My father and DIY
By any stretch of the imagination, tasking my father with mere DIY should have been akin to using a wrecking ball to crack a walnut. He spent his working life designing bits of military jets and oil rigs. Armed with this experience, you'd think that getting my Dad to hang a shelf would be like asking Chuck Norris to hang a picture, right?

Wrong.

My father is blessed with the self confidence of a herd of elephants, the patience of a small child and the easy going nature of Basil Fawlty. As a result, such trivialities as a set of instructions or even a cursory moment to check his calculations were frequently skipped, much to the hilarity of the neighbourhood.

I cringe looking back, neighbours must have been regularly regaled with the frenzied cry of "Oh SHIT!!!" being bellowed from inside sheds, under car bonnets or in the general vicinity of our tormented Black & Decker Workmate.

Boiler Room Rage

Incident number one occurred when I was about nine years old. Dad decided that the unsightly hexagonal key used to gain entry to our central heating boiler under the stairs just wouldn't do.

I recall being scooped out of bed by my nervous mother and bundled into the back of the family car for the four mile trip to our local Marleys at some ungodly hour of a Saturday morning. After a thrilling thirty minutes, I was ordered to assist Dad with his project.

After four hours watching his initial chirpy enthusiasm descend into a seething rage against every inanimate object within six feet, Dad had finished drilling into the metal door installed a proper handle. He took a step back to admire his work, placed a hand on the door handle when a deathly silence descended upon the house, which usually meant only one thing.

"Wha... Wha... You BASTARD!"

Oh dear.

I looked at the door and I looked at my dad. The expression on his face was midway between rage and utter befuddlement. His hand rested on the door handle he'd just fitted and he tried again, perhaps hoping his initial assessment was wrong.

Then Mount Etna erupted.

"They've sold me the wrong BLOODY handle. SHIT!" he yelled.

Yep, to open the boiler cupboard door, you had to pull the handle *up*.

Kitchen Farce

Six months later, Dad decided that mum needed a new kitchen. MFI? Not a fucking chance.

Despite spending his working day in front of a drawing board, Dad never bothered with such trivialities at home and simply planned it out in his head on the fly without so much as the back of a fag packet being used to scribble notes on. Sure enough, more or less the correct number of tiles was procured and saws, drills and spirit levels of varying degrees of reliability were produced. Lengths of wood were retrieved from the shed. All I wanted to do was watch Tiswas and goggle Sally James, but instead I was ordered to sit on the wood, hold screwdrivers and saws, not saying a word or moving a muscle while my father intermittently sketched marks on the wood with a pencil, sawed and ranted at the neighbours' children for being too noisy. The bewildering range of aged, rusting tools were dangled in front of my face with the faint promise that I might one day get to use them if I was quiet enough and concentrated long enough.

My mother kept her distance, she'd be told to "sod off!" when Dad got fed up of her nervously dispensed advice like "Oh, I think you need to put a screw in there" uttered at a hushed volume before she fled to the kitchen to brew more tea.

I guess she was desperately trying to contain his rage and placate him. Paradoxically, she was great at dispensing useless and rage inducing advice though, even a mild mannered soul like me cannot undertake any DIY while my mother is around, for being told "You need a phillips screwdriver for that" in hushed faux-knowledgeable tones usually had me grinding my teeth within seconds. Eventually, she resorted to her last line of defence - topping up cups of tea.

By lunchtime, our kitchen resembled the aftermath of Krakatoa crossed with a Greek Wedding. Bits of broken ceramic lay everywhere, in the middle stood a portly, red faced swearing man.

"The BLOODY walls aren't straight! SHIT!" he yelled, kneeling on the floor, with three inches of arse-cleavage peek-a-booing up from the beltline of his jeans as he attempted to tile from floor to ceiling. How he guessed from this altitude I'll never know.

"Shit! SHIT! You BASTARD!" he bellowed as another tile broke.

"These BLOODY tiles!"

The tiling was completed at long last. However, in a manner akin to one of those geometric illusion type drawings, if you traced the line of tiles along the top of the longest wall, the ceiling appeared to have been installed at an angle of two degrees off the horizontal. Apparently this was the fault of the builders for making the kitchen wonky.

By late afternoon I'd skulked off to watch The Fall Guy, but I can still hear the intermittent swearing coming from the kitchen as Dad sawed the last of the worktops and cupboard doors. By 5pm Sunday he was attempting to mount doors onto new cupboards. Yep, a sturdy looking framework and new worktops were fitted. Not bad.

