DIY Myths Vanquished
(Column: Men’s Health, June 2001)
‘Wha’ choo do-in?’ my housemate’s three-year-old sister sing-songed.
‘I’m taking this paint off the drawers and then I’m going to paint them again.’
‘You can’t do that,’ she said with the dumb bluntness reserved for toddlers and Mark Gilman.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re a girl.’
Strange child. My gender had never come into the question as to whether I could do DIY. My mother taught me everything I know about stripping, grinding and painting. While TV-moms would emerge from the kitchen, wooden spoon in hand, powdered with flour, my mom would step out from the new study, circular sander in hand, white with paint dust. One Christmas my dad gave her an electric screwdriver. It was exactly what she’d been hoping for.
The idea of a woman doing the DIY around the house was perfectly natural. I started small, hammering in nails for pictures. Soon I moved on to more ambitious projects – shelf assembly, respraying, some basic wiring. And it was when I moved out of home that things got really big. I decided to paint my bathroom. Sunshine yellow. A rather more complex endeavour than the old ‘paint your bedroom white’ affair. There was water-proofing, spackling, sanding and some pretty hardcore masking. The job couldn’t be done slapdash – a good, smooth colour paintjob needs patience and a steady hand. This obviously took some time. Gradually the transformation took place. I began to feel like a better-groomed, more articulate Tim ‘The Toolman’ Taylor. I felt… virile.
DIY, like washing one’s car, has a uniform for girls. And it really is faded cut-off denim hotpants and a ragged-to-the-point-of-transparent white vest. These are old clothes that we refuse to wear in public anymore and have therefore been relegated top ‘dirty work’ status. The clothing, the working with my hands, the occasional involuntary grunt during a particularly vigorous rolling session, the feeling of paint hardening under my nails… DIY makes me hot. And men pick up on it. ‘What’s this?’ he’ll ask, fingering a smudge egg-yolk yellow on my arm. ‘I’ve been painting my bathroom.’ ‘Oh wow,’ he’ll moan, imagining a bit of slap ‘n tickle with a wet paintbrush, ending with a romp in the soiled dropsheets.
DIY is in fact perfectly suited to women. We have the commitment to attention to detail necessary to do a decent household fix-up. There’s only one thing we won’t touch. Even my mother would defer this to my dad. It’s the most masculine tool of them all. The drill. Perhaps it’s because of the similarity to other of their functions, but all men can drill.
Just to illustrate this, I visited a gay friend of mine the other day. ‘Hilda! Reeva!’ he squealed in queen slang (translation: ‘Hideous! Revolting!’), waving a manicured hand limp-wristedly at the utensils scattered across his kitchen counter. ‘I simply can’t have this “kak” lying around any more. Excuse me darling, but I’m going to have to put up a rack.’ He minced off and returned with a large, black drill fitted with a very impressive bit. He plugged it in with a flourish, positioned the drill bit in the grouting, braced himself and the began jackhammering away in that crack like he was born to it. I just don’t have the necessary confidence.
I’ll do pretty much everything else though. And I’ll like it too. However, I can’t always get my fixing to fix. In the first few months of living in my new home I’d only had one lukewarm DIY experience. Yup, I painted my bedroom white. Not exactly a handygirl high. Oh, and a few blows at the Hilti, but that doesn’t count. Then I inherited a crusty old chest of drawers from my grandfather. Under those layers of yellowed Velvaglo there was oak, I knew it.
And that’s how I got into stripping. The best part of this particular DIY job was being able to go to the local hardware store and say with a straight face: ‘Can you help me? I’m stripping my drawers and I need longer screws.’
I spent hours giggling over this witticism with my housemate Andrew, who, like me, is a firm believer in keeping a chilled G’n’T in one’s unoccupied hand while doing a household job.
Now, the stripping is the easy part. It’s the sanding that’s the bugger. It was while sweating over a bumpy drawer that I realised that my housemate’s little sister may not be so silly after all. Let the men do the handywork. I’d rather cook a Sunday roast – they can spend their weekends slaving over residual varnish stains. Except that men are so bad at it.
I came from the kitchen with a fresh G’n’T to find Andrew, obviously inspired by my frenzied rubbing, having a go at sanding the drawers.
‘No!’ I screamed shrilly.
Andrew dropped the sanding block. ‘What?’ he said, surprised.
‘Sand WITH the grain, for God’s sake! Didn’t your mother teach you anything?’