The pink has to go.

I am lucky enough to have just acquired, for a song, a rambling great house with a lot of charming features. Of which the kitchen is not one, not least because of the wrap-around pink tiles. I should probably document the drastic facelift to which this dignified old dame is to be subjected; so here, for the record, are some pictures as she stands.

I am feeling a bit reluctant to take a sledgehammer to an elder and better, which is why I’ve been trying to get to know her the best I can, although she can be a bit stand-offish. If only I could make my position clear, she would surely see the benefits of a bit of an updating and welcome it with open arms, just as she welcomed me when I first stepped over the threshold. She knew right away I was here to stay and got straight down to lulling me into feeling at home so she could put me in her frame of mind. Which is admirably tidy, and always spotless. Including the ribbed shutters, which the village women are obliged to brush free of the profane dust rising from the square, apparently at all times.

It should have been clear from the start that I was taking on a formidable character and that no amount of concealing in the cupboards the representations in various media of the Virgin and the crucifixes which had been hanging above the headboards would extinguish the effects of all but a century of daily attendance at mass.

If it had not been for the young woman who works at the bank, I would never have bought Heno de Pravia soap, although I have long admired the name: “Hay from Pravia,” an allusion to the scent of freshly mown meadow exuding from the drab green lozenge. When my daughter came to see the house for the first time, straight from the airport, she asked how we could get rid of the smell of old lady. You must mean the scent of Heno de Pravia soap, I said, the fragrance of freshly mown hay. A simple matter to get rid of the pervasive smell by putting the soap in the cupboard. But she was appeased, just by knowing where it came from, and the soap stayed put.

As I say, the young lady at the bank turned me on to that freshly-ironed scent. She told me that when the previous owner of my house passed her bank book over the counter top, a smell of cleanliness wafted up from her hand. After what probably amounted to years of breathing in this elixir, the bank clerk dared to ask her secret. Soap and water, was the answer, and from that day forth the young woman also used Heno de Pravia soap herself. She told me she genuinely missed the old lady, for her gentle kindness and warmth rather than just for the smell of soap, but it was the smell of soap I found easier to follow through with, once I had finally found a supply of the old-fashioned brand.

The house has arisen somewhat organically from the differing needs of the family since they built it in 1900, patching together various buildings on different levels, leaving a series of steps strewn up and down your path from one room to the next, and two bedrooms stranded between upstairs and downstairs. Despite this, the living room has a kind of symmetry, although it was woefully “modernised” some 45 years ago in dark brown veneers, a furnishing style which has not stood the test of time, unlike the simplicity of bare white walls (once relieved of crucifixes) and open beams. I had considered knocking through to make a cheery kitchen-dining-cum-living room, but the house promptly and admirably defended her integrity: one of the doors to the kitchen slipped a latch two days ago to coincide with a gale from the west, banging ominously and frightening the cat. I cunningly got the recalcitrant door to click closed – for ever. The house was clearly trying to let me know what a change in that wall arrangement would actually feel like. She wouldn’t openly disapprove, but I knew her dignity had been compromised. She also happens to be right. That fireplace is completely centred at the moment. The builder had gone so far as to suggest bricking it up to take in the new plans. He must be bonkers.