Few dispute that the best thing that the parents of young children can do for their relationship is to go away for the night without their offspring. But it’s hard to justify a hotel bill purely on the grounds that a husband and wife may enjoy becoming intimately reacquainted, and really good excuses are thin on the ground. One of them did crop up last week, however, when we decided to redecorate the Farmhouse.

We’ve been putting this off because we were meant to have built our own house by now, but, having not yet even poured the foundations, it appears we will be renting from Sasha’s brother for some time to come. I get blasé about it, but the Farmhouse is idyllic really, a lovely old granite building set on one side of a 19th-century model farmyard. A lick of paint, we reasoned, would be worth it, even if we stay only another year.

Sasha’s brother agreed to pay for the paint if we did the work, but I’m a big believer in the classic economic notion of specialisation (that’s a posh way of saying “very lazy”), so we called Ted, who did the kitchen after we first moved in, and got him in for three days. His brief: cover as much wall and ceiling space as possible.

Ted is an old-school Irish labourer. He dislikes taking instructions from women, doesn’t break for lunch and is never sighted without a disintegrating roll-up clinging grimly to his lower lip. For days afterwards, you find these imperfectly incinerated yellowing objects abandoned in the corners of the rooms where Ted has been working. The right to smoke at work is non-negotiable. I suspect that Ted would rather not work than not smoke.

As Ted got cracking on the ceilings, off I went with the colour card to get the paint (on account) from Tommy Doyle’s paint parlour in Baltinglass, only to find that the colour we had chosen for Bento’s room, a shade of cool lilac, wasn’t available. I picked something off the cards that looked identical. Then we covered the furniture, dumped the kids on Sasha’s mum and took off to spend the night at a hotel on the coast in Waterford for which Sasha did a lot of the artworks in the bedrooms.

Thanks to Sasha’s artistic input they gave us a giant, split-level suite that made me panic the moment I walked in because I realised we weren’t going to be there long enough to utilise all its facilities: the balcony with the view of the beach, the pop-up flatscreen TV, the double shower, the downstairs living room, the bed the size of a suburban garage door. We tore ourselves away long enough to have dinner on the terrace watching the setting sun, and when it got cold the pregnant sommelier brought us out enormous blankets to snuggle into. It all reminded me of the old pre-child, halcyon summers Sasha and I used to spend hanging out in smart rooftop restaurants in New York.

We got back home the next day, as revitalised by all the bedroom activity as we were exhausted by it, to find Ted had effected a jaw-dropping transformation. The ceilings were the brilliant white that ceilings are meant to be (rather than the dreary taupe they become in this land of peat fires and fry-ups), the living room was pink and the stairs and hallway, a vast expanse of wall that would have taken me a week to do, were sky blue.

Then we walked into Bento’s room. I can only say that my colour matching skills need work. It was deep purple. It looked as if it had been painted by Dr Seuss.

Still, Bento likes it and it’s growing on the rest of the family. Maybe he’ll want his room in the new house done in it. Who knows when that day will come — but I’m hanging on to the colour code just in case.

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