h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My father-in-law died a few years ago and left his house to his four children. He was very fond of do-it-yourself and was always improving his house. Unfortunately, in his later years, he more often started projects than finished them, so when he died he left a huge number of unfinished tasks in the house.

The house has been rented out for a couple of years, but now we want to sell it, so we have to fix it up enough to make it saleable. It's a small, old house in a very good location, so we know that whoever buys it will rip it apart, rebuild and extend. This means that whatever we do to it now is only temporary: it's just to make it look inviting and a nice place to live.

I spent the whole weekend doing jobs on the house - fixing shelves, make electrical connections safe, putting magnetic catches on press doors so that they stayed closed and shifting a lot of rubbish into a skip. Yesterday I spent about four hours on my knees with a hammer and chisel, lifting some very firmly attached floor tiles so that I can put down carpet tiles in one small room. I'm all aches and pains as a result.

I hope to finish my work on Wednesday.

Good luck with that! I guess you'll be painting all the walls magnolia and putting a couple of pots of flowers at the front of the house too?

Actually there are two very nice big pots on either side of the front door with ornamental bamboos. They've survived the five years of neglect, so that's one less thing to do.

Actually brought a pot of magnolia paint along yesterday, but decided against using it.

What is magnolia paint? Is that a brand name in the UK or Ireland?

It's just neutral cream-coloured paint. It lightens the rooms, but it's not as stark as brilliant white, and it makes the white-painted skirting boards and door frames appear white (even if they're yellowing a bit)

Old houses are often painted from top to bottom in this magnolia colour before being put up for sale - a neutral colour like off-white is supposed to leave room for the potential buyer's imagination to picture the rooms in any colour they like. Strong colours will force the buyer to think of the room in one way only, and it might be a colour they don't like.

I remember when I was buying my house, the 1970s bright orange curtains were hard to ignore.

The corollary is that if you're buying a house, you can often get a better deal on ones which are tastelessly decorated.

In this case, the price of the house will be very much determined by the location. We just want to make sure that prospective buyers don't see a gloomy and shabby house and get put off.