When you buy a house, the thing nobody tells you is that what you’re really buying is the Forth Bridge.

As anyone who has set off on the long road to DIY hell will know, once you have painted one room, you have to go on to paint all the others. Then, when you're back at the room you started with, you will decide that it’s time to paint that one all over again.

It's a never-ending cycle of sloppy paint pots, precariously-placed step-ladders, annoying, slippery layers of newspapers and – sorry dad – paint brushes that go hard overnight.

Whenever I tell my dad I’m planning to paint, he lectures me on the importance of leaving paintbrushes to soak in white spirit. I nod, gravely, then when it comes to soaking my brushes, I realise I have no white spirit. I usually end up buying another paint brush the next day to replace the one that has practically turned to stone.

I recently started painting my spare room. I decided I was sick of it resembling a fly-tippers' lay-by and set about clearing out all the junk that has piled up in there over the years. I'd planned to throw myself into it; spinning around like a whirling Dervish with a bin liner, making brutal quickfire decisions about what to keep, what to take to the charity shop and what to chuck in the bin.

Half an hour after I'd started, I found myself engrossed in a photo love story in a 1975 Jackie annual I discovered. Then there was the album of old college photos that I spent a good 20 minutes flicking through, not to mention the further ten minutes I spent wondering what happened to that nice Irish lad from the graduation ball.

Then there was the pair of binoculars I didn't even know I had, the old birthday cards (some were from people I don't remember knowing), the big brown envelope full of pension information that I will never understand, even when I’m pension-drawing age, and the Russian doll set I once bought on a city break that has been gathering dust ever I got home and didn’t quite know what to do with it.

My spare room has accumulated so much stuff over the years, it has become quite a treasure trove. I spent an afternoon discovering things, wasting time I should have spent painting. And, while I have thrown some stuff out, much of it has simply been re-located to another room, only to return to the nooks and crannies of the spare room once the decorating is finally finished.

It's a long, gruelling journey along the Forth Bridge. But, if you take your time, there's some sightseeing along the way.