Paint

The kitchen is complete – was completed two weeks ago now – or at least complete apart from an edging strip between the kitchen floor and dining room floor, which I suspect the builder has forgotten about. And the painting – that's not quite done, but not far off. I started painting the ceiling and walls a couple of weekends ago – spent all day Saturday and Sunday at it, getting covered in paint for my trouble – and going through several colour schemes, as each one came out slightly disappointing. They were all supposedly shades of white – but then white can come in so many shades. So this weekend I did the walls again – two coats, yet another off-white shade – which may have to do, as I've run out of patience (and whites).

The problem was the units – stone-coloured, they said, though from my experience of stones they can come up in quite a broad spectrum of colours – which made it awkward to find something suitable for the walls – not too similar, not too wildly contrasting, not too dark and sombre (it is a small kitchen). I downloaded an app on to my phone which can paint your walls in real time. Not actually paint the walls, which would have been welcome, but simply colour in wall-shaped regions on the screen; which was entertaining and usefully distracted me from getting started with painting but was perhaps not much use in selecting a colour.

In summary, the skirting boards need to be glossed over (preferably in white) and then it will be finished, and I can move the fridge-freezer back in. There are still boxes scattered around the house containing various items of kitchenware, though I have emptied the obviously useful ones and am now faced with the odds and ends which I wonder whether I actually need or whether they may be safely committed to the bin. Not to the skip, you notice: it was finally taken away last Saturday, leaving a sad brown patch on my front lawn.