A new house should never by any chance be entered in the September quarter; it is astonishing what an amount of coal and reckless expenditure of gas is required to obtain even moderate warmth in a new house; and furthermore most appalling discoveries are apt to be made, as soon as the fires are lighted, of the manner in which floors, doors, and window-frames are capable of shrinking the moment warmth penetrates the place; these we can circumvent in summer, but the winter is not a time to run any risks of discovering that the more we try to warm the house the wider open gape the cracks in all the woodwork, and that nothing we can do will really warm a place, more and more exposed as days go by to the four winds of heaven. Therefore, if the future house has never been lived in, enter it in June, or even in March; there will then be ample time to find out all faults in the structure before the winter arrives with all its concomitant miseries.
Delightful Mr. Aspinall, for whose existence I can never be sufficiently thankful, has made house decoration mere child’s play compared to what it used to be; and, armed with his paints and a written description of what each room is to be like when done, the foreman can be left to his own devices, and the old house can be returned to with a safe conscience; for if careful selection has been made of each paper and its own particular paint, no risks are run of finding, as I found when I made my last move, that owing to the peculiar freaks of the painter there were seven shades of blue in my hall, and another separate shade of the same colour in a bed-room that was designed for a gem, and was becoming under the wretch’s brush the exact shade of a butcher’s apron, which was his own idea of a complete match to the ‘Berry’ paper--really a good hedge-sparrow egg blue-green! If only he had had Aspinall’s neat little tins, I should not have had to stand over him all the time he mixed his paint, and most of the time he was applying it, and could not see at the last that he was wrong and I was absolutely right. So if those about to move will leave their decorators instructions to use Aspinall and nothing else, they can be absolutely sure that their paint will be right, and not a perpetual eyesore, as it almost invariably is when left to the tender mercies of the ordinary decorator, who considers he has an eye for colour, and is as obstinate as half-educated people invariably are.