Don’t do it yourself – if you want it to stay in one piece

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

DIY novice not unknown to me once decided it was time for a small project that involved moving the television from the back sitting room to the front one, in a pre-digital era when telly worked by aerial and electricity alone.

How hard could it be, he wondered – even for a man whose awkwardness with a hammer meant that the only nail he’d ever managed hit with any force was the one on his finger.

His first difficulty was that he lived in a house with solid partition walls – none of your flimsy studded, wooden divides in these houses of the sixties – so that required what looked awfully like an industrial-scale drill.

Undeterred he got down to it, only to be constantly annoyed by knocking from the neighbour to his semi-dee – banging loud enough to challenge the drill for decibels.

Proceeding on the basis that it was a little rich to so forcefully object to a man doing a simple masonry job in the middle of the day, he ploughed on until he saw daylight at the end of his drill.

And then he realised what the knocking was for – because he’d drilled through the wrong wall, and he was now staring through a sizeable peephole into his neighbour’s front room.

It wasn’t so much his poor DIY skills as his appalling sense of direction that sent him straight through the dividing wall instead of his own partition.

And once the gap was filled between his house and next door and apologies were offered and accepted, thus ended a fledgling DIY career in its formative phase.

We dined out on that story for a long time – but then again not too much because none of us would have been blessed with the skills of what you might call a handyman…or handy person, to be more precise.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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