Don’t get me wrong, I quite enjoy DIY, especially when its on the TV and I can spend a satisfying half an hour or so tut tutting at all the silly mistakes these people make and then have to call in the gurning idiots they call ‘experts’ on these shows.
Look I know we all make mistakes, and I have made a few, the Heath Robinson maze of copper pipe I put together when fixing a shower to the wall comes to mind. But the point was, it worked and I didn’t have to call a local plumber who would have tut-tutted and then charged me a fortune to fix it, I think I would have preferred the gurning idiots and the national humiliation.
Does it make sense to you, after making your house look like a warzone, because of your own incompetence, to call up a TV station and say ‘hey come to my house to show the world what an idiot I am once you put a hammer in my hands’. But then again if the only other option is to have to spend the rest of your life having your wife moan at you and then leave, taking the kids and the dog, then being humiliated on national TV is a small price to pay!
So my DIY life has been this. If you remember it all started with the drains, which I very professionally unblocked. Then it was the bedroom window cills. (our bedroom is on the ground floor, we have an upside down house).
This started very well as you can see. The weather was good and I ripped the old rotten cill and frame out pretty damn quick, I can tell you. But then it started to rain. The option was of course, to down tools, rush off to the Hyper Value, buy a big piece of tarpaulin and cover the huge open space in our front wall. But I knew deep down that my wife would not stand for sleeping in a room with only plastic covering the hole, no it had to be glass or nothing.
The window hole
So for the rest of the day I DIY’ed in the pouring rain – no wonder I got a virus last week! I was soaking, but the frame was up and by 5:00 in the evening I even had the glass in, not puttied but in! What a hero. If this was the Soviet Union they would have given me a medal!
You've been framed
glazed
THIS weekend, I was up for a bit of light puttying, but it was DIY hell in my house once again. Not only had the dripping bath tap got progressively worse until the flow had become a danger to World fresh water reserves and my bank balance, but the shower pipe, the bit with the curly chrome metal around it, exploded and sprayed water everywhere.
Now a dripping tap doesn’t faze me one bit (Did you see rogue traders this week?) and it just gives me the opportunity to take a few pounds of the plumbers of this world. But isn’t it always the case, that while one tap body will unscrew nicely, the other (the hot tap and main culprit) was jammed in there tight! It took me all my strength and a pair of mole grips (a wonderful invention) to unscrew the bugger. But I did it and now our bath is drip free and showering to perfection.
So this weekend was spent puttying and tap wrenching, I wonder what next weekend will bring?
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