Things I have said (yelled) today:

Stop!

Don’t run! Walk! Slowly! No! Not there!

Now don’t touch the door! Or the door frame! Or the… oh.

Yes, it’s still wet. No, don’t tou… Hm. Right, go and wash your hands. And please don’t touch anything on the way to the… oh.

From which you can probably surmise that we have been painting and decorating.

The upstairs is largely done (only the girls’ room to go). But now we’re working on rooms that our girls need to pass through, and discovering that keeping three 7-year-olds and wet paint apart is a largely futile process.

Still, the dining room is nearly finished and will hopefully continue to look just as amazing as it does currently until we rent our house out.  See, we decided when our girls were young that there was no point trying to keep the walls clean. When you’re outnumbered by toddlers you have to be realistic about these things. So our walls have taken something of a battering over the last five years. Between the thousands of blue-tacked pictures, grubby hand tide marks, impact craters, crayonings no-one would admit to and other sundry abuses our dining room has descended to a state where we’d have trouble letting it out in Third-World warzone let alone a leafy English suburb.

There was nothing for it but to hit the DIY supercentre and start decorating.

Only it turns out that decorating is rather time consuming. And expensive. And tiring. Not to mention dangerous (when paired with wandering children). We started at Christmas and still have tons to do.

Nor is it the only thing we need to before renting our house out. We need to prove we comply with safety standards for gas and electricity, find an estate agent, make the gardens presentable, tackle all those little DIY jobs you learn to live with but renters might not be so laid back about, pack up (or chuck out) years of accumulated stuff, clear out the garage of things we really should have thrown away years ago to make room for the stuff from our house that we really should be throwing away now, and, of course, find tenants.

All of which makes our departure date seem worryingly soon. WIll we manage it all in time? I have to say, when I daydreamed about going travelling, my thoughts never dwelled on all the hard work we’d have to do before we stepped onto the plane. And it seems a shame to be spending so much time thinking about home improvements not our trip of a lifetime.

I guess there’s nothing for it than to just crack on.

I just hope all this hard work means we can find the tenants we need. And that they don’t mind a few finger marks in the paintwork.