My parents want to repaint the living room and hallway in the house and asked me to help them with colours. They know I'm arty and all that so it seemed like a good idea.

The only problem was they couldn't give me a good description of what they wanted, although they could tell me what colours they did not want. So once red, yellow, blue, green, orange, purple, beige and especially magnolia were out of the running things became a little tricky.

We've since worked out that they want a brown carpet, with pale yellow walls in the hall and brown in the living room. I think that most of the colours we've looked at count as beige, but whatever. They work nicely together so I can live with that. Now we're planning on blue accents for the living room so it won't turn muddy looking. I think it will work, but only time will tell.