My decorating disasters: A true story

Friday, 7 January 2011 3:28 PM

Writing about the bright green colour trend sweeping the interiors world this spring took me on a cringe-ridden trip down memory lane.

I'm sure most people have occasionally bought a piece of furniture or, worse, completely redecorated a room, only to stand back and survey the effect once it's done thinking, 'What have I done?!'

It takes a particularly clueless person, however, to create an absolute monstrosity only to look around, fold their arms and nod with satisfaction. Cue yours truly.

It all started when I was 13 years old and my brave - ok, foolhardy - parents said I could decorate my room in whatever colour I wanted to. The deal was that they'd buy the paint and I'd do the work.

That was fine by me, because I had a dream. Changing Rooms fever had recently swept the nation, and with it, the craze for sponging*. This paint effect had rather taken my fancy and so I proceeded to splotch every wall surface in my bedroom with a particularly sickly shade of cornflower blue. I didn’t do it very well - there were several spots where I'd used too much paint and it dribbled down the wall in wobbly lines.

However, I have never been one to do anything by halves and I didn’t stop at the sponging. Another trend at the time - at least for teenage girls - was the Mystic-Meg-style stars, moon and sun theme. I was quite an arty kid and so I bought some acetate, borrowed my dad's Stanley knife and made star and moon stencils, which I used to create a silver-coloured border around the room.

You would have thought that I'd be exhausted by that point, and indeed I was - for a week. The following Saturday, though, I realised that the play room was crying out for some teenage TLC. By the time I was done with it, the room was painted the most disgusting shade of acid green imaginable. One wall also boasted three moons and four stars. I'd run out of silver paint, you see, and at that point I also quickly ran out of interest. The room has remained in that state ever since.

It gets worse though. We had only moved into the house that year and we'd inherited some truly horrifying mustard-coloured carpets. Obviously, this didn’t sit too well with the acid green walls - but none of us, not even my design-savvy mum, could figure out what colour of carpet could complement such a 'jazzy' scheme (this was shortly before it occurred to us Brits that not all rooms actually needed to be carpeted).

Anyway, we somehow ended up settling on navy blue. None of us can remember whose bright idea that was, although let's face it, it was probably mine. I will have a hell of a lot to answer for when that house goes on the market and doesn’t receive a single offer.

Thankfully, my taste has developed into something approaching acceptability now, but there are nevertheless three morals to this story. Firstly, never give a paintbrush to anyone under the age of 16. Secondly, don't adopt any trend promoted by Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, especially if he's wielding a sponge. And thirdly, before you coat your walls in this season's forest green splendour, think very, very hard about what you're going to do with the floor.

*If you can't remember that far back, sponging is a painting technique whereby the decorator gets a wodge of natural sponge, dips it into paint and dabs it on the wall, creating a mottled effect.

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• decorating
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• painting
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• real people real homes
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• trends