COLUMN: Why I'm into DDIY - Don't Do It Yourself

Paul Fitzpatrick

A new acronym has entered the lexicon around the Virginia area in recent weeks – DDIY. It stands for Don’t Do It Yourself and has been uttered by my better half on countless occasions lately.

We moved into a new house, you see, and she is aghast at the thoughts of my ruining it with my cumbersome, ‘two left hands’ approach to getting stuff done around the place. And, I have to be honest, it’s a blow to the old ego.

There have been floors to be laid, walls to be painted, holes to be drilled and holes to be filled, TVs to be hooked up, plug sockets to be moved, a hedge to be cut down and got rid of...

Now, I have, like Liam Neeson in Taken, a particular set of skills - but unfortunately they’re limited and none of the above are covered.

So, I have spent a few weeks looking on as others do the work, trying to help, getting in the way, making the tea, spilling the tea, sweeping the floor, missing bits... that sort of thing.

An example of my affliction? Okay. I bought a few buckets of paint from Hyland’s and my main foreman, known for his skills if not his patience, threw me some duct tape and told me to seal the buckets in case they opened in the car.

Eager to help, I did so – and taped the handles down. He looked at me incredulously and slowly shook his shiny head in disgust.

Do you know what it’s like to go through life being this ‘unhandy’? It reminds me of the great sports journalist Hugh McIlvaney’s quote about how difficult he found the process of actually writing something. “Leaving a note for the milk man,” he said, “can be torture.”

For me, changing a light bulb can be life-threatening.

So, in the absence of a publicly-funded support group - I’m considering launch the Society for Clobs, Rooters and Awkward People (SCRAP) in the coming days - the way I have dealt with it is to embrace it.

If I tried to bluff it, my story would quickly unravel. Where real men gather and talk tools and engines and other indecipherable jargon, my head would spin and I’d find myself over-reaching.

“Ah sure if you’ve no six-inch socket you’d need a jerry hammer to ratchet the dump valve and carry the line to the drop unit,” they’d say as I racked my brains for something to contribute that didn’t sound ludicrous and expose me as an imposter.

To avoid such situations, experience has taught me to come clean at the earliest opportunity. “I never claimed to be handy,” I say when I have made a hames of something or am asked my opinion.

It’s an insult to my manhood, of course, but the choice between that and looking foolish is a straightforward one. Okay, the trade-off is that you will be instantly dismissed as a failure – I imagine echoes of Joe Brolly’s “Forget about him as far as he’s a man” when I leave the room – but that’s surely better than a failure with a tendency to bullshit.

Years ago, my grandparents were building an extension and it was jokingly suggested that there were such a spread of trades in the family that it could be an inside job. One grandson could draw the plans, another could sink the foundations and build the blocks, another could put on the roof and the fixings and yet another would get the job of painting.

There was even a role for the then-landscaper in the clan, sorting out the garden. And then came the inevitable question. What would Paul do?

Nanny looked at me with a mixture of pity and pride and came out with the immortal line, which has been repeated to me ad nauseum at all family gatherings since. “Ah sure, Paul... Paul can write about it.”

But I stubbornly persist. Last Saturday week was very warm, you may recall, and I took in to paint a bench at the back of house, in the middle of the lawn I have mowed seven times in two weeks (that’s one of the jobs I can do without risk of catastrophe, generally, so I make it out to be more important than it is and do it as often as I can, casually dropping it into conversation. “What was I at? Ah, I just lowered the blade and mowed the grass.”)

A rickety bench to be sorted out, you say? No better man. So, I took the For Sale sign down from the front of the house and, in the absence of a tape measure, roughly estimated the length of timber I needed to cut by comparing with the brush handle.

I rooted out two long, rusty nails in the shed and hammered on the lath (that’s another word I like to drop in) under the seat of the bench. By pure fluke, it was just the right length. After tightening the nuts with a vice grips – impressed yet? – I sat down on the bench to admire my work.

She was rock solid (in case you don’t know, and this is important, to a good handy man, all tools, mechanical parts and other objects are feminine).

I surveyed the garden, the freshly-trimmed grass, the bench glowing in the sun, the scrapes all over my fingers, and an unfamiliar feeling of satisfaction and triumph washed over me, like Alexander the Great felt when there were no more worlds to conquer.

And then it happened. I got a text and when I leaned over for the phone, I heard the agonising creak.

To my horror, one of my nails was now horribly bent, my piece of timber out of position and of no use, the bench wobbling like jelly. And when I stood up, I found I had sat on the wet paint. Another successful operation...

(Above: The refurbished bench)

 

A week or two ago, I obtained a small tool box and, apropos of nothing, really, other than to emphasise my manliness, texted a journo friend of mine who used to work as a joiner and knows his chop saws from his jigsaws, to mention, as you do, that my vice grips were made by a crowd called Draper and that I had a pair of snips with ‘Knipex’ on the handle.

Oh, and a wrench without a name, which sounds like the name of an Indie band.

“Oh dear,” he replied. “Lidl tools.”

“What should I have?” I asked innocently.

“Marples for chisels,” he said, “and Eastwing for hammers. Ryobi for your power tools.”

It was that last line that got me – “for your power tools”. Do I want to be that sort of person, who would text those four words in that order with a straight face? No!

From here on in, Paul can write about it, alright – but that’s where it will stop!