Do you have a funny tale of household horror? What terrible things have your DCs done to your home when your back was turned? Tell Valspar and you could win a £300 Love2Shop voucher!- NOW CLOSED

[AngelieMumsnet]

Have you ever turned your back for what seemed like seconds only to return to a pencil/crayon ‘work of art’ on your newly painted walls? Has there ever been an ‘incident’ involving a TV and a football? Have your children ever wreaked havoc with an unguarded tin of paint? If so, Valspar wants to know.

Valspar say "With great durability, Valspar Paint can withstand even the toughest parts of daily living and maintain its colour (even hundreds of scrubs!). So if those tiny, mucky hands and colouring crayons go astray – fear not. We have made sure you can scrub away the mess without the worry of taking a layer of paint off too – just in case your little one does decide to release their inner Picasso on your living room walls."

So, what are the most awful, or funniest, things that your children have done to your house while your back was turned? Whether the crime was big or small, Valspar would love to hear your stories.

Everyone who adds a comment to this thread will be entered into a prize draw where one winner will receive a £300 Love2Shop voucher.

Thanks and good luck,
MNHQ

Standard Insight T&Cs apply

DD's first attempt at writing was with a permanent black marker on the side of a mahogany dining table given to us by my FIL. We managed to hide it for years but he saw it eventually. Luckily he was exceptionally fond of DD!

Paint the house in sudocreme

My daughter carved her name, with a biro, in to her lovely new wooden bed!

Three years ago we went to a wonderful Dennis the Menace exhibition on the South Bank in London. We had a fantastic day and our DCs had hips of fun, they particularly enjoyed the area where visitors were invited to doodle on the walls. We thought it was a great way to encourage children's creativity. When we got home our DCs went upstairs as my husband and I recovered on the sofa. They went very quiet, we should have known they were up to something, and they were! We soon found out they had decided to cover the walls of their room with their very own art work and drawn all over the walls !! After cursing extensively (mainly in my head but not all of it) the creative area in the exhibition I gave each of them a bucket and sponge and they spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the walls and promising never to do it again! Touch wood (or wall), it has never happened again!

My two girls had a disagreement whilst eating weetabix and it went flying onto the walls and video recorder at the time. I went on the school run without seeing it and when I came back it had all dried on and I had to soak the newly painted walls.

My eldest dd decided to colour in my living room radiators (two large ones) with pencil. They looked lovely and I had to try and get it off using a rubber.

Think cream carpets, oil based face paint and 2 toddlers!!

I'm sure this isn't unique but my eldest once coloured in the whole radiator in pillar box red. It was warm so all the crayon melted on the radiator and was truly coloured. I think i squeaked (newborn upstairs asleep) and then had a bit of a weep before trying to scrub it off. We were renting and i had such a stress about them noticing the pink radiator when we came to move out a few months later. They didn't!!

Both DS's have ripped wallpaper & drawn on walls with pens & crayons.....DS2 has a lovely of smashing vases & photo frames too. Can't turn my back for a second.

Hi

My daughter (4) wrote her name on my dressing table (antique polished wood) with a hat pin. Then claimed it wasnt her!! But its your name I said.
Claimed she was framed by the cat

I realised that LO had been too quiet for too long and investigated to find that she had been salting the house. That is, she had managed to snag the salt shaker from the table (no mean feat for 19 months) and had been methodically making her way along the walls and furniture sprinkling a trail of salt. Not an unmitigated disaster but our house was pretty gritty for awhile as we struggled to find and clean it all.

We have also had pictures drawn on the walls. In biro?!

My son is on the top bunk and we didn't notice them for a couple of years... by then we had a lovely mural!

broke the tap in the bathroom and then said it wasn't him but there was nowhere else in there and also hiding fruit in his bedroom behind his books took me ages to work out where the smell was coming from it smelt like something had died in there and that apparently wasn't him either

DD decided to use her older sisters nail varnish to paint her nails and all of her dolls nails too. Luckily it was in the bathroom. She was worried about it so tried to clean everything off with nail varnish remover. The smell and mess were unbelievable.

Who knew sudocrem was so difficult to get off the walls, carpet, furniture, teddies and ALL OVER a small child?!?

When ds was 3 he was obsessed with his baby sisters talcum powder.

He sprinkled it all over the living room floor once leaving a trail of footprints into the kitchen!! Then claimed it wasn't him!

DCs spilled milk on our old sofa. We washed the covers, but in the end had to chuck the sofa out as we couldn't get the sour milk cheesy smell out of the foam non-washable cushions. :(

We moved into a house which needed a lot of work but DS has to sleep in a room with wood chip wallpaper until we got round to replacing it. One morning we found he had woken up and picked off every single piece of wood chip that he could reach out of the paper on the wall by his bed. Disaster!!! It took us another year to get round to redecorating his room!!

My Ds is only 6 months, so hasn't wrecked anything yet!
When I was about 10, I did a handstand against the living room wall and kicked and broke one of my mums favourite paintings. I pretended it just fell of it's own accord. My sister was convinced we had a poltergeist as a result!

Eldest DS 13 at the time and old enough to know better decided to see if he could 'pop' a cod liver oil capsule with a pair of nail clippers () and it exploded onto my freshly painted fire side red chimney breast. No amount of cleaning or painting over could get rid of it. He's now 24 and I think, sensible at last

My 11 month old son covered his twin brother in sudocreme while I ran to get a clean vest from washing basket

Dd2 found dd1's lipsalve once and used it to 'colour in' all of dd1's octonaut toys and a good deal of her bedroom once... It took me a while to work out what all the greasy stuff was then to remove it all before dd1 came home from school...

My daughter decided our brand new sofa was too plain and decided to use nail varnish to paint spots on it to make it "fancy"! In all fairness she did argue that the sofa was in HER playroom, and she had tried to use the colours that were in my cushions so that everything matched! Can't argue with her logic!

According to our 3DC we have a clever cat, according to them he was the one who scratched 'Daddy' into the hall wall paper. They are getting cleverer about their wall art now, when they write names, they don't write their own.

I am pretty sure it wasn't the cat, who smashed the centre light fitting while pretending that the broom handle was a light saber.

Then there was the time when the (long suffering) cat ended up covered in makeup, I don't even wear make up anymore so I have no idea where they found it, or the time when DS1 (then aged 4) cut DD1's (aged 2) hair, I had just had DD2 so was very emotional and cried about it, it did grow back.

I have two stories, both involving my twin boys.

The first is the time I left them in the sitting room aged about 3 so that I could cook dinner. They found a red biro from my work bag and drew all (and I mean ALL) over a cream leather sofa and pale wall behind it.
I'll never forget the shock,
That was the day I discovered that baby wipes really are miraculous!!

The other occasion was when they were about 2. A lovely summer day, they were pottering in the garden, playing in the sand-pit under the kitchen window while I was making lunch. They were industriously beetling around, occasionally one would go out of sight, I didn't really register...
Until I walked into the sitting room to find that they had been pottering in through the open conservatory door to the sitting room and had constructed a large sand edifice on the carpet in front of the tv. Half a sandpit there to play on.

Happy days - they are nearly 14 now. I consider myself blessed with the odd courteous monosyllable these days.