So we have spent the last two days building a DIY deck with decking tiles. Relatively easy to put together, until you realise that the people who built your house (who shall not be named for fear of lawsuit) are incapable of building anything in a straight line. Resulting in a lot of deck tiles needing to be unscrewed, slats and supports removed, cut back and rescrewed on with an old-fashioned screwdriver because someone forgot to charge the cordless one (which made it a lot easier once it WAS charged). So the tiny bit we had left to do turned into somewhat of a PITA as we had to borrow a circular saw - which of course had no instructions and we have never used before. Nevermind, it all got done after some minor technical difficulties and we just have to oil the remainder of the tiles that were laid yesterday. After I have a finished product, sans sawdust and tools all over the place, I’ll take another photo. Needless to say I didn’t get a chance to watch the sunset with a cold drink in hand yesterday because we were still putting in tiles at that point.

Which prompts me to bring up my Top 10 Reasons to hate DIY!

1. Splinters and sawdust get everywhere…..and I do mean everywhere
2. Nothing is ever as easy as what it seems
3. To make it as easy as it seems, it is helpful if your builder can pour a concrete slab in a perfect square. Ours apparently could not.
4. Downpipes although necessary make the job more of a PITA than it already is.
5. Repetitive manual labour, if you’re not accustomed to it, makes you very sore very quickly.
6. Cats incessantly complain about you being outside working hard and not being able to be inside serving their every need….consequently they make it their aim in life to keep you awake the majority of the night so you cannot get the sleep you need to recuperate properly.
7. Being too sore because you were doing a lot of DIY over the weekend is not a good enough excuse to call in sick.
8. The washing that you thought was safely hung around the corner of the house has to be rewashed because it is covered in sawdust, thus wasting water.
9. No matter how good a job you do, someone always has to find the one part of the project that went a little awry.
10. The only people who appreciate your hard work are those who actually helped put it together and can appreciate how difficult it really was.

October 1st, 2007 | Tags: landscaping | Category: Home and Lifestyle |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL