The Apprentice - Tomkies-style Episode One

No Alan Sugar here, just a good old-fashioned apprenticeship in decorating skills for Will!

One of the pluses of one's offspring reaching near-adulthood is that when he wants to swap bedrooms it's perfectly fair to expect him to pitch in and share the work. So when Will decided he wanted to up sticks and shift into the bigger bedroom, I figured it was time to pass on some of the skills my Dad taught me and teach him to decorate.

Here's what we started with (well, strictly speaking, we started with a room fit to burst with everything that wouldn't fit elsewhere in the house!)

I grant you we didn't do the plastering (I watched very closely and am learning but I have limits and it's a skilled job!). Everything else was strictly a joint effort. There was stripping the walls and prepping the woodwork (sneezes all round - we must have kept Kleenex in business that week). Then Errol, plaster extraordinaire came and worked his magic on the walls. (Incidentally, I discovered the best decorating product ever - carpet clingfilm! Fantastic stuff for keeping carpets clean when you're decorating. Just roll it out over the carpet and it sticks like super-thick clingfilm without leaving any sticky goo when you take it up - amazing!).

I had planned a nice bit of bish, bash, bosh easy emulsioning. Will, however, had other ideas (note to self: collect paint charts and don't take offspring to decorating store where the wallpaper is - this can prove to be an expensive tactical error). Oh, and it wasn't just any wallpaper - three different wallpapers, two with vertical stripes and one with a huge, complicated pattern repeat - deep joy! Still, I figured if he was going to learn he might as well learn the hard stuff as well as the easy bits!

So we measured and pasted,

We hung,

(a bit of admiring our handiwork, too)

A bit of a tea-break for someone....

More papering and cutting

See what I mean about the pattern?

Et voila, the job's a good 'un.

Off to Ikea next for furniture.....