Post by benno on May 21, 2009 7:08:13 GMT -5
D.I.Why God, Why??? A tale of home improvement woes
“Don’t you have a tap-spanner?” asked the chirpy plumber as he took a break from fiddling under my kitchen sink. This was one of those questions to which an immediate answer was not forthcoming due to its absurdity. It is not uncommon for me to choke on my own rage due to the stupidity of others, and this was one of those occasions. I had a problem with this seemingly polite enquiry for a number of reasons:
1) I am not a plumber. Why would I own a tap spanner?
2) Given the fact that I had just flooded my kitchen and a tap spanner was not amongst the tools I left strewn across the floor, it seems unlikely that I own a tap spanner.
3) If I possess a tap spanner that would imply that I know what I’m doing. Evidence to the contrary is all around you.
4) What is a tap spanner?
I managed to splutter ‘No…I don’t’ and he carried on working. The fact that I did not drag him out from under the sink by his mullet and take him slowly and forcefully through points 1 to 4 may seem to imply that, in my heart of hearts, I knew it was I who was to blame for the kitchen carnage. However, this is not the case. The problem I have with this scenario and DIY in general is that if everything worked the right way (i.e. how I imagine they should work) the work would be a happy place, with no need for tap spanners.
This particular disaster began on Saturday evening. Having finished the washing up, I stared blankly at the crappy rusted kitchen taps. Here was a job that had needed to be done for a while. I had about an hour before I became a slave to the TV for the evening, so I thought ‘what the hell, I can change some taps in an hour – I’m a man, it’s what men do’. In conjunction with the ‘jobs for men to do around the house timeline’ model as pictured in figure 1, I’d bought the taps some months earlier. I was confident that they’d contain some sort of idiot-proof fitting guide so I could whip the old ones off, slap the new ones on, earn much kudos from the wife and be sitting down in front of Ant and Dec before you could say ‘you need a tap spanner you
prick’.
Minor disaster 1 came on opening the new taps. They weren’t kitchen taps. Seemingly, they were miniature taps. On closer inspection they were revealed to be bathroom taps. Now, having made the effort since to become more knowledgeable in the area of taps, I can tell you that kitchen taps are a lot taller than other taps so you can fit buckets and stuff under them. I stared at my puny taps, aghast with frustration. After a few seconds deliberation with myself I decided I cared about the size of my taps, but not enough to back to the shop and get them changed. And hell, if I could put up with pathetic taps, so could anyone else (since this event occurred I have learned that others, particularly my wife, care more about tap size than me).
So away we went with the removal of the old taps. Now, as I mentioned earlier, if things worked the way I think they should work, the world would be wonderful. I decided that taps should just twist off. And you won’t have to turn the water off or anything because the twisting action will somehow form some sort of water blocking mechanism. So I twisted the cold water tap off. And it worked, barring minor disaster 2 which was a small flood. I revisited the old ‘water blocking mechanism’ theory and turned off the cold water, which made things a lot better. And now to the hot tap – which was a tough little bastard (or big bastard, in the world of tap comparison). Either way, it took some getting off. But a little gentle persuasion with a hammer and off it came.
So we’re halfway there: taps off. And there’s no stopping me now – away I go with the new taps. The cold water one screws in nicely and looks, well, small and odd but at least it’s not rusty. By this point I’m ahead of schedule and looking pretty sweet. But all that is soon forgotten following the swift onset of ‘Major Disaster 1: hot water tap won’t screw in’. This, combined with the increasingly important ‘Major Disaster 2: water pissing everywhere because of failure to turn off hot water’, makes for a red alert situation.
Now, the miracle of timing decreed that this was the moment my wife stumbled across ‘husbands Saturday evening DIY club for idiots’, and she was not impressed. Having missed the almost incident free stages of unwrapping, screwing and hammering she’d strolled it at what I like to term ‘the misadventure stage’. In an increasing panic I started reaching for tools I have only a rudimentary knowledge of: pliers, screwdrivers, spirit levels and other pointy metal things. But no matter how I gripped, screwed or poked the hot water pipe, the tap wouldn’t fit and the flood was worsening.
