News, sport and entertainment from the Bournemouth Echo and Dorset Echo.

Off the wall

From the Echo, first published Saturday 19th Feb 2005.

JOAN BAEZ has been up in our bedroom again, singing her heart out about railroad disasters, unrequited love and people getting stabbed down by the banks of the Ohio.

The American folk singer, along with blues legend Muddy Waters and Messrs Bach and Handel are always first out of the dusty cassette tape box when decorating time comes around. And doesn't it come round quickly...can it really be 16 years since I last did the bedroom?

The peeling wallpaper and battered paintwork finally shamed me into action, although with my appalling record on getting round to jobs like this, I feel a bit like the bloke who said he had a good wash once a month, whether he needed it or not.

However, I feel it's worth pointing out that there are things about decorating that they don't tell you in do-it-yourself books, which have pictures of men in clean white overalls using the right tools for the job and doing it really well.

They start with a nice clear space, for example. This is always a source of dispute in our house because I maintain that it simply isn't possible to push all the furniture into the middle of the room, throw some polythene sheeting over it and work round it.

As a result, I render every other upstairs room virtually unusable by filling it with all the stuff I've taken out of the bedroom being decorated.

I even dismantled three MFI wardrobes that had been assembled in the room and wouldn't go out of the door to the landing.

Then there's the removal of the old wallpaper. In an excellent piece a little while ago by one of the Echo's weekday columnists, the writer recounted how she'd hired one of those steam machines which magically lift the paper, backing and all, off the wall.

The only problem was that she also lifted the plaster off the wall, in huge slabs, and had to have the whole lot replaced.

With that in mind, I settled for a bottle of wallpaper stripper (which I suspect is only a soap solution), a bucket of water and a large amount of hard graft.

Even with the inspiration of Handel's Messiah and my entire stock of Bach violin concertos, it still took me two days.

My wife helped, of course, like wives do. She popped upstairs with a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, which was nice, and inserted her fingernail underneath a tempting piece of wallpaper at eye-level which looked just ready to fall off the wall.

It didn't, and when she realised that she could do no better than to tear off a small, narrow triangle of paper, she left the rest to me. But to be fair, she's the designer and buyer of paint and wallpaper and she's very good at it; I just put the stuff up.

The DIY books also advise you to remove radiators before decorating. They do not tell you that when you undo the nuts that join the radiator to the water pipes, you discover that radiators contain a thick black sludge that stains anything it touches.

Nor do they mention that it is impossible to do the nuts up again without them leaking ever so slightly.

As for wallpapering, this is a process that really should join the list of Things Best Left to Someone Who Knows What They're Doing, along with plumbing and plastering.

In my experience, wallpaper does not slide neatly into position as shown in the DIY manuals and the whole business degenerates into a lengthy battle with sticky, soggy, pasted paper which rips if you so much as look at it and has the really irritating tendency to fall off the wall and drape itself over the top of your head.

Still, the job's done now and looks to be good for another 16 years.