Do it yourself or get someone else in? It depends how old you are

May 14 2008 by Abbie Wightwick, Western Mail

MY mother rings to share her woes. Decorators are arriving tomorrow and should she take the curtains down for them? I say this might be silly as she is 68 years old and the windows are quite high up. Can’t she get the painter to wobble around on ladders?

Then she says she’s worried about the disruption, the mess and the fact she’ll have to make small talk and cups of tea.

I get brisk. As someone who recently had the back of my house ripped off and builders in for six months I have scant sympathy.

“It’s only a few pots of paint,” I point out.

“Yes, but I’m 25 years older than you. It’s harder to put up with these things as you get older,” she points out.

“Just be glad you’re not my age or you’d be doing it yourself,” I counter.

I’m not sure at what age DIY becomes non-compulsory, but I feel faintly guilty if I pay anyone to do something I could reasonably do myself. Fortunately, this doesn’t include ripping down supporting walls and drinking tea strong enough to haul weights with three sugars in. This is why we borrowed enough money to pay for six Caribbean holidays to get someone else to alter our house last year. St Lucia will have to wait.

For reasons we can only now guess at we then decided to save £300 by saying we would paint a part of the back of the house ourselves. So, the wall has sat for the past eight months unpainted. As an add-on to our mammoth building job the money would have been a mere trifle. Now, as a job on its own it will be too expensive. It was fine during the winter when we had no cause to sit in the garden and stare at the back of the house. Now the sun is shining we sit and muse about when we’ll get around to painting it.

My mother points out that her generation were never keen on DIY, building and decorating.

“I made my curtains though,” she points out defensively. And she could knit, sew, cook and hold down a teaching job.

Yes, I agree, I can’t knit, my sewing is poor and I would probably be an awful teacher.

“I have got three children though,” I say.

She says this is a good reason not to do DIY as we will simply spend the money saved on ways to recover afterwards. She would give me her decorator’s number but as she lives several hundred miles away he is unlikely to want a job painting the back of my house.

“And you might have to take down your own curtains,” she adds.

No problem there. They fall down every day on their own. Ever since we bought curtain rails over the internet and put themselves up ourselves they collapse.

There’s a pile of plaster dust on the floor and holes in the wall. Still, the curtains look very nice as long as we don’t open or close them.