Crash. There goes another one. The tiles are dropping off the walls in our kitchen, as if they're having a ceramic mutiny and decided not to stick around here any longer.

I suppose I shouldn't complain: my (former) sister-in-law once had an entire shelf fall on her head. She solved the problem by popping out to John Lewis's that same day and ordering a £7,000 new kitchen. Without telling her husband.

Admittedly, she was a shopaholic, but I have to respect her decisiveness. I went to B&Q this week to buy a tap, wandered around in a superstore-induced trance and came out an hour later with thirty quid's worth of houseplants. I suspect I might have shopping issues, too.

I'd never get away with the surreptitious purchase of a fitted kitchen - my husband is meticulous about checking receipts - so we may have to live with the ruinous state of the current one for a few more years. That is, if the knob doesn't fall off the oven again.

Our oven is so ancient that no-one makes parts for it any more. We only realised how old it was when we went round York's Castle Museum and spotted a replica of it in their '1980s Kitchen'. Even the tiles looked uncannily familiar. It's no wonder ours are past it. They're museum pieces.

Having lived with bare patches on the walls for a while now, I rarely notice them. We are not good at DIY in our household; when my friend Hilary came round recently, she was shocked when I pointed out the replastering around the boiler. 'Yes, it is a mess, isn't it?' she said.

'Oh,' I said, deflated. 'Actually, we've just done it.' OK, so it hadn't been sanded or repainted, but the plastering was still a major advance on our part: for the past three years, we'd resolutely ignored the exposed and crumbling brickwork, along with the gritty dust that fell on the Magimix. I didn't tell her this. Her partner is a builder. She wouldn't understand.

The trouble is it's a domino effect. If a knob falls off the oven, there's no point in buying a new cooker because we need a new kitchen. And we can't do the kitchen until we've knocked through to the downstairs bathroom, which is going to be a utility room. And we can't do that until we've installed a bathroom upstairs. And we can't put a bathroom in upstairs until we've divided the attic into two rooms, to make up for the first-floor bedroom that we'd lose.

That comes to about £30,000 - rough estimate, if we don't replace the flat roof and add a conservatory - which is a lot to pay for a knob. We'd sell up and buy a new house if it weren't for the humiliating estate agent's description, which would inevitably state, 'in need of some renovation'.

I have become twitchily aware of our property's shortcomings for two reasons. The first is that a number of my friends and family all seem to be building on to their houses and talk knowledgably about planning committees and architects while all we ever do is say we'll get some quotes, and then forget about it.

The second is that my husband has gaily invited some friends of his to stay with us over Easter - a family of four - who have never seen our house and don't know what they're in for. Suddenly I'm eyeing our peeling wallpaper, mouldering bathroom and half-painted bedroom (the coloured daubs show intention, and we even bought the emulsion, but somehow the rest never happened) and I'm panicking.

I wish I had my friend Sandi's touch with decorating. Sandi has great taste and combines artistic flair with a deft practicality that leaves me speechless with admiration every time I visit her gorgeous home. The girl could turn a bombsite into a des res. I figure she must possess a DIY gene. You've either got it or you ain't and in our families it clearly skipped a generation.

It's not simply laziness or ignorance that's stopped us doing up the house. There is the not-insignificant problem of money. We may be approaching a watershed on that (literally, the shower's leaking); if any more tiles fall off I shall take it as a sign to remortgage. Either that, or we've got a poltergeist. A priest would certainly be cheaper than a plumber.

In the meantime, you can do a lot with houseplants. Downstairs actually looks pretty cool now. If I can keep them alive until Easter, our friends may not notice the furnishings for the foliage.

I got the tap, by the way, only I'm not sure it's the right sort. I may have to go back to B&Q. With a chaperone, this time. Just in case I accidentally buy a kitchen.

Updated: 12:04 Saturday, March 18, 2006