My new flat is now becoming an embarrassment. Five months ago, when I bought it, I couldn't wait to do it up and get friends round who would admire how I had transformed it.

After I'd badgered them, two friends from Middlesbrough booked their train tickets to come this month, giving me what I thought would be plenty of time to put a few pictures up and scatter some cushions around the place. Little did I know that my builders would run off half way through the radical paint and repair job they were doing and that as a result, I'd lose all interest in my new expensive purchase.

The flat looks a sorry sight today. The bedroom hasn't got any electricity, the living room window won't open and the floor has half its trimming missing. When you sit on the toilet seat, it lifts up the other end, creating a kind of see-saw effect. There is plenty of furniture, but it is sitting in Ikea and Futon Company flatpack boxes, waiting to be assembled.

Until last week, the bathroom didn't even have a door, until I realised that might cost me two good friendships.

Even now, the kitchen is like a dusty hole with jutting pipes and cupboard doors hanging off hinges. It's the kind of pad you'd expect a serial killer to live in. Little light, no furniture, and lots of filth.

After a back-breaking clean up, I plodded back to my mum's house in despair. Even after four hours of scrubbing floors, the flat still looks pokey and incomplete.

All those plans I had to move a doorway here and add an alcove there lie abandoned until I can muster enough enthusiasm to get someone to do it.

The carpenter who came to fix the bathroom door didn't make me feel any better. Running his hands along one of my newly-painted doors - one of the few things that DIY Dave managed to finish before he changed his mobile phone number and ran off with my money - the dour Glaswegian said: "He wasn't really a painter, was he?"

I had to come clean with my two Middlesbrough pals, after much frenzied thought on whether I could get a tiler, painter and furniture assembler in the next 12 hours.

Realising that I'd run out of money and couldn't afford to get in anyone other than my mother to help me, I phoned up both my friends to let them know what they were in for.

There was no way to dress it up. Would they mind sleeping on a hard floor with no heating on a miserable- looking futon mattress? Oh, and best to bring a sleeping bag. They were good about it and said it would be a bit like a camping trip. Yeah right! In Kabul.