Remember the dehumidifier we bought for eighty quid back in January? Well I don't think it's quite done the trick...


I knew it was a bad idea to paint our walls yellow. They've gone from Cheddar to Stilton in eight months.

But hey, if you're happy to put your life on hold for a day or two, move some large items of furniture, and get up close and personal with a few hazardous chemicals which are likely to leave you with a permanent lung condition, then there's every chance you can get it looking like this again...


This all started yesterday when Lisa casually mentioned that she thought she could see a few signs of mould behind Amelie's bedside cabinet. Naturally I laughed all the way to the dehumidifier receipt, and pointed out eighty reasons why that was unlikely to be the case. But having done so, I thought I'd take a look.

Suffice it to say that my cabinet reshuffle revealed some surprisingly liberal amounts of mould. Which led me to tentatively pull the adjacent wardrobe away from the wall. I'm not saying that what I found was horrific, but for a moment I thought they'd built a toxic waste dump in Narnia.

Despite treating Amelie's bedroom wall for damp when we moved in last summer, and using a dehumidifier since January, she's been unwittingly growing the kind of flora that would put her sunflower to shame. I could have got straight onto the council, but rather than spend a fortnight breathing in fungus while we wait for them to take action, I decided my time would be better spent taking a few photos and then cleaning it up.

So I took the afternoon off work, and spent it working far harder with a packet of j-cloths and some industrial strength mould cleaner. Amelie's bedroom has been completely remodelled, with all furniture now scrubbed down and located away from exterior walls. I'm like a cross between Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Fungus the Bogeyman.

It wasn't quite the start to Easter that I was expecting. Although I did eat a lot of chocolate to get me through it. Fortunately we're off on holiday tomorrow. We're heading down to Wiltshire, where Big Sis has been left to her own Devizes for a few days, and invited us to join her. It should be the perfect, relaxing pick-me-up. Let's face it, the last time we visited, we had a marvellous time.