Tric Kearney: With the bathrooms remaining as they are, my focus, or some may say my whining, switched to our bedroom

OUR house reminds me of our children, it has a constant desire to part us from our money. I don’t mind when it‘s nice things like a new couch or television, but who wants to spend money on gutters or broken decking, not to mention a new boiler? Of course, they are all necessary, but they’re not the most glamorous of goods to go shopping for.

What with college fees and boilers, not to mention food and clothes, a few things we’d like to spend our money on have had to wait. Things like a bathroom makeover.

Over the past few years, I’ve been living in hope of renovating ours. Unfortunately, there’s nothing wrong with the two we have, the shower works perfectly, as do the toilets and sink. It’s just they are not new and sparkly like our friends’ bathrooms. So, every now and then I moan about them, until finally, a few months ago yer man said: “Why don’t you just go price it and get it done?”

How did we get on?

Well, since that day I’ve done nothing about it. The thought of shopping around for tiles and showers, not to mention the hassle of workmen has silenced me. Perhaps yer man knows me too well.

With the bathrooms remaining as they are, my focus, or some may say my whining, switched to our bedroom. Our youngest daughter was born there (in a planned homebirth) and recently when looking at old photographs we realised it has not been painted since. She’s now 16 years old.

It was a rather neutral beige colour, possibly called Meh, so we thought we’d go for a change. But, what colour would we like?

Yer man was all for something loud and different, but I was more conservative, reminding him that if it was on as long as the last colour, we might still be looking at it when we were collecting free bus passes! With no idea what we liked, I decided to seek the help of that font of all knowledge, Google. Little did I know it’s almost impossible to buy paint without a university degree in interior design.

Having typed in ‘painting our bedroom’ I was prompted to ask yer man some important questions.

‘What do you want your bedroom to tell you?’

Yer man was a little stumped by that one. As indeed was I.

We consulted Google again,

‘Do you want it to be a calm, relaxing room?’

Well, that sounded like a ridiculous question. Of course we did.

Delighted to be making progress, I clicked the link to discover we’d narrowed it down to blue, green, pink, white, violet, grey and lemon.

‘Or would you prefer warm and cosy,’ prompted the next question.

Who wouldn’t like a warm, cosy bedroom?

I decided Google was way too complicated so set off for our local paint shop and returned with enough colour cards to wallpaper the room.

“Are we definitely happy with this Virgin Mary blue,” I asked yer man weeks later, although, I suspected he’d lost all interest in painting and was possibly suffering from some sort of visual disturbance, blinded by the variety of tester blues on our wall.

Mumbling what I presume was agreement, he said, “I’ll paint it this weekend.”

I spluttered and choked as I tried, as politely as possible, to say, “Thanks but no thanks.”

Despite insisting he was an excellent painter, he agreed to call in the professionals. Two days later our bedroom was finished, with not a sniff of wayward blue paint on the ceiling or skirting.

So, were we right? Is it calm and peaceful?

Indeed it is. Unfortunately, as I lie admiring it, I can’t stop thinking, I’d like to do the bathrooms.