£1.6billion spent on Christmas spruce-up

By David French

11 Dec 2006

According to Alliance & Leicester Mortgages' movingimproving index, the money is spent on a variety of things to impress family and friends, from buying new furniture to splashing out on luxury toilet roll.

The research showed 65 per cent of Brits will be inviting friends and relatives to visit over Christmas and New Year. Of these, 82 per cent will be revamping their home in preparation, spending an average of £145.15 each.

But it's not just money that goes into making homes ship-shape to face the scrutiny of Brits' nearest and dearest - it takes time too. Re-decorating the spare room, general tidying and putting up the Christmas tree means the nation will spend 70 million hours preparing for their guests to arrive.

Stephen Leonard, director of mortgages at Alliance & Leicester, commented: "Christmas is a time for friends, family and general socialising, and we want our homes to look the best when entertaining guests. People want to feel house-proud and are putting in the time and effort to achieve house-perfection."

Seven in ten people want to feel proud when showing guests round their house, although 14 per cent will just use the impending visits as an excuse to do some decorating that needed doing anyway.

The top five tasks preparing for guests in the run-up to Christmas are:

Tidying the house (67 per cent)
Buying luxury food/drink (47 per cent)
Buying flowers (21 per cent)
Painting/decorating the house (20 per cent)
Buying new crockery/cutlery (8 per cent)

Men are putting their hand deeper into their pockets than women, (£168 compared to £127), but would rather do that than make the effort, as women will spend an average of six hours and 48 minutes sprucing up the home, compared to five hours and 48 minutes spent by men.

Those in Yorkshire will spend eight and a half hours preparing for their visitors, compared to time-pressured Londoners, who will take less than five and a half hours. In contrast, those in the North East will splurge almost £200 on making their home the envy of the neighbourhood, whereas West Midlanders will fork out just half of that (£108) on their homes.

Leonard added: "Christmas may be an excuse to give our homes a face-lift, and hopefully this will help make this year's festivities a real cracker. Not only could it help improve the setting for Christmas, it will also ensure that you enter 2007 in style, and make all the hard work worthwhile."