I have the same taste in wallpaper as Carrie Johnson – I’m just £112,000 shy of her budget
Katie Glass brings us up to speed on her efforts to decorate her house – on a shoestring
After my success painting the living room a rich, velvety red, I’ve become overconfident. “Anyone can be Kelly Hoppen!”, I think, heading out to Homebase with big plans to repaint the whole house.
In London, I never even considered painting. My city friends would cruelly say that’s because I had a social life then. There were also practical considerations. In the endless flats that I rented, there never seemed any point. Why lavish money, time and love on a property that you might have to move out of in six months? But now I own room after room, all begging to be done up.
I enter Homebase, my head full of ideas – a dangerous combination of unskilled and enthusiastic.
I do consider wallpapering, but that really does seem beyond my skill set. Besides, although I have the same taste as Carrie Johnson, I’m £112,000 shy of her budget.
My aunt gives me a tip that if I choose Farrow & Ball colours, I can have them colour-matched by Dulux for half the price. Some people are sceptical about this. One friend warns the paint won’t be the same quality. Another tells me she did up a flat like this and found the copied colours, always slightly mismatched, came out so bright and garish, it looked like she was living in a Jamaican dancehall. Still, that doesn’t sound too bad.
Choosing colours is far harder than I predicted. I run back and forth to Homebase buying little tester pots, daubing different colours all over the walls, so soon the house is full of wrong-coloured spots and I’m committed to painting rooms I never intended to touch.
When I do eventually settle on a colour, I discover the next problem: there is a vast gulf between what you think a room might look like when you’ve tried out a tiny smudge on a single wall to what it actually looks like when you’ve slapped paint across every surface.
I paint the bedroom a fashionable, cool lilac that dries to an icy white so cold that when Laila stays, she complains that the room is like waking up in the Arctic.
I buy a baby blue for the hallways, palatable in small doses, which – when it’s covered every wall – morphs into the putrid colour of a doll with pneumonia. “Like sickly babies screaming,” Martin considers, inspecting it. Now he is dating a local dairy farmer, he’s become a regular guest, but the best kind – turning up in the morning to do a quick plumbing job, disappearing in the evening to have dinner with his man, popping back the next day to comment on how my paint looks. “It really does make such a difference when you pay a professional to paint for you,” he comments one morning, apropos of nothing.
I discover it is very easy to make a bright room look dark, a warm room depressing and a beautiful room cheap, and also that there’s probably a reason that the last people who lived here had the whole place in shades of magnolia. “Boring,” I said when I moved in. Martin said nothing for once. Although, as he drily remarked, “Now, you are literally writing a column about watching paint dry.”
I can’t keep my hands off the walls, even the ones that don’t need doing find themselves smothered in lashings of Dulux. I become a regular at Homebase, where I hope the staff aren’t judging my garish colour choices that probably look like I’m decorating a brothel. Some people call my colour choices “brave”, but that seems an absurd word to use about decorating.
“Is this your first house?” asks a friend who comes over to find me painting the fireplace gold. Why? “No reason,” he grins.
In the paint section of Homebase, I laugh with the man at the desk about the ridiculous names they give paint: Hugs and Kisses, Celebrity, Mayonnaise, Dead Salmon (which, actually, I rather like). Some are less descriptive than evocative: Mellow Sage, Dimity, A Stitch in Time. I wonder why they don’t choose names more appropriate to our lives – Messy Bedroom, Muddy Labrador, Midlife Crisis Black, Menopausal Mauve.
“It’s literally someone’s job to come up with these names,” laughs the man in Homebase. I don’t tell him what my job is. “So, let’s see what Mole’s Breath looks like, then,” he says, popping open a tin.
I spend evenings standing on a chair, listening to 6 Music, drinking wine, slicking a fat brush until my right arm aches. I long to be ambidextrous.
In hindsight, the drinking was a mistake. The morning after an intense painting session, head throbbing under Homebase’s neon lights, it’s hard to remember if I’ve painted the spare room Careless Whisper or Ammonite. I’m only really absolutely certain when I’ve bought a litre of new paint, painted a whole wall, let it dry, and then it’s totally clear the other doesn’t match.
My attempts to diligently use masking tape on everything run into a sticky mess. Still, apparently the trend now is to cover everything the same colour – or at least that’s what a friend in Glastonbury says who has painted his entire sitting room teal – radiators, skirting board and beams. “If you don’t,” he advises, “your house will look like a mock-Tudor pub.”
Soon, I have transformed whole rooms into Elephant’s Breath, a peachy mole pink that has the distinct advantage of looking good even when patchy.
“Did you use damp-proof paint?” Martin asks, as we watch one colour soak through the wall. What is dampproof paint? It turns out there is a different kind of paint for everything – for the radiators, doors, floors.
As I paint the house, I get to know its bulges, its cracks and sockets. “They don’t have many plugs, do they?” I say to Martin, forgetting that they are me now. But every time I paint a new wall, I feel this house turning into my home.
I’m full of ideas… a dangerous combination of unskilled and enthusiastic