So this is what we bought

I turned out of the hall into the living room and gingerly felt for the light switch. Monsieur Detroit, bless him, had already arranged for the electricity and water supplies to be restored, but I had noticed on our first quick - indeed, our only - inspection that the electrical wiring was perhaps not quite up to the standard normally expected in the 21st century. The fluorescent strip light in the centre of the ceiling flickered hesitantly, died away, and then burst into glorious light, giving me the opportunity to open the shutters and allow daylight into the room. I almost wished I hadn't bothered.

Kicking aside some of the dust, I found that the floor was made up of orange and green tiles laid chequer-board style, the walls were covered with paper which bore a faded, 1930s pattern of large, overblown roses, the ceiling was painted a dingy white, and the woodwork was a muddy brown. But perhaps that makes things sound a great deal worse than they actually were. It was a good sized room, almost square, and after a thorough cleaning, with new wallpaper and fresh paint, it would be quite pleasant. It was certainly large enough to take a dining table and chairs together with a settee and a couple of armchairs.

The kitchen was more of an empty room than a kitchen. A sink unit stood guard just beside the window and a combination boiler hung on the wall, but otherwise the room was empty. "In need of some modernisation", as an estate agent might have put it. The floor consisted of the same orange and green tiles as in the living room, equally dusty and grubby. Most of the walls had greasy, metre-high, tongue-and-groove wainscotting fixed to them somewhat haphazardly. The only part of the lower wall to have missed out on the wainscotting was covered with a large sheet of plywood. An unshaded, low wattage light bulb dangled from the tongue-and-groove ceiling. As in the living room, the ceiling had at one time been painted white. At least, it looked as though it might have been white. Those parts of the walls not covered in timber were emulsion-painted plaster, although the exact colour of the emulsion would have kept the United Nations debating for several weeks. I eventually decided that it had started life as a ghastly muddy brown. Or had the walls been pink?