Roundabout

All My Own Work

By KAIIIARIINE WHITIEHORN

Things have changed, indeed, in the three years or so since I was on this kick last. There is much more assemble-it-yourself tax-beating furniture about. There are new Rufflette attach- ments for stopping the curtains flopping over at the top. There is a new way of putting on wall- paper that seems to depend on pulling it up through a damp bath on the skirting board : what stops you kicking it over I don't know. "r4,11ere are more washable wallpapers; more of those plastic surfaces which make paint and wallpapers unnecessary. There is Vipboard, the chipboard, though all the shops seem to keep only a few of each size and not nearly enough of any one, so that you go from shop to shop collecting it, and bringing in the Vipboard takes on a pastoral rhythm like picking up sticks. There are more, and cheaper, wall-attachment liook- cases. And in a good many of these things, it is the amateurs who will know about them first : the real decorator no more wants to hear about short cuts that make life easy for the amateur than doctors want to hear about the rhubarb cures you buy from a chemist.

Our hardware man, in fact, is rather like a good chemist : you tell him the trouble and he suggests the remedy. Since we began he has opened a new Do It Yourself shop where all these new goodies are to be bought; but even so, I view the prospect of starting again with gloom. Do it yourself is a never-never-land that should not be revisited.

In theory, of course, you should never have to do it again, since the assumption is that (a) the paint will last for ever and (h) by the time it peels off you will be rich enough to hire a man. But in fact it works rather differently : once the dis- crepancy between the cost of the materials and the cost of jull-scale decorating has penetrated your consciousness you can never forget it, just as publishers, having once started to buy books at trade rates, can absolutely never bring themselves to buy a book in the normal way again. So you do do it again—but you put it off as long as possible, partly because you can- not bear the thought of all those paint brushes in the sink again, all those nails on the floor, that white painty streak in the hair; and partly because it is impossible to re-create the con-

ditions which made it a good idea the first time.

Do it yourself in the first months of marriage gives you something to talk about once the first flood of total recall that goes with early romance has subsided. But after three years either you have found something to talk about, or you have stopped talking, or at least one of you has stopped listening. Either way you are definitely not looking round for subjects of conversation. Again, in the first months of marriage it is a great divider of the sheep among one's friends from the goats: those who can be asked to share your lettuce and turpentine and those who can't. This breaks down once you realise that only by asking the goats to dinner do you give yourself v. deadline for the completion of any one job.

And all that ludicrous optimism is gone. You no longer believe you can finish a room in a couple of weeks, when you know it took nearly a year last time. You no longer assume that things will stay up for ever on glue, faith and the wrong kind of nails: time has removed the glue and the illusions and it will take weeks of tugging to remove the nails. Do it yourself is essentially makeshift, though one never realises this at the time: after three years the more impressionistic bits are apt to have collapsed: badly stuck wallpaper has peeled off; the place where one touched up emulsion paint with glossy has re- sulted in revolting eggy patches; paint carelessly plastered over dirty surfaces the night before the in-laws arrived has peeled off just as the book always said it would.. You no longer think you will keep it all spick by touching it up here and there : one touch of anything makes all the rest look suddenly grimy.

It must be admitted that some of our decora- tions were actually quite successful. We had a room the floorboards of which were so far al

Part that when we accidentally dropped a lighted

cigarette between them we could see it glowing

dangerously while we doused, dribbled, swore and finally poked it out with a stick; this floor tits

covered in hardboard squares (forty to the racial' two nails to each--no wonder the woman down" stairs moved), and quite apart from the fact that.

plus Chinese rushes and Indian carpet, we g°1 a 20 ft. x 18 ft. room covered for £30, it has steadily improved with polishing so that it I° takes stains without any ill effect and 810 warmly. There was a splendid yellow paints the consistency and colour of butter, that went 0° the kitchen walls and has actually stayed on the kitchen walls.

Some things, in fact, have .proved to be q durable. It is another odd characteristic of it yourself, this uneven distribution of thorot ness: everybody has one job about which are immensely conscientious: my husband fanatical polyfiller, and roams round the II( looking for things, like mouseholes or nost that he can fill; he has a theory that each per even has one particular weapon with which is more thorough than others—which i; sumably why he does everything, incluc sawing through aluminium rod, with a penki One is apt to be obsessively fussy about thing and slapdash about another—we plaster of Paris into a rough piece of wall, sev layers of it : it was incredibly professional it took about a week and was almost immedia hidden, for ever behind a built-in bookcase.

Oh, well, here we go again. But this tin shall not be buying the best materials—the II may come out of bad brushes but weeks-old paint does not come out of any brushes; and I will throw away the old tins of paint at oncc. instead of optimistically waiting three years. And I will not be making do with anything that is only temporary. I have stopped seeing what vv:0 temporary last time; but I doubt if my fri(10 have. Do it yourself may be hard, but undo it yourself is impossible.

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