Bodge It Yourself.

My Dearly Beloved and I are decorating the kitchen, well, she is supervising and I'm doing all the work. She decided we needed some new worktops so we picked out some elegant and stylish black ones and had them delivered. I have always done this kind of work myself as I'm too tight to fork out for a proper tradesman to do something I can manage. It's not difficult if you apply a little thought and planning. 'Why don't you get someone in to do it?' said my youngest son. 'It's easy peasey' I said, 'just whip the old ones off and stick the new ones on'. It turned out to be a very good question.

Just as in true love, the course of DIY never runs smooth. I had some nerve racking moments cutting the worktop but it all went to plan. The problem began when I realised the new worktop was considerably thicker than the old one, clearly neither as thick as I am. This meant there was a 15mm gap between the taps and the feeder pipes, disaster. I had to rush down B&Q and buy up half the plumbing department trying to find something that would bridge the gap. Then I had to go back down again when I discovered I didn't have the correct washers to prevent the water from the newly connected taps flooding the floor. I bought every type of washer in the shop to ensure I had the correct ones. In the old days you only had two sizes to worry about, now there seems to be a whole range of washers and fitments of different types and sizes for all sorts of different reasons which is fine if you know what you are looking for. Unfortunately, I don't. What was that I said about thought and planning?

I was hoping to have it finished by 4PM; I finally finished it at 8:30PM. It was too late to cook so we went out for a pub dinner to appease the hungry family. With the cost of the dinner, extra plumbing supplies, the increased anxiety levels and factoring in a day lost, I could probably have paid for someone to fit the damn thing.

My previous DIY efforts have been generally successful. There have been some memorable moments like the time I put a screw through a gas pipe trying to re-route a TV cable and the time I had to remove all the tiles from a wall I had just put on. I spent the day of Lady Diana's funeral ripping out an illegal loft room only to put it back in after the surveyor had been; all with the consent of the buyer of course. My children have learnt most of their swearwords from my DIY antics.

 You will be pleased to know that the worktops are in place now and looking particularly fine but my son definitely has a point, it's questionable how much money I save. I don't need the aggravation these days and I don't do enough of it to keep up with the latest techniques and advances. However, there is a sense of pride in doing it yourself. It's possible to do a professional(ish) job without relying on some cowboy builder who could potentially mess it up or take forever to complete the job. The next project is tiling the kitchen floor and I will be obtaining some quotes for it. On the other hand...