THINGS are not always what they seem to be. Perceived faults are not necessarily negative, and the obvious is not always so.

When Basil Fawlty accused Sybil of having The statement of the bleeding obvious' as her specialist subject he was certainly not drawing attention to what he considered to be one of her finer points. But was he right?

The answer to one of the questions that I am most asked could well fit into the category of Sybil's specialist subject. People often ask me how I can possibly go about transforming a roofless hovel, filled to the rafters with rotting junk, into a beautiful home fit to live in. The answer is really very simple: you start at the beginning and finish at the end. That sounds trite, but let's state the bleeding obvious: it makes sense.

If you take your starting point to be careful planning and the clearing of the decks, and your finishing point to be the vase of flowers and the gently percolating coffee pot, all that remains is to put in place the stages of the process in between these two points.

You are of course correct - that is far too obvious. Not so, my friends. It is in fact so far from obvious that I get tired of repeating it. The rule is exactly the same if you are decorating the smallest room or renovating a castle: try to skip a stage at your peril. I have lost count of the number of homes that I have visited where people have tried to bring an end to their project by skipping over the final stages. This route leads to misery.

It is true that there are a lot of processes, stages, and skills involved in a major renovation, but it is only the same as any creative process. You set things out, you gather together your materials, your tools, your skills, or your people and then you do things in a logical process. You don't do things out of order, such as putting down expensive flooring before you have plastered walls, in much the same way that you wouldn't ice the cake before you baked it.

But there is a fault with this simple statement. It doesn't take into account the fact that people are human, and something happens to them where houses are concerned. Seemingly professional and logical people make the maddest decisions. They hack all of the plaster off their walls with not the slightest idea what they are going to replace it with; they put the TV back in the room and wonder why their life has become draughtier and somewhat gloomier than it was before, especially when not even going to bed in a ceilingless bedroom offers a release.

They cannot be happy because they have not observed the cardinal rules of never starting another project (each room being considered as a separate project) before finishing the last one, and never, never, NEVER move into a room before it is finished because that is exactly how it will stay.

If you put that vase of flowers on the table in that half-finished room, they will only wilt, your partner will nag you, you will become resentful, possibly turning to drink before repossession and homelessness beckon.

And all because you didn't start at the beginning and finish at the end. Obvious, really.