Kevin Page: When DIY goes wrong and why you should get a professional

Kevin Page decided to finish the bathroom renovation himself. He shouldn't have. Photo / 123RF

COMMENT

For the past month Mrs P and I have been enduring a bathroom renovation at our humble abode.

This has meant some adjustment to our usual living practices.

For starters, one of us - let's just say the one who shares snippets of his everyday life with you each week - has basically had to camp at his own house to be handy for inquiries from the builders and provide security at night for what would otherwise be a golden opportunity for would-be burglars.

At times, living thus has meant no electricity and for most of the time no shower, a bucket of hot water tipped over my head in the back garden sufficing.

Mrs P has definitely had the better part of the deal, boarding with the Boomerang Child and the new granddaughter during the week and braving the building site back home at the weekends.

Anyway.

Last Friday we said goodbye to the builders, plumbers, electricians, painters etc and opened the door to our new bathroom.

I have to say it's pretty flash.

I have to say also, it should be for the amount of money we've spent on it.

It all started some six months ago when Mrs P was in the bath.

By all accounts, she looked beyond her toes at the other end and noticed a patch on the wall that looked a little discoloured.

Naturally, being the inquisitive type, she poked it with her finger and discovered it was soft to touch.

Unfortunately, her investigation did not end there and she poked it again. This time her finger went through into the cavity behind. And that's where all the fun started.

Now I don't know about you dear reader, but I'm from the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" era, particularly if I've got a reasonable idea that it's going to cost a packet to get it fixed.

Naturally, I came over all Mr DIY. Put on the Placemakers T-shirt I got at the op shop so I at least looked the part and patched up the hole, put a nice bit of silicon around the edge and carried on with my life.

Sadly, the repair job did not meet with Mrs P's approval and over the following months, concerns were regularly raised about the likelihood of a leak, which would then, she assured me, get into the floor.

This would then rot, which would, in turn, cause some other calamitous material failure and before we knew it our house would fall down around our ears, leaving us both homeless and destitute.

I knew at that stage there would be no consoling her or suggesting further minor repairs. It would be a full renovation or divorce.

So away we went on the whirlwind that is building renovation.

We got quotes. We sorted finance. We changed our mind 25 times as to what towel rail went with which flooring. We upped our budget. We bought our dream towel rail. Then we took it back and got another one. And eventually, we got started.

And now, as I say, it's all done.

We did make one big mistake, though.

We tallied up how much we had spent before the job was fully finished. I'm talking about only a few bits and bobs. We are 98 per cent there.

But as the calculator kept adding zeroes to the total, I decided to save myself any more cash (and pain) and do the last 2 per cent myself.

Mrs P was not keen.

She was of the opinion that we had come this far, we may as well get the builder back in to finish the job off. Besides, she said, we are really talking only $300 more weren't we?

But I was having none of it. $300 was $300. Besides, all I was going to do was put in the wardrobe organiser in the space we'd acquired behind the new bathroom. What could go wrong?

Well, quite a bit as it turned out.

I won't bore you with all the details, but let's just say a little overzealous hammering in what turned out to be the wrong location led to a moderately sized hole in the wall. So now this needed repairing too.

While Mrs P has her own views on what happened next – and I'm sure I'll get to hear of them when she starts talking to me again _ as far as I'm concerned I did everything right.

I watched the instructional video on YouTube. I asked a bloke at the park who looked like he would know. And, most importantly, according to him, I applied a reasonable amount of brute strength.

Somehow, after all that careful research, we ended up with a hole in the wall of the new wardrobe AND one in the newly constructed bathroom. Worse still, the falling debris on the bathroom side somehow managed to hit and crack the new porcelain sink.

Now both holes need repairing and the sink needs replacing. Again.

Mrs P has banned me from anything to do with the job. We are getting the builder back in.

He thinks $1000 or so should get it all sorted.

I figure it's probably a good idea.

And while I don't know if it would still actually work out cheaper than a divorce, I've a feeling Mrs P might be doing some research on the matter.