How to Stay Married

Setting up house

MOVING IN

AT BEST A nightmare — as Dorothy Parker said, the one dependable law of life is that everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.

When my parents moved into their first house, they arrived to find the electricians had all the floor boards up, the paint was wet in the kitchen, and there was an enormous pile of rubble in the garage surmounted by a one-horned, one-eyed stag.

Try therefore to get all major structural alterations done beforehand. Nothing is more depressing than trying to get a place straight with builders trooping in and out with muddy feet and demands for endless cups of tea. Even the smallest job will seem as though they’re building the pyramids.

Try to get shelves up beforehand; removal men unpack at a fantastic rate, and you’ll soon find every inch of floor space covered and nowhere to put anything. Don’t forget to get the gas and electricity connected. Buy plenty of light bulbs.

Make a plan where everything is going — or you’ll end up with the grand piano in the lavatory, the fridge in the bedroom, and two little removal men buckling under the sideboard while you have a ferocious argument where to put it.

Get some food in. You’ll be so busy, you won’t realise it’s past 5.30, and the shops are shut, and you’ll be so bankrupted tipping the removal men and rushing out to buy picture wire, screws, and plugs, you won’t have any money left to go out to dinner.

A bottle of whisky is an excellent soother of nerves — but don’t let the removal men get their hands on it, or you’ll have all your furniture chipped. A friend who had two particularly surly removal men made them a cup of tea and slipped two amphetamines into each mug. After that she had one of the jolliest moves imaginable.

How much to tip: about 10s a head — £1 if you’re feeling affluent.

Do measure the height of the rooms before you go out and buy furniture in a sale. We had a tallboy standing in the street for weeks, because we couldn’t get it through any of the doors.

If possible one of you should take a week off work (even if it is unpaid) to get things straight. Nothing is more demoralising than coming home late for the next month to face the chaos.

Try to get the kitchen and one other room habitable, then you can shut yourselves away from the debris when it becomes too much for you.

DO-IT-YOURSELF

One of the great myths of marriage — heavily fostered by television commercials of smiling young couples up ladders — is that home decorating is fun when you do it together.

It isn’t. It’s paralysingly boring and caused more rows in our marriage than anything else. Just remember that, like having a brace on your teeth as a child, it’s worth it later on.

Invariably one partner is more hamfisted than the other, and the trouble starts when the more dexterous one becomes irritated and starts bossing poor Hamfisted about. Hamfisted gets more and more sulky until a row breaks out.

My husband is a great deal more adept than I am at decorating, but even so it was always a case of Wreck-it-Yourself. Our first attempts at wallpapering out-crazied the Crazy Gang. We lost our tempers, the measure and the scissors. I had bought enough paper to do two rooms (wildly expensive at eight guineas a roll) but we had to scrap so much we only managed three quarters of one room. Finally, when we stood back to admire our wrinkled uneven labours, we found we had papered the cat to the wall like the Canterville Ghost.

Our wrinkled, uneven labour

A FEW POINTS TO REMEMBER

Buy cheap wallpaper for your first attempts.

When you strip wallpaper and come to a layer of silver paper, leave it alone, or you’ll find you’ve stripped off the damp course, and any paper subsequently put on the wall will turn green.

PAINTING

Do remember to put dust sheets down when you’re painting or you’ll get shortsighted aunts commenting on the attractive speckled border round the walls.

If you’re doing the landing and the hall, don’t as we did start painting the landing scarlet, and the hall indigo — it never entered our heads that the colours would have to meet somewhere, in this case halfway up the stairs. The result is horrible.

Go to a showroom where you can see the paint you choose in large quantities. That colour that looks so subtle on the shade card can spread to vast deserts of ghastliness once it gets up on the wall.

Don’t mix paints unless you’re an expert: they always come out sickly ice-cream shades.

Never get friends to help. Even your own pathetic attempts will be better than theirs. We let a girlfriend, who claimed she found painting therapeutic, loose on one of the spare rooms. When we looked in a quarter of an hour later, there were terracotta flames of paint licking a foot high over the virgin white ceiling I had painted the day before. None of our cries of ‘Steady on’ or ‘I say’ could halt her. The whole room had to be painted again.

Tell your wife before you paint a shelf or she’ll bustle in five minutes later and replace everything you removed. You are bound to have a row about who didn’t wash the brushes last time.

If you run out of paint, do remember the name and brand before you chuck the tin away. We had to buy five different shades of orange before we hit on the right one again.

Lots of praise is essential. Say well done even if it isn’t, people get inordinately proud of the four square foot of wall they’ve just painted.

MISCELLANEOUS

Curtains were another disaster zone — in an attempt to make them not too short, I made them miles too long, so they trailed on the floor like a child dressing up in its mother’s clothes. And of course there wasn’t enough material left over for the pelmets.

Don’t be fooled by do-it-yourself tiling kits: they’re easy enough until you have to round a corner or meet a natural hazard like a light switch.

TRADITIONAL ROLE OF HUSBAND AND WIFE

Traditionally the husband is the more practical and mechanically minded member of the partnership. But if he’s the kind who hits the electricity main every time he knocks a nail in and puts up shelves at 10°, and his wife is the practical type who got a distinction for carpentry at school, she shouldn’t hesitate to take over. As my husband remarked, here was one sphere in which he wouldn’t have minded having his masculinity undermined.