It is against a man’s instinct to ask for another mans help, particularly if that man is charging a £60 callout fee. But after exhausting all options and settling for the holding position of ‘if I just ram the tap in as hard as possible the flood subsides a bit’, it was time to call for help. Now the word ‘emergency’ has different meanings depending on the context. You would rightly expect a quick response at any time to a cry of ‘Help! I’m being stabbed, it’s an emergency’. However, as this experience taught me, a cry of ‘Help! I’ve flooded my kitchen because I’m an idiot – it’s an emergency’ is not met with wailing sirens and blue flashing lights: particularly on a Saturday night. This meant, in short, an evening of late night bucket changes and dreams about living on a houseboat.
When the plumber did arrive the next day he’d obviously been up all night revising from The Big Book of Plumber Stereotypes. Blasé about the chaos, quietly amused by the obvious stupidity and patronising to the hilt, it was a gruelling experience. He got to work straight away, informing me that ‘I’d split the pipe by using unnecessary force’. Unnecessary? It was stuck! That’s what a hammer is for, surely. He continued with his fiddling, reaching blindly for spanners and things. His obvious expertise reduced a novice like myself to feeling only half a man. And then he hit me with the tap spanner query, which finished me off. He went on to advise me that if I was ever to try something like this again, I needed a tap spanner. I composed myself and told him that I was unlikely to try such things again…
Had this been the first home improvement disaster I’d suffered, my enthusiasm would have been merely dented, as opposed to being totally vaporised. This was in fact the latest in a long list of ill-fated attempts to ‘do it myself’. For your enjoyment, here are a few of my previous calamities summarised:
• The pipe. I was preparing bedroom floorboards for painting when I noticed a loose board. I took my trusty hammer in hand and nailed it down: job done in seconds. Some hours and several beers later I was sat watching The Worlds Greatest Police Car Death Chases or similar when I noticed what is best described as a repetitive clicking sound. Fearing it was ghosts or lice (or the much chronicled ‘ghost lice’) I went to bed quickly. By the time morning had come I was awoken by my shrieking wife. The repetitive tapping wasn’t in fact ghost lice: it was in fact dripping water hitting our new leather sofa from the water pipe I’d nailed through earlier that evening. On this occasion the emergency plumber was kind enough to point out that ‘I’d been quite unlucky’ but ‘the pipe’s position was clearly marked out in pencil on the floorboards’. Pencils?? Floorboards?? The bastard.
• The bath panel. ‘Successfully’ fitting a bath panel requires more than Sellotape.
• The tiles. ‘Let’s remove those tiles and have tongue and groove boarding’ we agreed, even though I had no idea what tongue and groove boarding is/was. Tiles, as any DIY expert will tell you, are best removed with brute force and a hammer, possibly of the ‘sledge’ variety. Much hammering later I had a pile of broken tiles and plaster. But mostly plaster. And bare brick walls. After removing the biggest bits of debris I decided to use the vacuum cleaner to sort the rest. This killed the vacuum cleaner (Dyson you bagless twat, how’s that for a terminal loss of suction). I then set about ‘re-plastering’ the walls, but soon got bored of that. So I just covered over the mess with ill fitting tongue and groove boarding. Truly a kitchen to be proud of. And some years later I got to witness a real kitchen fitter remove the tongue and groove boarding in preparation to fit new units. As he slowly and silently shook his head and his eyes filled with tears, I realised a profession as a plasterer was not a career option for me.
• The tree. When cutting down a tree I recommend the combined use of an axe, chain saw, manual saw, weight-lifting pole and several hammers. Allow 72 hours for this job and don’t expect to be able to re-use any of the above tools.
