive tidy up and clear out of her flat.  As if clearing her garden of weeds, helping her clean and clear her cellar, and sorting CDs, DVDs, books and clothes wasn't enough, I found myself painting some shelves that looked perfectly OK to me.

In My Day

I really hate decorating. I don't know why it's assumed that, as soon as we reach independence, we're all capable of wielding a paint brush, trowel and pasting brush in a way that will do even a halfway decent job.

As a child, I had, of course, watched Daddy doing decorating. The only thing I learnt from him was the importance of cleaning brushes properly. 

I think I tried decorating in my teenage attic bedroom at 4BH, but my first proper foray was when I lived in Tarring with Sue Hole. Our otherwise lovely ground floor flat was looking dingy and we persuaded our landlady that we could do the needful. We went to a shop which mixed the paint for you. Eau-de-nil for the living room walls with eggshell grey woodwork, shocking pink in my room with white gloss and I can't remember what Sue wanted. At least we didn't paint the ceilings purple, walls orange and doors pink as many of our hippie colleagues did.

The colour, when mixed didn't look at all right so we went back to the shop where it was proved to us that it exactly matched the colour card. "I'll put some more green in it, if you like", said the shopkeeper, doing so. We decided to live with the resulting vivid peppermint green. I've no idea what the landlady thought of our idiosyncratic colour scheme, which I assume she discovered after we'd left. What I do know is that the quality of our work (especially mine) was of the lowest standard, with unevenly painted walls and curtains of dripping gloss.

Later on, Paul & I decorated the flat at Belmont. There I actually hung wallpaper and am amazed that it clung to the walls at all. At Rowan Avenue we decorated the lounge walls in dark brown gloss and one wall of our bedroom in mirror tiles. We again managed to put wallpaper up at Montfort Close and have decorated at Mead Close. Paul, while being very good at putting shelving and doing electrics and light fittings, has a technique even worse than mine and is a great deal messier, believing that you can clean up all the drips later.

In order to save our marriage, we now get someone in every five years or so to put on another coat of magnolia.

At Becky's I dug my heels in and refused to paint the perfectly nice pine bookcase in the lower hall.