IF YOU’RE thinking of having a new bathroom fitted, please don’t.

Stick with the avocado suite, learn to love the plastic tubing from the taps that doubles as a shower and embrace the toilet that flushes, when it feels the time is right.

You see, after years of admiring the adaptive qualities of mould in the shower, pondering where the leaks were coming from and avoiding the nail sticking out of the skirting board to the left of the sink, I finally decided to get a new bathroom.

Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

So the builders came round. “Two weeks, maybe three at a push,” they explained.

“Well, we’ll go away for a week and the second week we’ll just have to cope,” I said, bearing in mind my house has only got one shower and one toilet.

My First mistake was expecting the bathroom to be completed in just two weeks. Builders have a rose-tinted view of time, it’s there purely as a guide rather than something definite.

Naturally, as soon as the bath came out, the plaster dropped off the wall revealing an intricate root network, the toilet had a lead pipe and the shower was made out of silly putty (or something).

The roots were the most interesting thing, apparently as a result of a large weed, which had lodged under a tile and spread its tendrils far and wide.

To the untrained eye, it looked like my bathroom was lodged in a plant’s digestive system.

To the trained eye, it looked like it would cost money and a bit of time to sort out.

So, after a week away, the roots had been dealt with and anything with a useful function had been removed.