It's Our Party And It'll Be Horrible Gaudy If We Want It To Be

Over a year ago, the missus and I moved into our first ever bought house (as opposed to all of the rented houses we had lived in previously). Initially we were excited at the prospect of being able to customise various bits of our new pad in whatever manner we saw fit, which was a luxury never before afforded to us. If you stick up a shelf in a rental house, you either need written permission in triplicate before drilling the first hole, or you need a foolproof backout plan so that when you move out, nobody notices what you have been doing. Same goes for painting walls, putting up pictures, not to mention large scale renovation.

However, we made a conscious decision that when we moved, we wouldn't just paint a couple of walls in fetching colours. Oh no! Call it a poignant refusal to be cowed by popular home fashion, or maybe just questionable taste, but we decided we would quite like to do our house up like some kind of wacky theme park. We started off gently in the spare room (mostly just for practice) and did a kind of an autumnal theme with wall stickers and bits of old tree. It didn't go so well. Next up was the bathroom, which has now been successfully transformed into a Hawaii surf beach party, resplendant with deep turquoise walls and pin-up girls all over the shop.

Our bedroom is pretty much the crowning achievement. We decided to turn it into a forest, so we got a photographic wall mural of a pleasant glade and slapped it up on one wall, bought a bunch of posh reclaimed oak furniture and bunged a ton of plants in there. All good so far. But then it tailed off a bit.

Our study was next on the agenda. It's deep red, gold and cream with a big three metre fixed countertop desk in it. It's a pleasant enough room to be in, but it's a bit ordinary. It wouldn't look too out of place on a design show. It didn't really push the envelope. Nor did the hall, stairs and landing. It's disappointingly cream/mocha with a pine banister. Once again, pleasant enough, functional, and probably just what you want for a hallway. We couldn't help but feel that we had grown a little tame in our ambitions though. For all our initial excitement, the house has been rapidly turning into something you would be happy to show off to prospective buyers. The living room was next. We needed an idea and it needed to be good.

And that is why we are going to decorate it like a Tiki lounge.

Thanks to the internet, I now know exactly where to get bamboo out the wazoo, hula girl neons, grass roofing, volcano lamps, reconditioned casks and all the other stuff that will undoubtedly make people puke out of their eyeballs when they enter. "Why would you do that?" people ask. "It's just horrifically tacky!". I will grant that they are correct, but it's nice to be able to say, for the first time "It's our house, we like tat, and if you don't want to drink mai tais and admire our fake palm tree, you know where the door is". I give it three seconds til they're helping themselves at the bar and bopping to the smooth South Pacific sounds of Martin Denny.

Waka laka chiki tiki!