My arch has fallen. I refer not to my feet, but to a garden feature I put up myself and that, consequently, keeps falling down.
It’s a recurring motif in my life: the struggle against gravity.
I refer not to various body parts sagging but to the fact that, whenever I attempt DIY, the constituent parts dive for the deck.
Engaging with the enemy
Screws, bolts, nuts, washers: as soon as I start a project, they seek sanctuary on the floor, rolling away to safety out of sight like commandos in a close engagement with the enemy.
The arch is over a path next to the little hut. It’s covered in clematis, which never flowered again after I cut it back but prospers foliage-wise, becoming particularly heavy when wet, and bringing the arch down with it.
The original arch was a cheap metal self-assembly construction. This is my second one. I do not recommend them. They rust quickly, certainly round here, where we get much rain, and are just too flimsy.
It’s still falling apart
So, as things stand, or totter, I’ve replaced the lower parts with painted wood, and bludgeoned the remaining upper parts – with rounded arch – to that.
But now the upper parts are falling apart, and I must consider replacing these too with wood, an exercise which will begin with me Googling, “How do you connect one piece of wood to another?”, a phenomenon I’ve never understood.
Grant me one thing with DIY: I persevere. But my language is appalling.
Sometimes, I worry that visitors may have come to the door, then slunk away on hearing me scream outraged inquiries to the heavens as to why nothing ever goes right.
That said, I never get visitors to the door. And no wonder, with language like that.
The silicone episode
If I’d any visitors while trying to silicone round the bath recently, they’d have sent for a medical specialist or exorcist.
This is the third time in three years I’ve assayed this noisome task.
It’s messy. Last time, I invested in plastic tape as an alternative, but it never remains stuck down.
This time, I watched three YouTube videos, made notes of their collective wisdom, and set about doing a textbook silicone job. Only to remember, on taking off the plastic, that my bath is not as other baths.
The tiles stop well short and the resultant space has been seven-eighths filled with long strips of wood.
Result: mess
Long story short: I siliconed over this. Result: mess. So, I tried plastic tape again, hoping it would be better this time.
Nope. The black tape looks like a temporary repair until a tradesman arrives, which they never will because there aren’t any round here. As I discovered when advertising this and sundry other odd jobs.
Odd is the word. All my DIY jobs are odd. That said, reading online about putting silicone round a bath, I found loads of folk saying it was a job they always botched.
There’s solace in knowing there’s a massive army of us engaging with Destroy It Yourself, hoping for just one job that we can finish with a sense of achievement, looking at it and saying: “I did that.”
We turn away for a well-earned libation. Then we hear a creaking sound … followed by a crash.
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