Renovation Rules

1. Any piece of building that you wish to remove will be better built than an earthquake proof skyscraper.
2. The feature you are determined to keep will be hanging on by the rust on a nail, be half rotten and need more effort to restore than it would take to toss and modernise.
3. Any item requiring removal will have at least 3 screws. One of these screws will NOT turn, no matter what you do. One of these screws will be just out of reach of whatever you are standing on. One of these screws will be positioned so you need to find a shorter screwdriver to access it. Often all these things apply to the same screw.
4. No matter which windowsill you’ve just painted – that will be the direction the sudden rainstorm suddenly appears from while the windows are wide open.
There wiill always be one polyfilled hole on the wall that you haven’t sanded and will only notice as the paint roller hits the bumps.
5. Sample colours and paint sample charts have no relation to each other.
6. The colour can be just what you want but if it’s name is something with similar mental imagery to ‘pig vomit’ there is no way you can put it on your walls.
7. If you own a 1950s double brick home nothing is standard, everything is solid and there are no straight lines.