zhisou

When I was at school the woodwork lessons were an eye-opening experience for the teacher.  I don’t think he’d ever before seen how the same person using the same yardstick could cut two bits of wood to such different lengths.  A box I once made increasingly consisted of filler, and decreasingly of wood, as you approached the corners.  The dovetail joints didn’t look much doves’ tails.   Nor anyone else’s tails.  Nor any other part of a dove.

You can see why I might approach DIY projects with my confidence a nudge under 100%.

The last time I did up a house, stupidly full of ill-considered beans thanks to too much time watching “Changing Rooms” and other MDF-centric television, I broke a lot more than I created.  Once, up a ladder with a pot of ivory-coloured paint, I inexplicably fell backwards.   This despite the fact that I was leaning forwards.   Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have been able to explain it.   I crashed into the wall behind, making a paintcan-shaped hole as I thundered into the plasterboard, smacking the 5L pot ahead of me to break the fall.

It was fun trying to repair the damage.  I stuck bits of cardboard in, creating a kind of pseudo-wall, then added filler until it was roughly level with the surrounding anaglypta.  Then I painted it.   It looked terrible.   As did the carpet – handy DIY tip: don’t use white spirit to clean paint from carpet.

I put some shelves up once.  It’s lucky the house remained standing, I drilled so much wall away.  The spirit level seemed to say one thing, the eye another.   The resultant wobbly slope help my Grandpa’s old pewter tankard for a couple of years before I spent the good part of an afternoon angrily unscrewing the four tiny screws that had held it in place.

That’s the thing, you see, because I am so stunningly shit at this sort of thing, and because it involves annoying physical effort and maddening fiddly little fuckers like screws, it drives me absolutely potty.  I get so short-tempered I even annoy myself.    We’ve learnt to plan better and live separate lives for the period of time I am on a DIY job.

Time is a great healer, it’s truly startling just how much one can forget.  Hence my agreeing to attempt to construct the innards of a couple of wardrobes.  I went to the shop and bought the bits and pieces and even indulged in a dead fancy Bosch electric screwdriver.  I asked the shop assistant if there were any top secret tricks of the trade to get the shelves straight.  “Patience” she shrugged.  “Where can I buy that?” I wisecracked – come on, she was a girl – I had to try to make her laugh – it’s what I do.

The man cutting the wood was having an argument with a customer.  The customer had asked for a piece of fake pine to be cut in half.  He hadn’t specified which way – the grumpy Cutterman cut it longways, the vague and emotional customer had wanted it sideways.   By the time I nervously rolled up with my scrawled measurements, the Cutterman was demanding to know the exact size of the required piece and the customer was refusing to go any further than demanding that it be cut in two.

I realised that I was sorely out of my depth in this daunting man’s world of tools and wood and exact measurements.  I read the numbers on the page again, worried that somehow despite measuring the wardrobe a hundred times with three separate tape measures in several different ways, that somehow the numbers did not correspond to the terrain measured.

It was too late.  It was my turn. I explained what I needed – fake classic oak, a 16mm thick board of glue and woodchip held rigid with a light brown veneer.  Classy.  I told him the sizes and he nodded but didn’t repeat what I’d said.  I felt antsy – come on, did you get it all?  Did you hear me?  I needed to see the paper to be sure – I’m a tangible chap, I need to touch things – but he was off with his mask and gloves and butchly doing big butch manly cutting.

I felt nervous all the way home.  Like something had gone wrong, like I was in big trouble for something.  I carried the sheets of “wood” upstairs, feeling the prickly frustration starting to rise: a fiery stroppiness being poked and goaded by the need to perform heavy lifting.

I cleared the house of Other People and got to work.  I tried every trick I could think of to try and get the various shelf supports level with each other.  I used rulers and string and spirit levels.  I used other bits of wood and held them at right angles to the fake grain to try to judge a straight line.  Eventually I tried measuring it properly.  I figured that if I divided the 72mm space with dots at 18, 36 and 54mm, made little holes with my brand new bradawl, then did the same a bit further along, as long as I was Dead Careful, the little screwy support things would be in line with each other.

You would not believe the very real shock I experienced when I slipped the shelves into place and they didn’t wobble.  Not only didn’t they wobble, but they actually fitted neatly into the space between the drawers and the wardrobe side.  I was perplexed: bamboozled.  How was this so?  Obviously I knew that in theory a mm here was the same as a mm there – but hard reality and years of experience had taught me that measurement was all very well, but in the real world stuff just didn’t fit together properly, no matter how many times you measured it.

Okay, the bottom drawer didn’t open because I’d forgotten to take account of the door hinge – but that was minor.  This would mean a return trip, buying a piece to go down the side, getting the shelves recut and doing it all again – but I had breached a barrier.  I had crossed a stormy sea, slayed a few demons.  I had successfully completed a minor piece of simple DIY.

I had become a real man.