"Oh SHIT! BLOODY HELL!"

It transpired that we suddenly had three previously unaccounted for inches between the cooker and a cupboard. This had my father in absolute apoplexy for a good few minutes until his genius saved the day.

Having seen the light, Dad wandered off with a saw and produced a cupboard door three and a half feet high by three inches wide. My mother was instructed to keep her baking trays there.

The Record Cabinet

Mum managed to win a small amount of money on the Football Pools. Yay mum! However, instead of treating herself to something nice, the poor, misguided soul did something truly daft in an ill conceived moment of kindness in the hope that giving Dad a new project would soothe his oft volcanic temper.

It was a bright summer weekend; I sat on my bedroom floor assembling the Forth Bridge from Lego. By 11am I was retrieved from my room and sat on a creaking Black & Decker Workbench steadying bits of chipboard as Dad intermittently sawed and ranted.

"SIT STILL!"

"Hold the bloody screwdriver properly"

"Where's my bloody tea?"

By late afternoon, the job seemed nearly complete. Despite the lack of plans, the cabinet was cuboid in shape. I was confident, had my super DIY dad managed to snatch a daring victory? It would appear so.

Supper on Saturday afternoon was almost a jovial affair. My mum wasn't a bag of nerves and things looked promising. A bottle of Blue Nun was produced to help the Chinese takeaway down.

Indeed, by Sunday morning, my own construction was coming along nicely. Humming along to the tune of "Relax" which was being played on my brother's stereo, my own Lego bridge was finished. Yay me!

Inevitably, the peace was shattered in dramatic fashion.

"SHIT!!!"

*sound of needle abruptly scratching across vinyl*

A blood curdling scream of rage and anguish pierced the air. Birds stopped singing outside.

"You BLOODY BASTARD!"

Then I recall hearing a loud banging noise, the type you might hear if someone repeatedly kicks a chipboard record cabinet hard.

"SHIT!" *bang* "SHIT!" *thump* "SHIT" *splinter*

Startled I walked to the window, and was rewarded with the sight of an overweight middle aged man toe-punting the rapidly disintegrating remains of a record cabinet around the garden. The wood, tools and everything else in earshot were excrementally denounced.

The reason for the destruction? Turned out that Dad had lost his temper attempting to take a plane to chipboard...
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Fri 16 Jul 2010, 12:03, 9 replies)

I laugh
because I'm turning into your dad.
I swear tape measures lie, I acutely remember an incident when I had measured the length of wood to be 32 inches but on fitting it found it to be much less.
There was much swearing, mainly at McTwat, God of DIY.
Thing is, I had measured that length of wood 4 times!!!

le'click.
(SpangoTheWonderBadger is brewing beer, Fri 16 Jul 2010, 12:41, closed)

your dad and my dad can never meet.
it would destroy the space-time continuum, replacing it with somethign three inches short, made of MDF, with nails poking out.
the only difference as far as i can tell, is that mine favoured the phrase 'BASTARD FUCKING THING!!!!' to denote displeasure at said artifact.
(UppityDamnPrimate LET'S OPEN THIS F*CKING PIT UP, Fri 16 Jul 2010, 15:02, closed)

I bet your dad never got the hang of fitting coving, either?
"Stay up you bastard!"
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Fri 16 Jul 2010, 16:38, closed)

Click for "the self confidence of a herd of elephants, the patience of a small child and the easy going nature of Basil Fawlty"

( idonthaveafunnynickname Drink-Aware? Sure. I'm aware I want another drink., Fri 16 Jul 2010, 16:56, closed)

"Having seen the light, Dad wandered off with a saw and produced a cupboard door three and a half feet high by three inches wide. My mother was instructed to keep her baking trays there."

Your dad's a genius
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Fri 16 Jul 2010, 17:24, closed)

These
exist in 'proper' kitchens
(Bernardate, Fri 16 Jul 2010, 17:31, closed)

clickety-clickety-click
My cheeks are now sore from laughing and the last remnants of mascara have gone for a shit :D
( Tourette's ( . )( . ) has a monkey hair in her fried egg, Sun 18 Jul 2010, 14:45, closed)

Ah, those halycon days of youth...
C'mon - EVERYONE remembers being ordered to sit on a bit of wood and 'not move!'

:)

*click*
( snee held his breath since, Mon 19 Jul 2010, 8:49, closed)

Quality.
Sounds horrific to have to sit through as a kid, but it had me laughing reading it.
( Evil Bastardo, Mon 19 Jul 2010, 14:50, closed)