No More Frikkin Nails
I am currently living in a house that can only be described as a show home for the latest BBC reality show on crap DIY. The trouble is that the work that has been done was by the last two owners and not me (Despite what the wife tells visitors).

For starters every room had a shade of pink somewhere be it the walls or the skirting board, and I'm not talking an easy to get rid of colour pink either this was full blown can-see-it-with-the-lights-off sort of colour. With this colour scheme I was sure it used to belong to Rod Hull for his live shows back in the 80's. Thanks to numerous hours of painting coat after coat of paint (One coat only white paint- Shite) the paint scheme looks considerably normal now but that isn't the end of the DIY woes of the house.

The previous owner also had a love for no more nails. I don’t mean that he attempted to glue everything together with No More Nails when it broke, as that would be a problem that would be easy to overcome. This is more bizarre than that. I found out about the old owners fixation a few weeks after moving into the home, he had just popped round to collect some mail from my house and found me sat on the floor unpacking my drill as I was having problems trying to remove a screw from the wall. While I was looking for the right sized drill head he decided to let me in on is little secret:

"I would watch what you're doing mate they're going to be stuck firm, I used No More Nails on the screws"

A quick WTF from me and he explained that he used to dip every screw and nail before he used it in the sodding stuff, so every time it came to me installing a new curtain rail/ change the light fitting/ some other bit of work a whole lump of the wall/ ceiling/ floor/ etc used to come our with it too (yes he coated the wall plugs with it too). Cheers for that. The first time I pulled out half the wall when removing a random screw I blamed my own crappy DIY skills.

The only true piece of genius DIY I have seen from the old owner (or Mr No More Nails as he's called nowadays in casa Bison) is in the garden shed. Inside this shed is a small cupboard with a door hidden behind the shelves. At first I thought that it was another crappy bodged attempt at DIY using an old door as a makeshift wall for a shed but a bit of further investigation and an update from my current neighbour (and all round nosey bastard) I found out that it is a working door and was also used as a secret exit for Mr NMN.

Turns out that Mr MNM was a bit of a henpecked husband, and not in the wife constantly nags until you get something done kind of way either. Every time Mr NMN did something to piss off his wife (i.e. attempt to fix the TV with bostik) she would yell at him and send him to sit in the shed to think about what he had done.

Once he was in the shed, he would simply remove the shelves, open the door (Which turns out is part of the back fence leads through to the overgrown garden belonging to the Chav family with bugger all idea about cutting grass behind casa Bison) and pop down the local for an hour. The door had a normal key hole in it but was padlocked on the inside for extra security-so the aforementioned chavscum family couldn’t get in (the padlock was actually the reason why I spotted the door in the first place)

Pretty clever but I still hate him, I had to remove the old toilet seat with a hacksaw thanks to him and his love for gluing things.

There’s loads more of botched DIY I could write about like the water tank that was held together with a combination of carpet, duct tape and some gluey substance that shall remain unnamed, the shelf system that was built with parts of old sofa (you could see parts of the patterned fabric still stapled to the top of the shelves but I need to lie down due to another bout of No More Nails induced rage.
(mon bison powered by magnets, Wed 9 Apr 2008, 19:02, 2 replies)

that secret escape door..
is a really good idea. I might like to have one of those.
( flirting with badgers What? It sounded good at the time., Wed 9 Apr 2008, 19:16, closed)

The thought of you removing the toilet seat with a hacksaw
has me doubled up. Usually they fall to bits!
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Thu 10 Apr 2008, 8:21, closed)