Home Decorating – Don’t let my Mum out the house

I love my Mum and her and my Dad have worked tirelessly to help us with our decorating. She does also have a penchant for embarrassing her daughters – I firmly believe that it is every mother’s right to embarrass their children and I intend to continue the family tradition to the fullest extent when/if our own children come along. So how do you combine decorating with my Mum’s skill at embarrassing me?

The decorating machine had moved on to thinking about the bathroom – O and I both love bubble baths and were desperate to have a bath in the tiny bathroom that we have. We knew it was possible as we were told when we bought the property that they had removed the bath and put in a shower cubicle to make it safer and easier for the little old lady that lived there. We had a vague idea of how it might all fit in but the maths wasn’t really stacking up. How do you fit a bath, toilet and sink into a room that is the length of a bath and the width of two baths? We had tried a couple of bathroom designers to see if they could come up with any creative ideas of how to fit all these things in – they all asked if we really wanted a bath, seriously why do they do that? We are the customer we are telling you what we want why are you questioning our sanity when we want to reduce the floor space of our bathroom to about a foot?

(we joked about trying to find something like this to maximise space

- I didn't realise it actually existed! From here)

My Mum then came up with the great idea that we should go and look at the neighbours’ bathrooms to see how they had fitted everything in. At this point we’d lived in the flat for over a year and we knew the neighbours to wave to, we’d say Hi but we’d never been in their homes, and I didn’t know the names of most of them. O at this point refused point blank to go anywhere with my mother (she has to become mother now to illustrate how mortified I was). Take note that we’d been decorating in another room for most of the day so were in old filthy clothes and looked like we’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. Seriously if some mad looking woman turned up at your door and asked to see your bathroom what would you do? Slam the door in her face would probably be my reaction! But no our neighbours are amazing and they all said yes, please come in (there were some very strange looks and quite a bit of hesitation), as I trailed red-faced after her.

There is unfortunately no denying that there has been huge benefit from this ordeal. We have completed the bathroom renovations (although it didn’t go smoothly) and are starting to look at the kitchen (probably after the wedding) but I now know what my neighbours’ kitchens look like (once she was in their houses there was no stopping my mother) which is helpful when planning our layout. I know all the neighbours’ names and although I’ve never been invited back into their homes (strange that) we are much friendlier in our waves.

So today’s lesson – my mother has no shame but she gets the job done.