Wyn Drabble: If you spot a weed drink up

It can happen in number of ways. I have, for example, been dressing-gowned and outside enjoying my first coffee of the day when I spied a large weed. Keeping the coffee nice and level so as not to spill it, I leaned down and plucked the intruder from the soil. Then, not far away, I saw another.

You know the rest. An hour or so later, an empty coffee cup sits alongside a sizeable pile of extracted weeds on the pavement. An unplanned day in the garden follows.

Wardrobe building can have the same small beginnings. A new, must-have shirt might be the catalyst. Then, oh dear, nothing goes with it. The process begins: new trousers, new shoes, perhaps a smart blazer. Expensive shirt!

So it was with our most recent bout of interior redecorating. A very smart and quite large new pottery item needed to be on display. But the house colours were all wrong. Solution: change them.

Do you think it stopped there? The furniture now looked too shabby. New furniture. Dining chairs re-upholstered, new cushions scattered tastefully across new sofas, new art work configurations. All for a piece of pottery.

Naturally enough, I was in charge of the painting element of the makeover and, based on this experience, I would like to pass on a few snippets of information that may be of use to other would-be decorators.

First, please be aware paint is now a lot more expensive than it was last time you did this - probably double the price. At least.

Simply work out the surface area to be covered by multiplying some numbers and then, I think, subtracting the hypotenuse - or is it the isosceles? - of the number you first thought of ... no, wait a minute. I'm getting a bit confused now. Let's just say you should set aside an awful lot of money.

Second, be sure to include new brushes, trays and rollers in your budget. The old ones are hard as concrete and unusable.

Be prepared for some flak about this from your better half. Had she been in charge, the brushes would have been soft and malleable, having been lovingly pampered with moisturiser and appropriate cosmetics for the past decade.

Decide on a colour scheme early on. We've gone with what I shall call an ivory and black look but I'm certainly having some fun with that. You see, a friend from Wellington simply has to know our colour scheme but I won't tell her because I'm happy to wait until she sees it for herself.

So I keep sending family and friends back to her in Wellington, all with conflicting "eyewitness" reports:

"I think they may have overdone the mauve."

"The kitchen is a lovely apricot - or is it peach?"

"Hot pink wouldn't have been my choice."

Be tolerant of good insects. Yes, you've got to clean the walls down but you may be dislodging benevolent spiders from their homes as you do so. I learned that daddy-long-legs seem to favour particular spots. Gently whisk them away - for their own good - and they will come scurrying back to start over again in the same possie.

One was so determined that he/she came scurrying back to the same spot after having been gently relocated to the outside with its lawn and trees and other attractions for eight-legged creatures.

If you have to paint a ceiling - and my advice is not to - make sure you clean all the fly doots off first. This is hard, back-breaking work and raises the question: how come they can, in defiance of the laws of gravity, poop upwards?

But my most important advice is this: do not always accept the "tips" offered to you by your paint retailer. I bear no malice because I'm willing to admit I must have done it wrongly.

The "tip" was to line the paint tray with clingfilm. That way, after work you just remove the clingfilm and your tray is clean. Sounds good, doesn't it.

I applied my roller to the lined tray and rolled it gently back and forth to pick up some of the ivory paint. It picked up the clingfilm which wrapped around it in a most inappropriate, clingy manner.

After I had extricated the roller from the tangle, I was left with what looked like a mutant albino squid writhing in the tray and emitting its white ink to scare me off. From then on I opted for an unlined tray.

So, don't say I didn't warn you. Beware of that first weed, that new shirt, that new decorative item: it could be the start of something bigger than you can handle.

Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, public speaker and musician.