Postcards From Across the Pond

As noted in my previous post, my wife has left me to go hike the Northumberland Coast Path, leaving me without adult supervision. So, I am staying out until all hours, carousing and enjoying life on the edge.

Well, in my dreams.

I’m too old to run with scissors (and I think my wife knows this, otherwise she would never have left me on my own) so I’m mostly merely walking with paintbrush, or measuring tape, or screwdriver, because I have opted to stay home to undertake a list of DIY projects that have been building up. And I say “opted”, but it was always a foregone conclusion that I would not be going on the walk with her. First of all, it’s a girls-only outing. Besides that, she didn’t want me to go, and I didn’t want to go, either. So, we’re all happy.

And I am. Now. But it was a close-run thing.

Our flat was remodelled before we moved in, presumably by someone who wished they were doing anything else but remodelling. It was a travesty, and it took a lot of time, ingenuity and lumber to get it into a state we were happy with. And one of the things my wife wasn’t happy with was the tub guard, which was a flimsy piece of board crammed haphazardly up against the tub.

My wife had a vision of a rustic covering with a “distressed” look. I thought she was crazy, but following her instructions, I was able to build, and paint, something very close to what she was envisioning. And it looks great.

The bodge-job covering the pipes, however, was left alone because, well, it might not look great, but it worked well enough. Until the leaks.

I wrote about the first leak, the one that introduced us to Templeton, but there was a second one, from a different pipe, not long after. Both leaks caused the bodged coverings to rot and required me to take them apart and refit them after each episode, leaving them looking rather sad. So sad that even I agreed something needed to be done. I was going to replace like with like, but my wife thought I should match the tub guard. I thought she was crazy.

With a keener understanding of my lack of vision, however, I set off, immediately after my wife left, for the nearest B&Q for lumber, moulding, paint, lacquer, screws and whatever else I thought I might need and dragged it all into the dining area to begin what turned out to be a four-day marathon of measuring, cutting, gluing, painting, screwing and finessing of what I hope is something resembling what she had in mind.

What took me so long was the fact that I was working on the fold-out craft table I’d built some time ago, using rudimentary tools and the need to repeatedly go to the far end of the flat to measure, then go back because I had forgotten the measurement, then measure again, then cut by hand only to find out I was a quarter inch short. If I still had my shed, I could have made more accurate (and straighter) cuts, though I wouldn’t have saved much time as my shed was in Crawley and my flat is in Horsham.

Bit by wonky bit, I painstakingly cut, assembled, glued, painted and screwed together pipe coverings that don’t resemble rotting boards. Although pleased with the result, as I cleaned up the mess on the morning of the fifth day, I realized I had only three days left and eight more items still on my To-Do list, and panic set in.

Fortunately, most of the other jobs were easily and quickly accomplished. The biggest one took only hours instead of days, and that involved shortening the craft table I had been working on.

When I built it, I carefully measured it to be as large as it could be. And that worked fine, it you didn’t mind squeezing around the dining table to get to the balcony or shuffling between the wall and the craft table to get into the kitchen. Still, we lived with it for years, but then, only days before she left, my wife noted that it might be a good thing if the table was about half a foot shorter. She qualified that statement by saying she didn’t expect me to do it, which made me think that, yeah, I ought to do that.

The hardest part of that job was cutting it by hand, because that’s a long way to have to eye up a straight line. But I’m pleased with the result, and now you can get to the kitchen and the balcony without wondering if you need to go on a diet.

She’s due home tomorrow, and I have one item left, which is to iron my clothes. But I’m tired, and thinking maybe I’ll lower my standards instead.