If you've ever done up a house while juggling husband and kids and job you'll know what I'm talking about...

If you really want to test your marriage, forget having an affair, just do your house up. It’ll suck up far more money, time and energy, spit you out the other side broke, beaten and exhausted, hissing, ‘Never again!’ like a woman who’s just given birth to a ten pound baby. When we moved into our house in Queen’s Park, north-west London, five years ago, it had deep-pile moth-gobbled yellow carpets, spinach-green wallpaper, and a bathroom and kitchen that were John Lewis’s finest circa 1988. But to us it was a palace. We’d been living with our first child in a ground flat in Kilburn and would frequently walk past the house on the way to the park, admiring the blossoms, the pretty, tidy street. I’d peer into the bay windows of the neighbouring houses and see the inhabitants and think, lucky them. We never thought we’d be able to afford anything like it. Then I sold my first novel, The Rise and Fall of a Yummy Mummy. House prices suddenly slumped. There was a small window of opportunity. We grabbed it. Chinking glasses to our good extraordinary good fortune, we excitedly made plans to do the house up one room at a time, starting a new project every time we got our hands on a bit of dosh, and some spare time, which meant that we did the biggest jobs during my maternity leaves. Better to immerse myself in total chaos with a new baby and builders than to try and write novels through the brick dust at a later date, we thought, not realising that decisions you make on three hours sleep are rarely the right ones and that breastfeeding and builders are best kept separate. But we couldn’t afford to move out, or pay for someone else to project manage the whole thing. Ok, we needed to add a loft, rip out the kitchen and bathroom but other than that it was just a question of stripping back, painting and sanding, and then, voila!, a house hot off the pages of a magazine. Anyway, how bad could it be?

Pretty bad. A Victorian house is like a mouthful of bad dentistry. You strip away one layer of wood chip wallpaper only to discover another layer beneath that. Bang the walls too hard and bits fall down on your head. I pinpoint the moment a choking mushroom cloud of wood dust thrown up by the floor sander set off the smoke alarms which in turn automatically called in a fleet of fire engines as the tipping point. It didn’t feel like a property programme then. We soon realised that when we finished one room, the others, by contrast, looked even worse: guests would coo at our sitting room and then make the mistake of using the decomposing bathroom. And of course the work took longer than we’d anticipated, so long it changed us as a couple, flinging us back into traditional gender roles. My husband was the one who frowned over a costing spreadsheet, discussed weight bearing loads with the roofers and tried to get the boiler to behave like a boiler rather than a stoned, capricious teenager. I’d be the one making cups of tea for the sparkies, while flicking through interiors magazines with a baby on my knee, in all honesty, checking out of the boring blokey stuff, (i.e the hard work.) There’s a lot of boring blokey stuff. Disappointingly it turned out that doing up a house is not about rummaging on Portobello and Farrow and Ball paint charts. It’s about money, less and less of it, and builders.

Ah, builders. The first lesson? Builders respond to firm handling. Too many cups of tea and middle-class apologetic niceness and you’re done for. They’ll sniff your fear and slap another grand on the bill. Also, there’s an inversion of power towards the end of a project. Builders hate snag lists. They don’t do closure. Rather, like flaky boyfriends, they start off keen, attentive and committed, then just when you think you’re on the same wavelength, they’ll start disappearing, turning their phones off, going on unexplainable journeys at weird times, while you sit there like a jilted lover trying not to drink and text. And those are the good ones. 

If they’re not elusive, they’re omni-present: it’s one extreme or the other. Witnesses to your least attractive traits, they’re there crouching down by the skirting board, cup of tea in one hand, eyebrow raised, when you have a nuclear row about tap fittings. They’re there when you stumble down for breakfast after a night up with a sick baby looking like the Gruffalo. They put any mistakes down to ‘crossed wires’  between husband and ‘the wife,’ and love to play you off against each other. ‘Ooo, the wife wants that does she?’ the builders would whistle to my husband, as if I was demanding a Birkin bag rather than a soft close loo seat. Yes, they wedge themselves between a married couple like bad grouting.

But they are useful when it comes to entertaining the troops. My two year old won’t watch telly, but he will sit in his high chair and watch a plasterer for hours. He lights up at the clomp of steel toed boots. Every day they were here presented fresh opportunity to get his paws on a circular saw, usually left helpfully plugged in.

Eventually, thankfully, builders leave. Then Doing Up A House is just about embarrassing shop assistants by squabbling in bed shops. When I got married I never thought my husband was the kind of man who’d veto a velvet headboard on the grounds of, ‘I’m not Graham Norton!’ But then he had no inkling of my compulsive online cushion shopping obsession either; I’m always one click away from The One. We’ve had to compromise, and barter. I’ve frogmarched him protesting down the Golbourne Road on many a wet, windy Friday morning to rummage through antique chandeliers and mirrors. He got his BB Italia sofa. I paid over the odds for an armchair on eBay, after too many glasses of wine. He won’t sit on it. But gradually our tastes have morphed together. I’ve learned to be less impulsive and appreciate grey. And although he’s still not ready for gold wallpaper in the loo I’ve managed to sneak pink into the house, which really is a sign of quite how far we’ve come.

Five years since we started, the bits we first did up have been battered by the children and need doing again. There is crayon on the walls and finger paint on our beloved vintage Ercol chairs. I’ve written three more novels in the loft and in the process transformed its clean minimalism into a stinky writer’s pit. But the house feels completely ours now. It was all worth it. It didn’t break us. And it looks like our marriage will outlast the boiler.