I’m staggeringly impatient. This is the first drawback. The second, and major, drawback is that I just do not possess the aptitude for it. Don’t get me wrong, I recognise my DIY limits more than anyone so I only take on the simplest of tasks but I often manage to underestimate even those. This invariably results in a cacophony of unrepeatable language. The start of a DIY attempt commonly coincides with my wife making sure she’s at the other end of the house or, better still, in a different county.
In my last house I put up some CD shelves. There were three holes for securing each shelf to the wall and I left one overnight (half filled) to ensure it was properly attached. Next morning it was fine, so I filled it with the remaining CDs. When I came down the following morning the shelf lay in the middle of the floor, surrounded by scattered CDs. I swore a bit. Now, I’m a man who believes in overkill. If I can’t open something I generally result to brute force, normally with the biggest hammer I can find. No word of a lie, I once tried to get a car stereo in place with a hammer (which is ironic given that kids probably use one to remove them under torchlight). Anyway, plainly a hammer wouldn’t work in this case so what I actually did was make nine more holes in the shelf and attached it to the wall with twelve screws and half a tube of No More Nails (just to be sure). The only thing that’ll get that shelf off the wall is a wrecking ball so I hope the bloke who bought the house likes CDs.
I’ve made the mistake a few times of underestimating a painting task. That’s easy right? You lob the paint on the wall and job done. For the last room I painted I even bought the ‘one coat’ stuff to speed the process up (did I mention I’m impatient?). When they named it ‘one coat’, I want to know who did the counting. I mean, it’s not a big number (that’s kind of the point). Did they lose count or was someone in the marketing department dyslexic? It must have been a marketing thing because ‘three coats if you’re lucky’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Buying any kind of furniture which requires assembly is normally a nightmare too. First off, at least two screws will be missing. I built a bench for the garden and I swear they did it on purpose. Not only were the screws missing but they were such an obscure size that I had to visit three DIY shops before I found the correct sized ones. Once you overcome the component shortage you’re then left to deal with instructions which look like they were drawn on tracing paper with crayons by a five year old. In the dark. The printers then remove a couple of stages from the process and you’re left wondering how the cabinet you’re building went from comprising of sixteen separate sections to the finished article in a single, seamless step.
Then there are the DIY shops, catering to the belief that the every day bloke can build himself a two storey extension over the course of a long weekend. There are two types of people in DIY shops; those who stroll around confidently (they’re there to buy a three mill flange-nut hexagonal converter and know its application intimately) and then there’s me. I’m the clueless bloke, repeating my steps down the same aisles (looking just as confused and lost as the three previous forays past the array of spanners).
I’ve said all this but, of course, you’re not a man without a good tool kit (no double entendre intended). It is acceptable to enter a DIY store and gaze longingly at chainsaws with motors powerful enough to run a yacht. A psychologist would probably be interested in what compels me to look at the scythes, axes and hammers while wondering which ones could genuinely be used in a new Friday 13th movie. I’m not going to ask though. My point is a man without a tool kit is... well, he’s a girl. It doesn’t matter if you can use it or not but when someone asks if you have a three quarter inch wrench you need to be able to give a positive response. It’s the law.
