Now it is

When we bought the house, this room had no skirting board at the foot of the walls, so when I decorated, I had bought some cheap skirting board. Naturally, I had fixed this so it ran along the top of the floor. As the old floor had been uneven, we had been forced to remove the skirting board to lay the new flothe skirting. If we hadn’t done so, some of it would have been below the level of the new floor, and some about four inches above. It seemed a shame to put back the old, cheap skirting given that the floor was now so smart. That really would have been spoiling the ship for a halfpennyworth of tar.

Most do-it-yourself stores in France have an abundance of skirting board already painted in a wide variety of colours or wood-type finishes. Mr Bricolage, however, had nothing that I thought quite right. There was no way I was going back to the store where we bought the laminate flooring, and we ended up doing a tour of all the towns and do-it-yourself shops within a radius of about twenty miles. We had left the next nearest to last, intending to call in there on our way home. It really was a last hope as it was by far the smallest of all the shops and was therefore the least likely to have anything to suit.

I suppose I should have known better. That was the shop which had exactly the right wood-finish board – and, what’s more, in sufficient quantities for us to buy what we thought we needed and be confident that there was more if we had miscalculated.

The one fly in the ointment was that where we cut a board at an angle of forty-five degrees, the board showed a horrible white end. The shape of the room meant that one of these ends was prominent and anyone looking around the room would immediately have their eyes drawn to it. I had no wood stain or paint that would be right, but Chris assured me he knew just what to do. He took a saucer of water and a tea bag and, after a few experiments, produced a liquid that was nearly the colour of the skirting. We painted this on the visible ends, and the job was done.

This is what the window bay looks like now the new floor is down:

 And this shows how uneven the floor was before we started: