Home Improvement, with extra swearing

Tuesday 15th December

So there's a plan afoot.

I have a few rooms in my house that serve virtually no purpose. I have a Library that's virtually impossible to get in the door for all the stuff that's piled around waiting to go up into the attic and has been for the better part of the year, plus everything in the spare room.

The spare room itself used once or twice a month by people foolish enough to want to sleep overnight. Little do they suspect the mountain of bodies in the back yard.

No, the spare room was the target of the latest plan to convert a boxy little room with a ratty single bed and a mountain of crap into a new and efficient office for my writing.

So, taking it in order the first thing that had to be done was to magic the room empty. Which is easily enough done with an army to help carry and a warehouse to put everything into.

I, however, had neither of these things. I had a couple of invalids and an already-full room to squeeze things into. And apparently boxes do not move by swearing at them. It only took a couple of centuries to move everything out of the room, but by god it was finally done.

Then a quick trip to the insanitarium, and onto step two, removing the wallpaper that was apparently put up in the age before the steam-turbine and was apparently fashioned from some primitive form of asbestos.

It was fascinating to discover all the different wallpapers that the room had been decorated with before the current one, each of which was suitably horrible and all of which had only been partially removed before the decorator gave up and just papered over the lot. I think I might have gained a few inches to the room by getting rid of most of it.

I eventually gave up and decided to paper over what was left, especially since what was left had apparently been welded to the wall. That only took another couple of centuries.

Let's not forget the cleaning up at this point. Mountains of dirty and used wallpaper all over the place can be seen as a hindrance and doesn't move itself by swearing at it, my hoover will testify to that too.

Now for the trip to B&Q. Alright, so the timeline is a little squiffy, but you'll just have to accept that I was in the place wandering round the wallpaper aisles looking for divine inspiration. Fortune favours the brave and I discovered that the second best way of getting help is to walk up to a member of staff and admitting that you're clueless as to what you're doing.

The very best way of getting help is to grasp a member of staff firmly by the throat and admit that you're clueless as to what you're doing. Clueless about wallpapering that is, I'm quite good at throttling people. We used both methods while I was there.

A quick tour of the site, a large trolley and some crying later I found myself in possession of a billion rolls of paper, some coloured, some lining paper, a fifty billion gallon drum of ready mixed paste, some tools, a new folding table and a couple of bits for some shelves and I headed to the tills.

Oh, a side note about tills in B&Q, if you're running a shop the size of a few barns stuck together you really should have more than one till open at once, no matter what time or on what day. I decided to save time by using the self service tills. This is a mistake since the ones at B&Q were designed by Bobcat Goldthwaite's speech therapist on L.S.D. Scan first item, check. Place first item into large hopper, check. Wait for assistance, che….what? The point of using this till is because there's no bloody staff here in the first place. Nice going, B&Q, way to make the customer feel loved.

What you might have realised at this point is that I have spent a lot of time, money, effort, swearing, my house looks like a bombsite, my feet hurt and I have yet to actually start decorating. There is something very wrong here.

Oh yes, I forget to tell you about the spare bed. Well that had to go. We've got a foldout futon for guests to sleep on, so the big ratty single bed had to go, same as the red sofa in the living room. So how do you get rid of old furniture? Well the most obvious answer is to call friends with vans, all of which have since sold or crashed them, inconsiderate sods.

We eventually called the magic pixie hotline branch of the local government, who for a one-off fee would gladly come round to the house and magic things away. A maximum of five items to be magicked away. Well, a bed and a sofa is two items, yes? No. That would be one sofa, a bed and a mattress. No, that would be a sofa, a bed, a mattress, and a headboard. I seriously expected them to start counting the cushions on the sofa and charge us double.

But these they would magic away from the house on a Wednesday, providing they were outside between seven in the morning and five in the afternoon. They aren't insured to come inside, these magic pixies. So they had to be outside at the latest of 7am. And you can't put them out the night before because this is rainy season and if they get waterlogged then the pixies can't touch them. They probably explode.

Hence the scene at my house a couple of weeks ago of me and my darling manhandling large furniture through small doorways at six in the morning trying to be extra quiet to not disturb the neighbours and setting up an art installation in the driveway. Then back to bed.

I got up to relieve pressure at 8am that morning to discover that pixies like driveway art so much that they had stolen mine without waking us. I wonder where it is now, but when they say they start at 7am, for once I believe them.

Anyway, back to the plot, I'm standing in an empty room with a bucket of paste and a flimsy table and enough paper to kill a civil servant.

I nearly wept when I realised that I had yet to start.