Mixing All The Metaphors And Not A Small Amount Of Paint

If you want to save me from DIY trauma, you could book a tarot reading with me, which is my real day job, unlike my budding apprenticeship for being the most unhandy Andy there ever was. I am good at tarot reading and it doesn’t make me cry or question my life choices. Help me out here.

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I’m in a particular kind of DIY hell right now, in which I feel a bit like that guy in The View but instead of having the same jeans on for four days now, I’ve been painting the same bit of wall, wearing the same filthy pyjamas which will not be going to a disco in the middle of the town. They will be going in the wash or possibly the bin.

I’m still painting the wall. I will probably be painting the wall for the rest of my life the way things are going. In lieu of hurling myself into the sea due to boredom and deep frustration, I thought I’d write about it.

I love home making. In fact I was interviewed about it by the lovely

Katie McCrory

which you can read here. I could never claim to be an interior designer however, due to the fact that my skills are limited to rearranging bibelots rather than whacking up a home made media unit using old cotton reels and practical ingenuity.

I know my limits. Having said that, sometimes I am forced to exceed them thanks to extenuating circumstances. That’s where the wheels start to come off, and that’s where I am about now. In a wheelless clown car covered in paint.

My taste always, and I mean always, outstrips my budget. I have a skill in that whenever I am called upon to choose something in a shopping situation, I automatically pick the item that turns out to be the most expensive thing, not only in the shop, but sometimes the entire planet. It’s not a skill that serves me particularly well due to eternal and ongoing budget constraints. I’ve had to learn to work round it, which means that any project involves a complex negotiation between what I want, what I can afford and what I can practically do.

Money has been cascading out of our hands in the last few months. I feel like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, except that I’m worrying about that piffling leak while overhead I am just about to be engulfed by Hokusai’s great wave - to give you the mash up image you never knew you needed.

Buying a house is an ongoing fiscal drain in which I find myself endlessly buying mops and laundry baskets and contemplating the ugliness of vegetable racks but also the impossibility of storing potatoes in any other way that isn’t equally terrible or worse. The list of necessary things doesn’t seem to diminish no matter how many clothes airers I buy.

Unpacking boxes has stalled due to the large amount of books we own and the tiny amount of shelving currently available. We need to unpack the books, which are stored where the coats and shoes will go in the hall. Once that’s done we can free up space in the garage where the shoe racks, coats and trainers currently live, which then means we can take the tools which are currently littering the hall and put them away. I dream of not seeing a table full of mole grips, rubber gloves and masking tape when I come in through the front door. It’s giving doctor porn, which is not the soothing Mid Century Modern vibe I was aiming for.

We knew as soon as we moved in that we wanted to turn the lounge into a library. The kitchen/dining/lounge area at the back of the house is big enough for us to not need a separate lounge which, as it was configured, we would never have used otherwise. We would however, use a library.

I was in charge of the aesthetics. Jason was in charge of the planning. I ran off to Pinterest and started the satisfying job of looking at other people’s libraries and cross referencing them with my own wish list. It soon became apparent that paying someone to build what I wanted was going to cost winning the lottery type money. Jason decided that we would attempt to do it ourselves.

Ever since we first met we have been addicted to watching Grand Designs and for a while we dreamed of building our own house. Then the reality of parenting three children and an assortment of animals kicked in and we shelved the plan. Jason however, had been quietly dusting that plan off while we house hunted. On a day when we had been fruitlessly driving about the Kent countryside failing to find a house, he suggested that we might want to build or at least renovate one.

I thought about it, because once upon a time I really did want to do it. But once upon a time I was twenty years younger and a whole lot less traumatised by life. Now I very much do not want to build a house, and I am fairly ambivalent about renovations. However, when the opportunity to make a library came along and the only option was to do it ourselves, I decided it would be a good way to test the waters regarding scaling that renovation up. I said yes.

I have regretted that several times a day ever since.

My favourite bit of any DIY project is demolishing. I am good at smashing things up and I find it hugely satisfying. However there is a big difference between knocking something flat and curated destruction. I couldn’t just take a sledgehammer to the room, because we needed to salvage some things. Me wading in with a giant lump hammer would not achieve that. It is significantly less satisfying when you can only bash things up carefully.

One good thing about the original room was that it was not old with beautiful features that needed delicate and careful conservation. I think it was either the first room the previous owner did up, where he made all his mistakes or the last room he did, where he thought fuck it, because he was sick to the back teeth of building work. Whatever order he did it in, he 100% did not have a Pinterest board or any interest in interior design.

The main feature of the room is a modern, electric fire, which sits where the old chimney breast would have gone. The space is built out into the room and the fire is set into it, flush to the boxed out wall. It’s extremely ugly. Imagine an aquarium for tropical fish, but all the fish have died. You think about all the money you spent on the tank and stones and fake coral, and decide to stick coloured lights in it and turn it into a feature fireplace. It is a horrible feature.

