Anything you can do
So, all these DIY jobs that men spend ages doing are real hard jobs are they? Huh! Piffle (always loved that word). I laid a floor last night. Yes I did. Me! Moi! I can't tell you how excited I was when I realised that it wasn't that difficult at all. When I say laid a floor, perhaps I should clarify. I was getting my Port Glasgow flat ready for my tenant to move in and one of the last things to be done was putting the mosaic floor tiles on the bathroom floor.
Now I know a lot of men and they all are prone to giving advice about how it's not quite as straightforward as you think it is, this DIY stuff. There's the preparation to be done and that takes a long time but if you don't get it right, you're doomed.
Well let me tell you what preparation I did. I looked at the floor and thought 'yes, that's where I want the tiles to go'. I looked at the tiles and thought 'yes that's the tiles I want to use'. I swept the floor, peeled the backing off the first tile and plonked it in the centre of the room. That was it. Once started, there was no stopping me. Preparation is for patient people and I'm not one of them. I now know there's no need.It got a little bit tricky when I had to cut a tile and realised I had no knife. But hey, life is only as tricky as you make it. As the old Chinese proverb goes:
'if in life,
you have no knife,
just use a blunt pair of scissors and you'll find that they'll do much the same job'
And they did - do the same job that is. Tile cut, tile fitted, Anne happy. I've not finished it off, I have to cut some toilet shaped tiles before I'm done but how hard can that be?
The thing is, I think women tend to naturally lack confidence in their abilities with these kind of things. I kept going back in to make sure the floor hadn't buckled or gone squinty because I couldn't believe it could be that easy. How could I possibly have managed it (in less than an hour) when it's such a big hard job for big hard DIY'ers to do? When I woke up this morning, I was scared to go in, in case I suddenly noticed something glaringly obvious that I'd missed.
I keep thinking about the time I decided to show my friends who lived upstairs from me, that actually, I wasn't a disaster in the kitchen and if they could cook, so could I. So I invited the two of them down for dinner and with a smug look on my face presented spaghetti bolognaise which I'd prepared with my own fair hands. They were fair impressed I can tell you.
'And you did it all yourself?' they asked incredulously.
'Yes, of course I did' replied I.
'From scratch?' they questioned.
'Mais oui' I replied 'and I'll tell you something, it was a doddle, this cooking lark is soooo easy, dunno what all the fuss was about'.
And that was fine until they spotted the empty jar of spag bol sauce which, is not (apparently) 'making it from scratch'. I thought because I'd put the stuff in the pot, put the spaghetti in another one and then, managed to merge the two, that constituted cooking. But apparently not! Huh!
Anyway I'm now waiting for someone to look at the bathroom floor and tell me that in actual fact, these are wall tiles. They're not. But that's what happens when you're used to men making things out to be big complex jobs.
Anyone needing a floor laid, just let me know.
Or a pot of something heated up - very good at that :-)
