What I Learned From A Decorating Disaster And How It Applies to Writing

I call it The Great Yellow Miscalculation of 2026

After several weeks of a kitchen renovation and then having decorators in my house while I took my mother away, I expected to come home and finally relax. My home would be beautifully upgraded.

The decorators said they could do all of the downstairs apart from the room I use for my Buddhist chanting (which we call the Buddha lounge). I decided that I could paint that room myself along with the upstairs bathroom.

The final day of our holiday was busy. It was like luggage Tetris as I had to fit all of our bags around the mobility scooter that takes up a significant portion of my mother’s car. She wasn’t feeling well that day so it was important to get home before her spirits dropped any further and it was a three-hour drive in weekend, holiday traffic.

After dropping her off and unloading her luggage, I drove the remaining ten miles to my house.

With trepidation, I turned the key in my front door, excited about how it might look. I’d chosen a pale yellowy white which I had used many years ago in my London flat. It was a shade that I knew and had long dreamed of for my current living room. I expected it to be light, subtle and lofty.

But when I stepped through the door into the entrance hall, my face slightly twisted. It wasn’t conjuring up the feeling that I expected. I walked through the main hallway, observing the yellow and then into the living room.

There was so much yellow. I had agreed with the decorators to do the ceiling in the same colour rather than white, because again I had done this in my previous property and it looked good. But that property was a basement flat, not a vast long room with huge windows and French doors like my current lounge.

Everywhere I looked it was yellow.

Yellow upon yellow upon fricking yellow.

Even though the woodwork was painted white, it wasn’t enough to break up the colour which was closer to a lemony shade than the creamy white I remembered from before.

My heart and energy sank. This was not the feeling that I wanted. I had expected to walk in and love the transformation. But I didn’t. It was jangling my nerves.

I perched on the sofa, still looking around the room. Maybe it would have looked better if the ceiling had been white. I walked back out to the hallway, not loving it.

Yes, white ceilings might take the edge off the yellow but the living room was a long, uninterrupted room. Repainting the ceiling without screwing up the walls would be a bitch.

Over the next couple of days, still in an energy slump from the disappointment, I came to the conclusion that the hallways would need repainting in a different colour and then I would have to make a decision about the living room.

I was no longer “over the line” with the work in my house. I’ve spent a lot of money on it this summer; I can’t justify paying out more so yours truly will do the labour on this new adventure.

I decided to tackle the bathroom first, as this had always been my plan and it was a small room. As I rolled up my sleeves and grabbed my paint roller and brushes, I started to see parallels between the enormity of this task and how it often feels when you decide to write a book.

It can be daunting to embark on such a huge project

Writing a book can take months or years. Getting it published is a whole other endeavour and then you have to figure out ways to generate sales. Some people get frightened about all of that work and never start writing.

With my reduced energy from long-covid, the thought of replicating the sixty hours of work that the decorators had done was enough to send me to bed for a couple of days.

But like writing, you have to keep the action small. In the bathroom, the first job was to clean all of the nasty corners and then fill the sizeable crack above the window and the hairline cracks around the door.

In writing, to make progress you have to write a sentence and then another. The smaller your goal, the easier it is to do. I have written whole drafts of novels in a few minutes a day or a hundred words at a time.

It takes longer than you think

I thought I’d get the bathroom done in a couple of days and be onto the next task. A week and many hours later, I am finally painting the skirting boards and the door. Then it will be done.

When I first started to write, I was surprised at how long it took me to write the draft of a novel. I was used to corporate work where there’s a deadline, you do the hours and submit your work. But writing had a timeline of its own. You can’t force creativity. I discovered that I couldn’t do it for more than a couple of hours a day. Finishing a draft always took longer than I thought.

Nowadays, I don’t set deadlines. I just let it unfold at its own pace.

While I’d like to get all this decorating done during July and August so that I can refocus on my writing and coaching come September, it too will take the time it requires.

I am seeing progress. Today I should finish the bathroom and by this time next week I’ll probably have one of the hallways done too.

There will be setbacks and you’ll feel like that time is wasted

The Great Yellow Miscalculation is a huge setback in terms of time and money but it can be overcome.

Eighteen years ago, with my first novel, following some professional advice, I redrafted it and broke the story. Two thirds of the way through, it just didn’t work anymore. Work came to a halt and I abandoned the project for eight years. However, when I re-examined the manuscript, there was merit in this draft even though I didn’t like how the story went. It helped me to find a way forward and I eventually re-drafted in a way which took on board the critique but was also satisfying to me.