• The pond. How difficult can this be? Dig a hole, put in one of those plastic pond liner thingies, pave round the pond, put some water in – et voila, a pond. So I start digging. Digging is hard and boring, so I keep checking every 4 minutes to see if the pond liner will fit yet. Eventually it kind of fits - this is what’s known technically as the ‘TWD’ or ‘That Will Do’ approach – so I’m satisfied. In order to improve the fittingness I’ll half fill the pond. Gravity decrees that a heavy pond will fit snugly and beautifully into the half-arsed hole I’ve dug. However, fate decrees other wise, meaning I’m forcing mud into the ill-fitting pond hole as the pond fills in an attempt to get it looking more pond-shape and less war-trench shape. After some time it begins to rain and I’ve had enough. This task can be continued tomorrow I decide. No, wait, I’m going on holiday tomorrow, so it’ll have to wait a week. One week later I return to find it has rained for 7 days continuously. The pond hole has filled with muddy water and the pond liner in floating on top. If you imagine a shipwreck floating to the surface of a swamp, you get the idea, but please see Figure 2 for further illustration. Unperturbed, I bail out the hole and force the lining back in. This time, I’ll use the power of paving to hold this bad boy in place. Cue much shitty paving based on the assumption that ‘my garden is level because surely it was designed that way’. The result: a wonky pond on a 38 degree angle that makes a bid for freedom each time it rains. Still, we put 5 fish in it. Then a bird ate them.
I’m sure you’ll agree that in each case I was not really to blame. If builders kept pipes more than a nails length away from floorboards, Sellotape was stickier, plastering was easier, trees were less formidable opponents and gravity worked better then all of the above wouldn’t have proved as problematic.
The plumber surfaced from beneath the sink, declaring that the pipe was fixed and my new taps were fully fitted. “Those are bathroom taps mind” he said, “You’ll have fun and games fitting a bucket under those”. “Oh just piss off Mr. Tap Expert” I thought as he started obviously scouring the kitchen for something. “Have you seen the lid from my tin of grease?” he asked. “No” I replied, handing him his payment as he gathered his tools together. “I’m always leaving it somewhere or other” he continued. Keen to see the back of him, I ushered him to the front door and noticed the grease-pot lid stuck to his back. “If it turns up, give me a bell” he said. “Will do” I said, before shutting the door and sniggering like a schoolboy.
This is what DIY reduces you to…
“Don’t you have a tap-spanner?” asked the chirpy plumber as he took a break from fiddling under my kitchen sink. This was one of those questions to which an immediate answer was not forthcoming due to its absurdity. It is not uncommon for me to choke on my own rage due to the stupidity of others, and this was one of those occasions. I had a problem with this seemingly polite enquiry for a number of reasons:
1) I am not a plumber. Why would I own a tap spanner?
2) Given the fact that I had just flooded my kitchen and a tap spanner was not amongst the tools I left strewn across the floor, it seems unlikely that I own a tap spanner.
3) If I possess a tap spanner that would imply that I know what I’m doing. Evidence to the contrary is all around you.
4) What is a tap spanner?
I managed to splutter ‘No…I don’t’ and he carried on working. The fact that I did not drag him out from under the sink by his mullet and take him slowly and forcefully through points 1 to 4 may seem to imply that, in my heart of hearts, I knew it was I who was to blame for the kitchen carnage. However, this is not the case. The problem I have with this scenario and DIY in general is that if everything worked the right way (i.e. how I imagine they should work) the work would be a happy place, with no need for tap spanners.
This particular disaster began on Saturday evening. Having finished the washing up, I stared blankly at the crappy rusted kitchen taps. Here was a job that had needed to be done for a while. I had about an hour before I became a slave to the TV for the evening, so I thought ‘what the hell, I can change some taps in an hour – I’m a man, it’s what men do’. In conjunction with the ‘jobs for men to do around the house timeline’ model as pictured in figure 1, I’d bought the taps some months earlier. I was confident that they’d contain some sort of idiot-proof fitting guide so I could whip the old ones off, slap the new ones on, earn much kudos from the wife and be sitting down in front of Ant and Dec before you could say ‘you need a tap spanner you
prick’.
