Richard Hammond's wife Mindy on choosing bathroom decor | Mindy Hammond | Columnists | Comment

Read article : Richard Hammond's wife Mindy on choosing bathroom decor | Mindy Hammond | Columnists | Comment

Izzy and Willow have demanded a bedroom each, as regular readers may recall. Our girls now being 11 and 13, that seemed reasonable enough, so once again Hammond Towers has rung to the jolly sound of building work.

The bedrooms are coming along fine but there’s just one problem: their bathroom. This was last decorated five years ago, when they were little. It’s blue and white with a jaunty seaside feel: there’s a lifebelt on the wall, a huge yellow rubber duck on the bath, and I even made curtains out of fishing net. I love it. The girls, sadly, don’t – at least not any more.

Even I had to admit the decor was looking a little tired, so, cradling my favourite ducky in his red sou’wester, I opened negotiations. Which then followed a somewhat familiar pattern. “OK, I’ll redo the bathroom, but only if you promise to actually use it and stay out of mine and daddy’s.”

“We will! But please can we have a proper shower – you know, a cubicle?”

“Er, no. You’ll have a proper shower over the bath.”

“But we never have a bath! We have showers. We don’t need a bath!”

“That’s not true, you love your bubble baths, especially when you’re poorly. And trust me, in a year or two you’ll be in there for hours.”

“No we won’t, and it’s not big enough. The screen doesn’t even go all the way round.”

“Good grief, we didn’t even have a shower when I was growing up – you girls don’t know how lucky you are.”

“Yes, we know, you had a tin bath in front of the fire once a week, ‘whether you needed it or not’.”

“I’ll have you know, young lady, that the first time I had a place with a proper shower was when I moved to London and lived in a shared house with five other girls. That shower was over the bath. It didn’t have a shower screen, it had a curtain that used to fall down, so you ended up doing a weird dance with a wet sheet of plastic stuck to you, in a bathroom whose only source of heat was two electric bars in the roof.”

“Aw muuuuum!”

“Right, OK, I’ll get a proper screen to go all the way round. But I’m sorry, the bath stays, otherwise there’s only one bath in the whole house, and that’s no good when we’ve all been out in the snow and the mud, is it? After all, do you really want to share a bath with me?”

“Eeeew! No. Fine. But pleeeeaase can you make it nice?”

“I will, I promise.”

So, after a day spent trawling the internet, I joined Dave the decorator for a site meeting.

“What about a feature wall?” I said, chewing the arm of my purple designer specs like I knew what I was talking about. “You know, in a soft, warm colour, to make it feel more grown-up?”

He sucked his teeth. “First you’ll need to do something about them cracks.”

“Yes, but you can fill those, can’t you?”

“Well, I can, but in an old house like this they’ll only open up again. You’d do better to paper it – there are some nice wallpapers these days, specially for bathrooms.”

“Yes,” I said, as though I’d known this all along. Then I retreated downstairs for another look on the computer. Unfortunately, halfway down I tripped on a flip-flop and dropped my glasses, which – being blind as a bat without them – I then trod on.

So I hope the girls like the wallpaper I’ve chosen for them. It’s sort of swirly. At least I think it is. Or maybe those are flowers. Or are they giant pink sheep?