Above it sits the fake chimney breast where there is an enormous chipboard panel with a hand sized hole in the middle. Behind this is the circuit board for all the electricity in the house, hence the hand sized hole. When you need to get to it, you stick your hand in the hole and pull out a huge, wall sized piece of board, which you stagger about the room with and hopefully do not drop on your own toe. Putting it back in is a nightmare. I have thought about this a lot and cannot begin to imagine why or when this was ever a good idea. If I lived alone I am 100% sure this is the way I would die, flattened by a fake wall.

In one corner of the room was a small, terrible bar area with one, hideous strip of bilious floral wallpaper that literally went with nothing else in the entire house. Next to it were two IKEA book cases with pelmets added for class, except they were battened on with bits of unpainted wood and more rainbow lights so when the lights came on, it really highlighted just how much of a rush job it was. Nothing screams class more than disco lighting nailed to MDF.

The rest of the lighting in the room involved a pendant ceiling light and two wall lights that really let the MDF radiator cabinet beneath show itself to its full potential. The lights were fitted with black wire lampshades that defeated the object of a lampshade by having no shade giving properties. They looked like a cross between a draining rack and a fruit bowl and probably came from Cold War Moscow.

Finish that off with cheap grey carpet, which smelled weirdly of dog. I say weirdly, because they didn’t have a dog and nor do we. Add a polystyrene picture rail and voila, you have a room which despite having stunning sea views had all the warmth and charm of the visitors lounge at Wormwood Scrubs. It was not a hard decision to rip it all out and start again.

We can’t afford to have a new fire/place so the job of the rest of the room has to be to lure you into forgetting the dead fish funeral centrepiece as much as possible. The bar came out quite satisfactorily. The IKEA bookshelves were going to be salvaged and used for storage elsewhere, except that the guy who put them in loved them so much, he couldn’t imagine anyone else not loving them and had glued them to the wall. This was the only place where I was allowed to use my big hammer and I had to be very careful with it. The biggest satisfaction was taking all the pieces and the carpet to the tip.

Because the bookcases were going to be the wall forever, the guy hadn’t bothered to plaster the wall behind. In fact one section didn’t even have plasterboard, just a gaping hole into the wall innards behind. This has meant two weeks of figuring out how to put plasterboard up and then plastering it. The plasterboard was easy. The plastering was not.

I bowed out early doors due to having attempted plastering before and ending up in a Rumpelstiltskin rage after I lost all the skin on my knuckles and bled all over the wall while watching lumps of bloody, raw plaster plop onto the floor below. Jason is the one who manfully plastered, sanded, plastered, sanded, skimmed, sanded etc. I came into my own when he gave up on getting a smooth surface and let me go mad with the filler. I’d say the wall is 70% plaster, 30% filler but in his defence, no blood sacrifice was made, so he wins.

Then it was time to paint. I chose green for the walls and pink for the woodwork. I hate gloss paint so I had to sand and then do lots of fiddly stuff to the woodwork to get matt emulsion to stick to it. I have now been painting for days and days. Hence the distraction Substack post.

I am not very neat. My hands are a bit shaky. My brain is also a bit shaky. I get very easily bored if I don’t feel I am making progress with a task. I get absolutely infuriated if I mess up a task, particularly if it’s a boring one that has to be redone. That’s where I am now, in the land of painting fury.

I know my own shortcomings and I decided to do the grown up thing and try to improve my skills. Instead of just slapping paint on any old how and hoping for the best, I did my preparation. I dusted and hoovered to get rid of plaster dust. I sugar soaped the walls. I masking taped everything that needed taping, including switches and plug sockets. I did every boring job you can think of that they tell you to do to make your life easier.

Then it did not make my life easier at all. It just made everything slower and more frustrating when it did go wrong. Taking the masking tape off the walls to do the woodwork, lumps of paint kept coming off with the tape, which meant going round again, patching everything up. Because of that I decided not to tape again when it came to the woodwork because if I had pulled more paint off I would have had to hulk smash something.

I bought a special product for sticking emulsion to gloss woodwork. It stank to high heaven and stuck to everything with the exception of the woodwork. It’s the decorating equivalent of Super Glue. Frankly I’m amazed I didn’t come out glued to the room forever. It gave me a headache and the rage.

Painting the skirtings without tape meant lots of smudging, so I then had to go back round repainting more of the walls and really I am sick to the back teeth of everything and mostly of myself. I am even surer than ever that I don’t want to renovate a house, hell I’m not sure now I want to live in this one. I do not have the temperament for this and there’s still so much left to do. It’s safe to say I won’t be auditioning for Interior Design Masters 2026.