Why do houses keep breaking? You spend a sizeable amount of time in your twenties desperate to be able to afford your own home, only to find out when you eventually own the deeds that they come with a never ending litany of disasters.

So getting the house painted on the inside, top to toe, had been put off for a decade or more. It seemed sensible to schedule the work for when I was away on a trip to Baja, but then who would have though it would over-run by two weeks? I arrived home after more than twenty four hours of travelling to find the house in chaos, dust everywhere bar a one metre square on the sofa in front of the television where he obviously sat down each day. All else had been left to gather dust and debris.

Two weeks with workmen in the house is difficult, even if they’re nice enough people who work quite hard to not get in the way, to be pleasant company. And since I was glad they’d been there to keep him company (and were on a fixed charge) I couldn’t get too cross. Painting was followed by a leaky radiator that required the heating to be turned off for a fix, which in turn was followed by repairs to two toilets. The final fix was supposed to be yesterday, but flushing the toilet led to a flood in the bathroom – at one o’clock in the morning obviously – so clearly we’re not done yet. And that’s not counting the repair to the roof, the trim underneath a dormer window is letting water through and damaging the newly painted ceiling underneath. Joy.

Maybe a better question would be: why do I have to be the one to fix stuff, or to stress and organise the stuff being fixed? Because every family seems to have one person who for want of a better reason gets stuck with this stuff. And in our house that person is clearly me. When the toilet flushed and the floor flooded, it was the second time in the evening. Why didn’t my daughter or partner recognise that there was a problem? At least it would have been earlier in the evening, and someone else would have been around.

It’s got to a stage now where my partner literally thinks of something that ‘might’ break, and feels a need to let me know. What if? And because I’m a manic sorting kind of person who needs to solve problems, once he’s pointed out a possible problem, it’s very difficult to ignore it.

Maybe I just need practice.