Minor disaster 1 came on opening the new taps. They weren’t kitchen taps. Seemingly, they were miniature taps. On closer inspection they were revealed to be bathroom taps. Now, having made the effort since to become more knowledgeable in the area of taps, I can tell you that kitchen taps are a lot taller than other taps so you can fit buckets and stuff under them. I stared at my puny taps, aghast with frustration. After a few seconds deliberation with myself I decided I cared about the size of my taps, but not enough to back to the shop and get them changed. And hell, if I could put up with pathetic taps, so could anyone else (since this event occurred I have learned that others, particularly my wife, care more about tap size than me).
So away we went with the removal of the old taps. Now, as I mentioned earlier, if things worked the way I think they should work, the world would be wonderful. I decided that taps should just twist off. And you won’t have to turn the water off or anything because the twisting action will somehow form some sort of water blocking mechanism. So I twisted the cold water tap off. And it worked, barring minor disaster 2 which was a small flood. I revisited the old ‘water blocking mechanism’ theory and turned off the cold water, which made things a lot better. And now to the hot tap – which was a tough little bastard (or big bastard, in the world of tap comparison). Either way, it took some getting off. But a little gentle persuasion with a hammer and off it came.
So we’re halfway there: taps off. And there’s no stopping me now – away I go with the new taps. The cold water one screws in nicely and looks, well, small and odd but at least it’s not rusty. By this point I’m ahead of schedule and looking pretty sweet. But all that is soon forgotten following the swift onset of ‘Major Disaster 1: hot water tap won’t screw in’. This, combined with the increasingly important ‘Major Disaster 2: water pissing everywhere because of failure to turn off hot water’, makes for a red alert situation.
Now, the miracle of timing decreed that this was the moment my wife stumbled across ‘husbands Saturday evening DIY club for idiots’, and she was not impressed. Having missed the almost incident free stages of unwrapping, screwing and hammering she’d strolled it at what I like to term ‘the misadventure stage’. In an increasing panic I started reaching for tools I have only a rudimentary knowledge of: pliers, screwdrivers, spirit levels and other pointy metal things. But no matter how I gripped, screwed or poked the hot water pipe, the tap wouldn’t fit and the flood was worsening.
It is against a man’s instinct to ask for another mans help, particularly if that man is charging a £60 callout fee. But after exhausting all options and settling for the holding position of ‘if I just ram the tap in as hard as possible the flood subsides a bit’, it was time to call for help. Now the word ‘emergency’ has different meanings depending on the context. You would rightly expect a quick response at any time to a cry of ‘Help! I’m being stabbed, it’s an emergency’. However, as this experience taught me, a cry of ‘Help! I’ve flooded my kitchen because I’m an idiot – it’s an emergency’ is not met with wailing sirens and blue flashing lights: particularly on a Saturday night. This meant, in short, an evening of late night bucket changes and dreams about living on a houseboat.
When the plumber did arrive the next day he’d obviously been up all night revising from The Big Book of Plumber Stereotypes. Blasé about the chaos, quietly amused by the obvious stupidity and patronising to the hilt, it was a gruelling experience. He got to work straight away, informing me that ‘I’d split the pipe by using unnecessary force’. Unnecessary? It was stuck! That’s what a hammer is for, surely. He continued with his fiddling, reaching blindly for spanners and things. His obvious expertise reduced a novice like myself to feeling only half a man. And then he hit me with the tap spanner query, which finished me off. He went on to advise me that if I was ever to try something like this again, I needed a tap spanner. I composed myself and told him that I was unlikely to try such things again…
Had this been the first home improvement disaster I’d suffered, my enthusiasm would have been merely dented, as opposed to being totally vaporised. This was in fact the latest in a long list of ill-fated attempts to ‘do it myself’. For your enjoyment, here are a few of my previous calamities summarised:
• The pipe. I was preparing bedroom floorboards for painting when I noticed a loose board. I took my trusty hammer in hand and nailed it down: job done in seconds. Some hours and several beers later I was sat watching The Worlds Greatest Police Car Death Chases or similar when I noticed what is best described as a repetitive clicking sound. Fearing it was ghosts or lice (or the much chronicled ‘ghost lice’) I went to bed quickly. By the time morning had come I was awoken by my shrieking wife. The repetitive tapping wasn’t in fact ghost lice: it was in fact dripping water hitting our new leather sofa from the water pipe I’d nailed through earlier that evening. On this occasion the emergency plumber was kind enough to point out that ‘I’d been quite unlucky’ but ‘the pipe’s position was clearly marked out in pencil on the floorboards’. Pencils?? Floorboards?? The bastard.
