EMPTY Nest Syndrome is afflicting me in an unusual way.

With both my sons settled in homes of their own, we’re suddenly looking at acres of echoing, deserted space (well, two bedrooms, anyway).

Luckily the offspring aren’t far away, so I don’t feel downhearted or discombobulated like some mothers do upon finding that they’ve achieved what Nature intended and produced independent adults.

Just daunted.

Why? Because we’ve got to refurnish and redecorate those rooms.

I’m not blessed with artistic talent.

My heart sinks when I’m required to summon up the visual imagination to select colour schemes and curtains.

I love exploring junkyards and auctions, picking up bits of furniture and old china, with which our home overflows. Some women get the same kick out of shopping for shoes.

But when it comes to interior design, getting the basics right is so expensive, so time-consuming (especially for the Principal Painter and Decorator, who, needless to say, is not me), and so risky – because I’m prone to changing my mind – that inaction seems the wisest course of action.

More than once I’ve invested in soft furnishings I’ve quickly come to regret.

Then I’ve had to live with them for at least a decade until we both got fed up enough – me with looking at them, and him with me moaning about them - to do something about it.

So for weeks, I’ve been putting off the inevitable. But I knew, really, we couldn’t manage for long without guest beds. And when I came to think about it, the natural linen-coloured curtains I’d once considered so tasteful had undergone a peculiar shrinking process and were now odd lengths, and they’d always let in too much light.

We had some vivid floral ones in our bedroom that I’d mentally written off ages ago as an error of judgement. We could move them. But they wouldn’t work with the beige carpet, which had in any case developed an oily and mysterious stain.

Plus we’d have to buy new curtains for our own room.

The prospect of explaining this thought process to my husband was just too much, and I mentally filed it under A for Another Day. Until Monday, when he finally said, in a tone of wonderment, “I thought you’d have been full of plans for doing up those rooms.”

That’s Married Couples’ Code for “I’ve got a day free so you’d better get on with it right this minute, otherwise you might have to wait a couple more years.”

Cue quick trip to the bed shop, the carpet shop, the DIY shop – and decisions made in haste, all in the space of a morning. Let’s hope they won’t be repented at leisure.

anneriddle36@gmail.com