I remember once during our marriage prep I was asked what one thing about living together I wouldn’t enjoy. Without hesitation jumped to D.I.Y. It’s something we always paid someone to do growing up and therefore something I have little to no experience of doing, aside from the woodwork DT lessons. Hannah however, is the completed opposite. She enjoys decorating, painting, building shelves, drilling into walls and assembling things. So when she suggested we paint the walls of both bedrooms in our flat as well as the ceilings, radiators, doors, and skirting boards, and strip the old carpet in under a week! I thought it was an impossible task.

We got to work buying the correct paints from B&Q, mainly whites but also gloss paint, and a saturated blue colour for the statement wall in the main bedroom. Since the carpets, we’re going to change we didn’t bother covering them, but we did so to everything else. The ceiling was the first thing to be painted and it took us most of the day to get 70% of it done. Something about having our arms in a vertical position for a long period of time got us tired really quick. This didn’t bode well for our task ahead.

The next day we started on the walls which were a lot simpler, mainly because the paint was less thick. We got through two white walls before starting on the statement wall and realising the paint on the tin wasn’t the colour that ended up on the wall. At first, we thought it’s because the paint was wet, so we did the whole wall and left it to dry overnight. The next day it was still the wrong type of blue. So we made a quick trip to B&Q before church and got a new colour.

The paint pots available weren’t what Hannah and I really wanted for the wall. We did some research on Pinterest and the one we had in mind wasn’t around, our only option was to have a colour mixed for us. We looked at a wall of paint cards with about two thousand different colours which, made it really hard to choose a colour. We had about seven types of dark greens to choose from in varying levels of saturation. We picked the closest card to the future carpet colour – light grey and placed one on top of the other. Eventually, we landed on one and picked a few tester pots for the statement wall in the spare room since the amounts they had were more than what we needed.

Once back home we got straight to work with the new green paint and it was perfect, almost makes me wish we did the research first so we wouldn’t have made the mistake we did, ah well. From this point onwards it was pretty much Hannah doing the painting while I was at work. She did the doors and white skirting board in one day, I manage to get gloss paint on my jacket which means we’ll need a new one soon. She did the radiators and ceiling in the spare room on another day. Then the white and statement wall of the spare room on the third day. She also took off the old carpet and underlay in the main bedroom which revealed the uneven concrete floor we’d been standing on for over two years. She bought some fast-drying concrete from B&Q and managed to smooth out the unevenness. I’m super impressed she managed to get this all done just before the carpet fitters arrived and out he new carpet on.

Moral of this story, we should have done more research and maybe got a professional painter, and carpets are really expensive. But on a serious note, I always enjoy working on a project together with Hannah and this was no exception, even though it’s not our usual sort of creative thing to do I enjoyed seeing her in her element and the excitement on her face when everything came together, she has a real talent for any and every type of design.