What makes a house a home? We discovered the answer this week. All you need is a carpet, and suddenly when you trot bare-foot from the dining room into the sitting room, you don't have to worry about the splinters you might pick up along the way. With a carpet you no longer fret that bare board trotting in the early hours of the morning might disturb the neighbours. You just stand there, happy as anything, toes luxuriating in all that synthetic fibre, wondering why you waited a year-and-a- half to buy a strip of carpet for your hall.
We were playing the painting waiting game. There was no point investing in floor coverings, we reasoned, when it was only going to get ruined by paint splatters. The waiting for the hall to be painted business might never had ended, had we not woken up one day and realised that the hall was not actually going to paint itself. The painting fairies - distant relations of those shoemaking elves - were not going to arrive in the night and splash a few tins of magnolia around. The selfish imps.
Initially, we planned to have a painting party because we read about them in one of those oddly upbeat DIY magazines, and it seemed like a cheap way to get an annoying job done. Our only outlay would be the paint, some pizzas and a few cans of beer for the participants. We made enthusiastic noises about a painting party in what we thought were the appropriate family circles, but received only polite but non-committal noises in return. They took one look up at our majestic hall ceiling, estimated the amount of sanding required on the stair banister and promptly offered to help with jobs such as screwing handles on doors.
So we waited. One day, without really saying anything, we realised we were waiting for the man of the house to make a start on the job. No sooner had this sunk in than he began collecting things. One day he came home with a roller and a stick that allowed the roller to extend to a great height. All the better to reach those hard-to-get-at corners, he explained. Another time he came home with an industrial-sized bottle of white spirits. For the clean-up, he said. After a few days, and a few more bottles, it became clear that his mother's genetic predisposition to bleach hadn't in fact skipped a generation but had merely morphed into her second son's obsession with another equally toxic substance. The painting equipment mountain teetered in the shed while we waited patiently for the big day to arrive.
Deep down, we knew it never would, no matter how many squares of sandpaper he brought home. So, one day I rang the number of the professional painting people, a number I had hoped to use only in an emergency. It was painless really, just a quick, casual conversation involving words such as "quickly" and "please".
I told him the bad news when he arrived home with a bag containing eye-goggles and two pairs of paper overalls. He took it quite well. Initially, I was a bit worried when he disappeared off to the shed to, as I thought, stare lovingly at his painting purchases and apologise for letting them down. But when I went out to see if he was OK, the hysterical laughter coming from the shed sounded like someone more relieved than peeved. I knew then that he would eventually get over it.
The professional painting people were very professional. In the past, we have employed work persons who nicked chocolate from our fridge and then inserted cardboard into the empty wrapper as a decoy. This subterfuge was slightly less successful than intended because they used cardboard covered in the brand name of their company's product. Duh. These painters brought their own snacks with them, including fancy German sausages and olives, of all things.
As I struggled to cope with their ridiculously professional 7.30 a.m. starts, their leader would ask me questions I found myself entirely unprepared, for such as: "What colour do you want the walls?" We soon eased into a painless choosing method. "I use this one a lot," he'd say, painting a neutral shade. "I absolutely love that," I'd say. "Urban Stone, it is," he'd say. "Urban Stone," I'd repeat back to him before cycling off to work without a care in the world.
Now our house is a home. The walls are perfectly painted and the hall floor is covered in a carpet the exact colour of red wine, so chosen because the (why, oh why?) cream carpet in our sitting room is already liberally covered in red wine stains not of our making. When we have a party, and we will one day have a party, all those drinking red wine will be forced to stand in the hall, and they won't even mind because these days it's the best place to be. Home is where the carpet is. Finding this out has just taken slightly longer than expected.