• The bath panel. ‘Successfully’ fitting a bath panel requires more than Sellotape.
• The tiles. ‘Let’s remove those tiles and have tongue and groove boarding’ we agreed, even though I had no idea what tongue and groove boarding is/was. Tiles, as any DIY expert will tell you, are best removed with brute force and a hammer, possibly of the ‘sledge’ variety. Much hammering later I had a pile of broken tiles and plaster. But mostly plaster. And bare brick walls. After removing the biggest bits of debris I decided to use the vacuum cleaner to sort the rest. This killed the vacuum cleaner (Dyson you bagless twat, how’s that for a terminal loss of suction). I then set about ‘re-plastering’ the walls, but soon got bored of that. So I just covered over the mess with ill fitting tongue and groove boarding. Truly a kitchen to be proud of. And some years later I got to witness a real kitchen fitter remove the tongue and groove boarding in preparation to fit new units. As he slowly and silently shook his head and his eyes filled with tears, I realised a profession as a plasterer was not a career option for me.
• The tree. When cutting down a tree I recommend the combined use of an axe, chain saw, manual saw, weight-lifting pole and several hammers. Allow 72 hours for this job and don’t expect to be able to re-use any of the above tools.
• The pond. How difficult can this be? Dig a hole, put in one of those plastic pond liner thingies, pave round the pond, put some water in – et voila, a pond. So I start digging. Digging is hard and boring, so I keep checking every 4 minutes to see if the pond liner will fit yet. Eventually it kind of fits - this is what’s known technically as the ‘TWD’ or ‘That Will Do’ approach – so I’m satisfied. In order to improve the fittingness I’ll half fill the pond. Gravity decrees that a heavy pond will fit snugly and beautifully into the half-arsed hole I’ve dug. However, fate decrees other wise, meaning I’m forcing mud into the ill-fitting pond hole as the pond fills in an attempt to get it looking more pond-shape and less war-trench shape. After some time it begins to rain and I’ve had enough. This task can be continued tomorrow I decide. No, wait, I’m going on holiday tomorrow, so it’ll have to wait a week. One week later I return to find it has rained for 7 days continuously. The pond hole has filled with muddy water and the pond liner in floating on top. If you imagine a shipwreck floating to the surface of a swamp, you get the idea, but please see Figure 2 for further illustration. Unperturbed, I bail out the hole and force the lining back in. This time, I’ll use the power of paving to hold this bad boy in place. Cue much shitty paving based on the assumption that ‘my garden is level because surely it was designed that way’. The result: a wonky pond on a 38 degree angle that makes a bid for freedom each time it rains. Still, we put 5 fish in it. Then a bird ate them.
I’m sure you’ll agree that in each case I was not really to blame. If builders kept pipes more than a nails length away from floorboards, Sellotape was stickier, plastering was easier, trees were less formidable opponents and gravity worked better then all of the above wouldn’t have proved as problematic.
The plumber surfaced from beneath the sink, declaring that the pipe was fixed and my new taps were fully fitted. “Those are bathroom taps mind” he said, “You’ll have fun and games fitting a bucket under those”. “Oh just piss off Mr. Tap Expert” I thought as he started obviously scouring the kitchen for something. “Have you seen the lid from my tin of grease?” he asked. “No” I replied, handing him his payment as he gathered his tools together. “I’m always leaving it somewhere or other” he continued. Keen to see the back of him, I ushered him to the front door and noticed the grease-pot lid stuck to his back. “If it turns up, give me a bell” he said. “Will do” I said, before shutting the door and sniggering like a schoolboy.
This is what DIY reduces you to…
