D.I.Y. - Just Pick Up a Phone... (DIY in general)

Member Name: mcrouch

Product:	DIY in general
Date:	24/08/01 (439 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Inspirational,, gives freedom to creativity

Disadvantages: Costs a lot getting professionals to put everything right afterwards

DIY around the home has to be one of the most creative and rewarding experiences open to the homeowner. It must be, the TV programmers keep telling us it is. And it’s so easy too.

The trouble is I’m just not very good at it. Well that’s a bit of an understatement, I’m completely hapless and out of my depth when it comes to the majority of DIY jobs. Let me tell you a bit about it.

Today we are bombarded with TV shows and associated books and magazines that on the surface are aimed at getting us to become actively involved in the design and maintenance of our homes. I say ”on the surface” because the truth of the matter is they are actually dirt cheap to produce and the terrestrial channels can fill no end of air space with them. Daytime television is littered with programmes about overhauling our kitchens, renovating our bathrooms, landscaping our gardens and redecorating our living rooms. And people like me buy into the idea. At least, I did.

Take Changing Rooms and HomeFront as typical examples of these kinds of programmes. They show that with a bit of forethought, planning and designing (and the services of expensive design consultants) we too can completely renovate our homes in three days.

Hogwash!!

I know, I tried it. I sat down for several days (not continuously, I took breaks) and sketched out numerous designs to refit my rather small bathroom. The trouble is drawing pictures of how everything should look is a far cry from the practicalities of actually doing it. I mean, in my bathroom there is only one place the bath can go. And the toilet for that matter. And the sink. So with that aspect of my redesign project completed, the question now was colour.

First though I had to strip the flowery wallpaper that the previous tenants had put up (wallpaper in a bathroom??). With a bit of elbow grease and a lot of time, I eventually stripped the walls and washed
them down. Unfortunately this left several patches of cracked plasterwork. Not to worry, various plaster filler kits are available in the DIY stores these days and they all seem to give the impression that it’s pretty easy. So why is it that my walls now resemble a landscape of gently rolling slopes? No matter how much I follow the instructions, the walls are never flat. But then I have a brainwave. I call it creativity. I meant to produce gently rolling slopes to give the bathroom character. Yes, that sounds reasonable and it satisfies me for the moment that my DIY so far has been successful.

Colourwise I opted for an aquamarine shade with wooden shelving and sides to the bath. Even a hapless D.I.Y.er like me could do that.

Not.

Okay, the painting was not much of a problem and I did manage to get three small shelves up but only because I made use of the fittings that were already there. So they wobble slightly and the shelves are a different shade of wood to the fittings but hey, it’s that character thing again, right? I know I’m right, Laurence Lewellyn-Bowen has advocated it on HomeFront.

The bath panels are an entirely different matter. I am faced with the fact that no matter what I do, the purpose-made, easy to fit panels are just not going to go. And so I do what all DIY enthusiasts end up doing at one time or another. I hire a professional fitter to do it for me!

I bought a Home Front book on bathrooms and kitchens and was inspired by some of the ideas in it. One paragraph mentioned the importance of positioning things like sinks – apparently a simple move to the left or right can make all the difference. What these books, magazines and programmes never tell you is how do you move the sink? What’s involved? How much? And so I fall back to Plan B. I phone a plumber.

No wonder these guys charge so much. People like me are completely at their mercy, and know
it. At the end of the day, I have had the walls replastered professionally, had the sink and bath fittings moved and fitted and my hero, my dad, repositioned the shelves. All I had to do now was repaint the room.

Okay, so now I have a reasonably decent looking bathroom and all I had to do was make a complete fiasco of it myself, call in some professionals and pay them a lot of money and then paint it. I had no idea DIY was so easy. Time to turn my attention to the kitchen methinks!

Other people’s houses always look decent and well cared for but I suspect that lurking behind a wall of silence is the fact that many other DIY enthusiasts suffer similar experiences to mine. DIY for me is like entering a banqueting hall and being faced with platters of every kind of food imaginable and knowing full well that however hungry you are, you’re never going to be able to eat it all. DIY is being faced with no end of creative and ingenious ideas but knowing full well that most of us simply don’t have the skills and resources available to us to pull them off. And that is why I hate DIY programmes that make it all sound so easy and straightforward.

I hope that someday soon, this glut of DIY programming will disappear from our screens and let us return to the cosy, characterful surroundings that we love. And when they do, I will buy some MDF and carve them a tombstone into which I will chisel the words “Do It Yours…”. At that point, the cheap chisel I bought for the job will have snapped in half and I’ll have got bored with the job and turned my attention to something else like decoupage.

Summary: