Skip to main content

Further adventures in D-I-whY

Yay! A Bank Holiday weekend!

Three whole days off work to relax and unwind... or 72 hours of fear, loathing and DIY.

I’m lucky enough to be the current owner of a charming terraced house, on a quiet street, built lovingly from local stone by craftsmen over 100 years ago.

Some delightful period features, a dash of quirkiness and a rugged exterior means I’m quite similar in many ways.

Unfortunately, the craftspersonages who put it together seemingly didn’t own a tape measure, for every door is a different size, the ceilings slope gently (which works OK, because the floor does too) and they had clearly never heard of right-angles or straight edges.

Even their best efforts have been surpassed by a century’s worth of amateur DIY (Damage It Yourself) enthusiasts giving their all in the name of top notch corner-cutting, bodging and disfiguring.

To give you an idea of what we’re up against, we once foolishly thought it might be nice to double the number of plug sockets in the bedroom - to two. As it turned out, this necessitated rewiring the house, and ‘redecorating’ involved removing an entire wall that turned out to only be standing because it was held together by multiple layers of blown vinyl wallpaper.

I still have flashbacks that involve me sobbing uncontrollably onto a sheet of plasterboard that wouldn’t fit because it’s edges were too straight.

Next up is the hall, landing and stairs. Currently a fetching shade of ‘Despair Yellow’, early attempts to remove the woodchip have revealed further layers of woodchip, plaster on top of woodchip and damp patches from next-door’s disused chimney. Oddly, there’s also some black, tar-like sheet on some bits which I can only assume was put up in the 70s by a stoned owner to stop aliens from reading his thoughts... man.

We’ll need to rectify the different heights of skirting board, and there is another wall which I think might have been constructed using the wattle and daub technique, with a large area under another acre of woodchip that moves worryingly when you press it.

Hopefully, removing the boxwork on the landing will reveal beautiful old banisters, waiting to be restored to their former glory. Sadly, they will no longer have their stairs counterparts as these were ripped out before we moved in.

The stairwell is so high, I suspect we’ll need oxygen pumping up there when we attempt to explore it’s uppermost regions, and I’m genuinely scared of what we might find under the worn carpet.

With sockets and switches that delightful shade of yellowy-brown that only comes with decades of use (and all in ridiculously unhelpful locations), a radiator that can probably remember when England won the World Cup, and a filled-in doorway that was clearly blocked up at night, during a power cut, by a blind 5 year old, it could be a tough long weekend for me and Mrs G.

On second thoughts... is there anything good on TV?

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 1st of May 2015, where it was retitled as "I'm still having DIY flashbacks". You can read the version published by the paper on their website here

Written and submitted a full week ahead of publication, this was my holiday filler column, meaning I wrote two on consecutive nights. Hopefully, quality control didn't suffer as a result.

It's now Sunday lunchtime, and we're still yet to do any of the DIY, although we have talked about it. That counts, right..?

(Jean Michel Jarre CD singles still being played today. Always interesting to consider that a 35 minute CD containing 6 different mixes of Oxygene 10 clocks in with a total time longer than the first few Beatles albums...)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...