WE live in a very nice house in a very nice street. But our house is beginning to fall apart. I’m afraid to say it’s now one of the scruffiest on the street.

Bits of the upstairs windows have come loose and are hanging by a thread.

The downstairs windows are only held together by lumps of filler, there’s a hole in the roof, the entire interior needs painting, and the back fascia needs painting.

I blame family life.

We moved in 14 years ago, when we had fewer children and I was a stay-at-home mother who somehow managed to make time to paint rooms in between changing nappies, doing the school run and taking the children to the park.

Over the years, I have become an expert at decorating a room and putting together flat-pack furniture, while my husband – the one with little patience – mends things in a temper and in a hurry, ergo badly. Consequently, the things he mends break or fall apart, yet he refuses to get in people who can do the job properly because he works from home.

I went back to work part-time five years ago and the children have become teenagers, so my out-of-office hours, which I could have utilised for house maintenance, are taken up with my other ‘job’.

This includes the roles of taxi driver, confidante, cleaner, tidier, launderer, referee (yes, the teens fight, physically and verbally, and frequently need to be separated), banker, alarm clock, and everything else required to maintain family life.

I just can’t find the time for DIY and decorating any more.

This means, sadly, that bits of the house deteriorate, its shabby appearance in sharp contrast to our neighbouring houses, whose owners have invested loads of money in smartening up their interiors and exteriors.

I look on enviously at their whiter-than-white window frames and perfect pointing.

But we simply can’t afford it.

My mother keeps telling me that house owners should spend at least a couple of thousand a year on maintenance but who has that kind of spare cash?

We certainly don’t.

Perhaps we could cut back on food for our ravenous teens.

Or maybe we could stop buying clothes for our growing teens, or stop having trips out at the weekend.

One teen sat her final GCSE exam last Friday and, after months of revision and stress, needed a treat.

The problem is that now the house is so run down, I’m reluctant to invite people in.

This is because I feel ashamed of the hall.

It was painted in a lovely Fired Earth neutral called Chalk White.

Well, it was lovely until the children got big enough to cycle to school and subsequently created ever deepening lines of black at roughly the height of handlebars as they haul their bikes through the hallway day after day.

Plus there are other dark marks corresponding with the buckles of their backpacks.

And there are marked and stained walls in just about every room.

Perhaps I just need to accept that in the 20-odd years from your children’s birth to adulthood, the house goes straight to the bottom of a family’s list of financial priorities and remains there until they’ve all left home.

Can I live with the dangling bits of our broken window frames, the broken banisters and the flaking paintwork?

Well, I think I can – because quite frankly my family functions perfectly well in a tatty house.

The shabbiness is only noticed by me – the children don’t really care because they’re used to it and my husband doesn’t care because if he did, he’d have to do DIY. And he really doesn’t want to.

It’s perfectly feasible that a shabby home can be a happy home.

We will turn blind eyes to it and hope that as the house continues to crumble for at least another few years, it doesn’t devalue the property prices in our street too much (sorry, neighbours).