Somebody sent me an article from the Daily Mail last week and I’m unsure as to whether they sent it to extract a comment of some sort or because they know my secret… My mother, who’s in her eighties, has a pampas bathroom! She refuses to change it because it has such a nice deep bath… despite the fact that she’s not had a bath for years because she’s not as able-bodied as she used to be and may not be able to get out. We can live and dream - which is why I still have all those size 10 clothes in the attic)!

In case you missed it, the article was about how an avocado bathroom suite – popular in the seventies, is the biggest turn-off when it comes to buying a new house. The fact that the Mail uses a cream thirties bath to illustrate the article is neither here or there (although the journalists should perhaps know better). The point is that the bathroom isn’t very attractive.

There was a discussion amongst readers who posted comments, about what’s more important; getting a house of a decent size that you like, in a location in which you wish to live, with a bathroom of some really odd colour; compared to a small ‘beige’ house (as one reader put it) with a shiny white bathroom.

I for one would opt for the former because there’s something quite exciting about transforming a grotty bathroom – particularly if it’s avocado to begin with – whereas you can’t easily change the size of your house and certainly can’t change its location without moving home. However, people can so easily underestimate the amount of time it takes to choose and install a new bathroom… and as someone who lived for some years with a sky blue bathroom with blue patterned tiles covering all the walls, and who now boasts a white bathroom suite, pink wooden panelled walls and a spearmint green door, I know what I’m talking about – so be warned!

Companies in this industry occasionally run competitions to find the owner of the oldest fridge or washing machine so they can replace them with modern versions in return for the publicity the campaign brings. How long, I wonder, before some clever manufacturer runs a similar campaign and thus rids this nation of its horrid avocado, pampas or blue bathrooms (or the like) forever…

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Yours,

Jan Hobbs