Many a writer has written themselves into a cul-de-sac or abandoned a partially complete manuscript. Sometimes it can be salvaged, other times it’s best to chalk it up to experience and move on.

When mistakes happen, there’s always something to learn. With my decorating, I’m hoping to prove to myself how I can adapt, learn new skills, manage my energy and finally create a home that I love.

What looks simple takes more skill than you envisaged

I was arrogant when I started writing. Because I had what I called a f*cked up imagination and a reasonable command of the English language, I thought it would be easy to write my story and become a best-seller.

After seven years I discovered that there were many skills in novel writing, and I didn’t have them! I had to learn about story structure and then practice it.

“Showing not telling” also eluded me – I just didn’t get it until finally the penny dropped and I experimented with finding ways to describe the thoughts and sensations that my characters experienced, rather than just saying they were sad or angry.

Similarly, it’s easy to think that anyone can pick up a paint brush and make a room look good. But there’s a knack to painting a crisp line where two colours meet, to not getting paint absolutely everywhere and to achieving a smooth, even finish on the woodwork. I needed the right tools, I had to ask for advice and then console myself that with practice, I would get better.

In both cases you feel stupid because you can’t do it, and wonder what others will say when they see the fruits of your labour.

You get frustrated at being unskilled but it’s important to keep going

Your first attempt at any endeavour rarely meets what your taste expects.

I chose a dusty purple colour for the walls of my bathroom. There’s a tricky section where the wall meets the white seal of the white pvc window. After the first coat, this line looked wriggly and awful – like someone completely unskilled had done it! I felt dejected and pissed off about the whole project. I was saddled with all of this work which I feared would end up looking crap. I didn’t sleep much that night.

But with the second coat I experimented using masking tape. After that I found a really good fine edged paint brush and managed to touch up and neaten the line not just around the window but also where the walls meet the white ceiling. It’s not so bad now and I’m proud of my work.

It’s normal for writing to not pan out as you envisage. The story or scene which you conjure up in your head often doesn’t work out on paper. It’s hard to make it how you imagined it.

Many writers give up at this point and become “blocked”. But you have to persist, learn new skills and wrangle your ideas through several drafts until at last it portrays what was always in your heart.

You will go from elation to despair and back again

Initially I was excited to embark on my bathroom. We had lived in this house for fifteen years and all that time the bathroom was a dirty orange colour, the choice of the previous occupant. I couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

But when I started mixing up filler and dealing with the cracks, I felt overwhelmed. How could I possibly do this and make the walls look smooth and beautiful?

Doing the first coat of white on the ceiling was daunting but later that day, when I did the second coat in a lot less time, I was back to being excited.

However, my lack of skills for doing straight lines sunk me again with the wall colour until I was able to improve on it with the second coat. Then I was excited because I had persisted through something difficult and won.

I love working on my novels but they are huge projects and I often wonder whether I can pull it off. With my first book, getting to the end of a draft felt like such a huge achievement and I was proud of myself. Then I would get feedback from friends and get despondent when they would say “just do it like this” because I knew that it would take me another year to accomplish that.

I’m on draft four of my second novel and it’s in pretty good shape. I’ve really enjoyed the process but at the back of my mind I know that soon, I will need to share it with beta-readers and then an editor. This scares the shit out of me!

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With any big project it’s important to keep plodding forwards, one tiny step at a time. You will have to regularly coax yourself through each stage, reassuring yourself that you will figure it out eventually. As you progress, you’ll be able to look back at each stage of your achievements and be proud of what you accomplished.

As for the Great Yellow Miscalculation, all is not lost. The preparation and the woodwork are done. I’ll have fun experimenting with new colours and I have a hunch that with a white ceiling, the living room will be just like I imagined it.

Plodding gently

Cali x

Photo by Ali Mkumbwa on Unsplash

Do you need some hand-holding to embark on a new project?

If that big hairy goal keeps whispering to you and you think it might be time to do something about it, have you considered coaching? You’ll get hand-holding, someone to bounce ideas against and most importantly, an accountability partner to keep you moving forward in small, manageable steps tailored just for you.

You’ll get stuff done quicker than if you were left to your own devices. I remember doing a three month review for one of my first clients. She exclaimed, “Only three months? It feels like I’ve made six months of progress.”