Doing it ourselves

I’m not a natural when it comes to DIY (or housework when it comes to that matter), and nor is your dad. It would be safe to say that we’ve developed something of a blind spot around damp patches, peeling paint, holes in the wall and unvarnished floors. Sadly for us (but luckily for you), we’ve woken up to the fact that doing DIY with a babe-in-arms will be far worse than doing DIY with just us two.

So we’ve been getting to it. First step is the damp. Simon spent the ‘worst weekend of his life’ last weekend taking all the plaster off the walls downstairs, in readiness for some men injecting the walls with chemicals, wrapping them in waterproof membranes and then slathering them in plaster.

I spent most of the weekend sat in the bedroom with the dog, under strict instructions from him downstairs not to do too much. I did manage to blacken the rusty old fireplace in our bedroom (a job I had successfully avoided doing for two years). All went well until I took off the masking tape that had been protecting the walls from the gloopy black paste I’d liberally applied. Off came the tape, and so did half the wall. The fireplace looks great though.

This is why I hate DIY: one step forward, two steps back.

We’ve also been without a bedroom door for six months (don’t ask). A month ago, Simon pulled a blinder and managed to find a replacement (to be fair, it was in next door’s drive and we could barely get out of our own front door without tripping over it). He sanded it down, cut it to size and then hung it. We went to bed feeling all smug that we’d finally sorted it, only for me to wake up, half-suffocated, at 1am. Your dad had liberally doused the door in white spirit after sanding, and the fumes seemed to multiply during the night.

Cue me waking Simon up and crying that the smell might hurt the baby (that’ll be you, then). And cue Simon getting out of bed, taking the door off its hinges, hefting it downstairs and putting it in the shed.

Two weeks later, the door is still in the shed. Told you we were crap at DIY.