DIY misadventures abounded last night.
It really should have been a simple process. Put a bathroom cabinet up and a shelf underneath. Nothing too arduous. They came from Ikea, that wonderful warehouse of DIY flatpack dreams, where assemblage is a simple case of allen keying a few bits of wood together to create a miraculous piece of complex furniture. We'd even pre-built all the units - all that was required was fixing them to the wall. A plasterboard wall as well. Easy to drill through.
So, by the laws of nature, and indeed, the laws of Ikea, this should have been a doddle.
Why then, did we start the proceedings at 6:30pm and not finish until 10pm? WHY? Why did it take 3 and a half sodding hours of our precious time to drill four holes in the wall and tighten four screws?
Well, things started to go wrong approximately five minutes in, when hubbie realised that he'd drilled the first hole far too large. He realised this at precisely the moment when the rawl plug fell through the wall and landed with a clutter on the other side.
We swore a bit.
Then, we simply drilled another, smaller hole above it, hoping that the cabinet would cover up the enormous gaping mess that we'd drilled into our freshly plastered and painted wall.
Rawl plug in...check. Screw in...check.
Except (and this is problem number two, only five minutes or so after problem number one) we then realise that the screws aren't long enough, and don't actually reach through to the other side of the cabinet.
More swearing ensued, this time a little bit more colourful.
Hubbie raced to Focus down the road to purchase more screws. Wifey paced the bathroom tiles, looking anxiously at the instruction booklet and biting her nails.
Hubbie returns, screws go in fine, (well, I say fine, we had to tie bits of thread round the heads to pull them forcibly through the cabinet, which it definitely DOESN'T tell you to do in the Ikea instruction booklet, but this was only a minor issue...) and cabinet fixes to the wall. Woo hoo!
However, we then encounter problem number 3. We can't get the doors to go on straight. Literally half an hour is wasted fiddling with the damned hinges, tightening, retightening, offering little 'bits of advice' to one another that gradually turn from 'helpful bits of advice' to 'rudely barked orders', right through to 'insulting one another on our crap DIY skills'.
More swearing ensues, and I'm fairly sure our ajoining neighbour would have heard the foul language at this point.
We make the unanimous decision to leave the doors for the time being. The doors had, by this point, started to epitomise everything I loathed and despised about the world, and I was, to be completely honest, only a few moments away from ripping them forcibly from their hinges and lobbing them down the stairs. Then opening the front door and booting them down the road for good measure. Then setting fire to them.
We moved, wisely, on to the shelf.
Hubbie, full of renewed vigour for the fresh task, merrily drilled the first hole.
And then discovered it was far too big. Not even by a little bit. We're talking practially inches too big. A huge chasm of a hole, once again, in a really prominent place, on our lovely new plastered wall. Hubbie, in a moment of desperate optimism and delusion, tried to insert the rawl plug, where it rattled fruitlessly around like a needle in an empty kitchen roll.
The language reached fever pitch. I don't think I've heard my husband say the F word quite so often. Or the B word (which one? Well, I would probably say all of them.) Indeed, he invented a few words that I'd not heard before, but they sounded fairly rude. He woke the puppy next door, who started whimpering in fear. I'm amazed he didn't wake D. Probably he did, without us knowing it. Probably D was up in his cot, sitting there in the darkness, eyes wide, assimilating as many rude words as possible, to make sure he repeated them at the worst times that would be most embarrassing to his mother.
I went downstairs to watch TV, and left hubbie to it. I went back up, half an hour later, to find that he'd done absolutely nothing apart from stare despondently at the hole.
And, to add to his humiliation (men take it so personally, don't they? It's like the unwritten rule - to be a man, one must be able to put up shelves and cook barbeques) I then had to ask the BFG to help us to put the shelf up. BFG thought it was hilarious, and then proceeded to make many jokes at hubbie's expense, who fortunately wasn't there to hear them.
Oh dear.
But hey - it's the last day that the builders are in for a while! We're still in an uncompleted house, due to the company who were supplying our windows and doors all going bust (argh!) but hopefully, it'll all be done by the 3rd September. Fingers crossed...
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