So the final bathroom tile decision was only made twice more after yesterday's post. Pretty dynamic decision-makers we are. Total time spent deciding on bathroom tiles: 76 hours.

Now (sob) we have to decide on paint colour, kitchen unit colour, kitchen flooring, and flooring in the living areas. We went to Master Builders on Saturday and saw some marvellous wooden flooring (the fourth picture shown on the linked page) and had fun spreading them around on the floor and choosing which wood we liked, and which plank-size. The people there did not like our children, especially Daniel who was a little wound up after too much time spent indoors and too much red juice. At one stage the old bat looking after the place went into the toilets and came out looking rather shaken.

'They're all sitting on the toilets in here,' she said, visibly distressed.

The horror! Children sitting on the toilets!

Her assistant then came out, emitted a faint gasp at all the wood samples out of their slots, and hastily produced a big fat flooring brochure which we 'might like to look through at home'.

As it turned out, we traumatised these two for nothing, as the stuff is probably way too expensive to use - it varies between expensive (12-year guarantee, 0.5 mm timber layer on superwood) and exhorbitant (30-year guarantee, 3.6 mm timber layer on superwood). Probably we are going to keep our parquet flooring, fill in the small gaps where walls and a cupboard have been removed with some hopefully matching parquet, and maybe put the cheaper version of the wooden flooring in the new family room. Although it would be nice to lay wood throughout, it is just too expensive to do it throughout. A much cheaper version is a laminate, which is a sort of melamine which looks like wood. I would rather keep my real wood parquet and have the family room different than do the whole lot with fake wood.