It all began when the estate agent rang to update us on the viewings we’d had. Feedback, they said, had suggested it was hard to see the full potential of our family home (a solid North Wales dowager of a 4 bedroom semi) because the ‘large amount of furniture and, er, so on was, er, distracting.’

Huffily, we decided that our potential buyers clearly had no imagination. Surely they knew the furniture would be going? “I’m not painting everything magnolia,” I shrieked at every opportunity, banging saucepans around the tiny kitchen and roundly blaming all our troubles on Phil and Kirsty and their obsessive ‘house-dressing’.

During a short pause in the histrionics, sister 3 had a suggestion. “ Let’s pretend we’ve not all lived here on and off for 30 years and try to see it with fresh eyes”.  An hour later, to say we’d had a revelation was an understatement. It was clear that to the unaccustomed eye, the house we’d just put on the market was occupied by a tribe of colour-blind, junk-hoarding mutants. I realised that in terms of interior design we were like the wizards who tried to blend in with muggles at Harry Potter’s Quidditch World cup and while everyone else coolly strolled around in understated M&S chinos and polos, we were rocking a Hawaiian shirt, pink shorts, argyll socks, sandals and a sombrero.

We started at the front door. Much of the carpet in the house (including the first bit you set foot on as you cross the threshold) had been lovingly transported from the family business – a cinema. The large splashy squares, as I recall, had been striking in the vast expanse of foyer that, thanks to our showman dad, had played host to everything from a real live elephant (Dumbo) to Little Nelly (Bond) and a jaunty looking VW beetle (Herbie). In a family semi, the bold sweep of royal blue and gold assaulted the senses, eliciting the kind of gasp generally only heard from people suddenly and unexpectedly entering a cold swimming pool. But this was nothing compared to jolt of mental espresso generated by the sitting room carpet – clearly woven by a generous and inclusive soul who hadn’t had the heart to leave any colour out of his design. So far, so eye-opening.

We moved onto the downstairs landing and up the stairs. “It looks like someone has just ….vomited art over the walls” said sister 3 gravely. It was true. Watercolours of the Australian outback jostled splashy oils of musical instruments and delicate English butterfly prints in a companionable mix of shapes, sizes, colours, frames and spacing . Here and there were even more egregious lapses as wistful girls gazed over meadows and mop-haired scallywags swapped cigarettes. A tour of the bedrooms confirmed our worst suspicions. Somehow, without noticing, we’d lived out the latter years of our childhoods in a home of terrifying eccentricity. Walls were painted in a range of colours most often seen in an ice cream parlour – strawberry pink, lemon, blueberry, peach. Here and there was interposed a selection of floral wallpaper that looked as if someone had played blind man’s supermarket sweep in B&Q . Borders had been used with frank nonchalance about where most right-thinking individuals would put them. The only note of consistency was in the curtain colours which seemed to be uniformly bottle green or mustard. There were emerald and black geometric prints. There was buttercup yellow shag pile.

It got worse. We’d apparently become inured to the sheer amount of stuff that infested every flat surface. Odd china figuruines (most of them 80% superglue, having been hurled at someone’s head in 1976), small furry toys (plush and wire turkey anyone?) copulating fimo pigs, lumpy child-made pottery, an indecent number of teapots, scary family photos featuring seventies perms and eighties fashion and the piece de resistence – an evil looking stuffed rat, probably single pawedly responsible for putting off all three viewers so far.

On Saturday, the antiques dealer arrived to take away a job lot of furniture. He took the Welsh dresser – a capacious beast with a storage chamber you could lock a younger sister in. He took a huge carved Victorian chest you could bundle a younger sister into and then sit on the top. I experienced mild panic. Was there now no place in which to incarcerate a small sibling? Then I was jolted back to reality. I was no longer 10 and she was now about a foot taller and four times stronger than me. As more and more furniture was carried out of the front door large dusty bare patches started to appear.

I saw it mostly as a hoovering job; sister 3 saw an artist’s canvas. As the house reverberated to the sound of scrubbing and hoovering there were occasional shrieks. Mine usually because I was about to topple off piled up pieces of furniture on which I’d stood to re-hang huge pictures; sister 3’s because of my habit of leaving everything I was part way through doing in doorways she was trying to get through (often with limited visibility due to the stuff she was carrying). She collided with piles of bin bags, bits of furniture, the hoover (several times) and alas (snigger!) the big tub of soapy water I was using to wash down the skirting boards.

Sister 1 rang. Could we make sure we kept the ugly troll which she had made in pottery when she was nine and which presided over the begonias? We promised we’d keep an eye open for it. Had the haunted dresser gone? It had. There had been collective sighs of relief as it was driven off in the antiques van, the evil ghoul from the ironing room in our old house still no doubt knocking about inside.

Stuff piled up in the garage, plastic coated wire wine racks, a manky breadbin, a peculiar wardrobe painted with blue rabbits. Bin bags proliferated. In the frenzy I accidentally threw away my own toothbrush. The stripped down house began to emerge, along with another problem. Our mother had had a quaintly laissez-faire attitude to our teenage attempts to stamp personality on our rooms. Paint your sink with emulsion? Fine. Try out your new ‘marbling’ technique on the garden furniture? No problem. A tangerine ceiling? Why not? Alas, our creativity was benignly allowed to flourish in many areas, as witnessed by a dustily unearthed 1982 diary which informed us: “Laura cooked tea tonight. Chicken with spices. Quite strong *cough* *cough*”

The ‘stronger’ bits of teenage design were camouflaged as best as we could. Sister 3 became momentarily obsessive about matching art to walls – sunset pictures and still lives of fruit were made to form an orderly queue for the sitting room. The blue bedroom became a veritable shanty of ships. The wind chimes which had knocked everyone above five foot seven on the head several times a day for the last 30 years were finally taken down.

As we left on Sunday – aching in every muscle, the house was gleaming but it was also glowing with an new sense of possibility. A veritable Mona Lisa of a dwelling, it now smirks mysteriously in its coat of many colours dreaming of future that’s oatmeal and barley white. Another stage in the long goodbye accomplished. Sweet dreams, 173.