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Bollocks! Fuck! Arse!

57 replies

MitziK · 23/04/2020 13:40

Working from home: Day 10,000 (or whatever the fuck day it is now).

Peaceful, quiet, sunny, warm - birdsong and the occasional whingeing DTwatCat wanting me to go into the garden and entertain him with a pointy stick to chase.

DP eventually emerges from upstairs five hours after I do (which is fine by me, it means I don't have to endure shite like reruns of Nightrider and the fucking A Team). Makes a cup of tea. Great.

I'd vaguely noticed things had been moved in the region of the Cupboard under the Stairs, but as I haven't really seen him move much over his furlough period, I assumed he'd dropped something when I heard some scrabbling noises.

Oh, how wrong I was. He had been in The Cupboard - looking for stuff.

I spent ages carefully organising and stacking DIY items in there. They're my tools. My million rawl plugs, bolts, screws, brackets, saws - I do the flatpacks. I do the plumbing repairs. I do all of it. Not because he doesn't want to, but because I'm good at it and like fixing, building, mending and improving things. He gets enlisted when some grunt work is required. Very simple, unambiguous instructions - this is a person who, for all his intelligence and degrees, if you tell him 'look to your right', will inevitably start spinning round anticlockwise and fall to his left. He is definitely spatially disabled.

He's come out and said 'I finally found them!'.

What?

'Shelf brackets! They were really hard to find!'

Right hand side, three inches to the right of the door behind the case that holds all the shelf fixings and in front of the drill cases?

'Oh. You knew where they were?'

'Well, I did put them there in the first place' because I don't believe in rummaging around for three hours and spent a lot of time and effort in planning how my DIY stuff was stored so I can go there and instantly lay my hands upon anything I need. 'Why?'

'No reason' and he wanders off.

Ten minutes later, I hear thumping sounds. He's only decided that today is the day he is going to fit a shelf over the bathroom door to put baskets on place the toiletroll stash.

Very, very calmly, I try to find out whether he's considered that the planks need to be cut to size. And remind him that the tenon saw would be the appropriate choice (rather than the pruning one from my equally well organised gardening equipment). And that the workbench currently lives in the shed of a thousand spiders and he'd better not be planning to continue sawing directly onto the kitchen table if he wishes to live until teatime.

Oh, and the wood needs to be painted to increase its lifespan in a humid environment. And wood screws are in the case marked Wood Screws, rather than the short brass ones meant for picture hanging.

It's all in hand, apparently. He's just going to put it up temporarily and then take it down to paint it.

He's already snapped my shovel handle two days ago. And I've just reset some of the slabs on the patio, so I can't hide the body do any more digging.

Please, make it stop.

OP posts:
Thisismytimetoshine · 23/04/2020 13:42

Why aren't you doing it yourself; since you seem to be far better equipped to do so than he is??

Judashascomeintosomemoney · 23/04/2020 13:43

I think we both have to confront the very real possibility that we’re married to the same man.

MitziK · 23/04/2020 13:51

Um, I'm not doing it because I'm working? In between bitching about him on MN, I'm answering emails.

OP posts:
maras2 · 23/04/2020 13:53

Sound very much like son of honydragon's Spoony Fucker DH. Smile

MitziK · 23/04/2020 13:53

@Judashascomeintosomemoney, could be.

Do you think you could take him back for a bit? It's gone very, very quiet now, which is making me all the more twitchy.

OP posts:
Lllot5 · 23/04/2020 13:56

I wonder if they could go and live on a island somewhere?
We can call it Manland, you could go on holiday there to visit but come home to a clean tidy house where things stay where you put them.

Lllot5 · 23/04/2020 13:57

Except my sons and son in law of course. They’re perfect 😇

BearSoFair · 23/04/2020 13:57

if you tell him 'look to your right', will inevitably start spinning round anticlockwise and fall to his left Grin
Sorry OP but that really tickled me!

MrAlyhakinsMassiveYacht · 23/04/2020 14:03

DH has spent the entire day playing with my water fountain, which I bought the parts for, constructed and have maintained for nearly a year. Some idiot child kicked a football into it last week and then water level went down.

Now he had the hosepipe out earlier and me asking him, since he was holding the hosepipe, to top up my fountain seems to have translated to "please take my fountain to bits and remake it the way you thought I should have made it in the first place oh and while you are interfering could you move it across the garden so I can't see it out of the window anymore. "

MitziK · 23/04/2020 14:07

I can't bear the silence anymore. It takes me back to the Great Washing Powder Disaster of 1994 when the then two year old DD went very quiet and I found her happily mixing the contents of a box of Fairy on the floor with cat food and orange squash. Three weeks before payday.

I'm going up. Wish me luck - and the patience of a saint.

OP posts:
Njinkskyrulestoo · 23/04/2020 14:12

OP I love this post!! :)

At least B&Q are open again.....

BeetrootRocks · 23/04/2020 14:15

Bizarre answer from Thisismytimetoshine Grin

Windyatthebeach · 23/04/2020 14:16

Op you have mentioned patio stones..
Problem solved...
Wink

picklemewalnuts · 23/04/2020 14:19

Yes. Yes yes yes.

gamerchick · 23/04/2020 14:20

At least B&Q are open again.....

I saw, made my day it did Smile

Good luck OP.

MitziK · 23/04/2020 14:22

And - breathe. He got confused about how to make a shelf from three planks of wood where the desired depth was greater than that provided by attaching them to the single screw holes on the brackets.

So he's gone back to the guitar where he belongs.

I'll introduce the concept of using an offcut cut into strips to secure the planks later. Maybe. Perhaps by showing him the construction of the potting bench I knocked up a few years ago.

Or I'll just pretend that none of this happened in the hope he'll forget all about it again...

OP posts:
1forAll74 · 23/04/2020 14:35

I love your writing style,and love your organising skills . I am like you with all my diy stuff. I am not married now,and an oldie,but love diy stuff,and can do most things, so everything has to be in good order in my shed,a shed with no spiders,but a few slugs now and then.
Hope the new shelf will be ok, I have put a few shelves up in my time, mainly because I love using my super spirit level, ha ha.

Willow2017 · 23/04/2020 15:10

Love this thread and your writing style. I wish your dp would try something else soon (sorry)😁

MrAlyhakinsMassiveYacht · 23/04/2020 15:48

Can you send him to the shops or out for a walk and while he's out slam the shelf up, making sure you are done and sat back in the same place you were when he left?

MitziK · 23/04/2020 16:56

He's already been out - before I finished work for the day. There are, however, mutterings of 'having another go tonight'.

I'm really hoping there's something good on TV tonight. Or the Lyrid Meteor Shower turns into a Meteorite Bombardment. It would probably make less of a mess - to use the bathroom, I had to pick up five towels, the door rack and squeeze my huge backside around a step stool which had two blunt pencils, three screwdrivers and my Attack Tape Measure (it's very highly sprung and can only be described as having a hair trigger for retraction) balanced upon it in a little DIY cairn.

The upside of him going to the shop was that he got properly dressed. The idea of him attempting all these things whilst in a T shirt and shorts instead of borrowing my steel toecap boots and wearing some bloody trousers was all too traumatic for me.

OP posts:
roarfeckingroar · 23/04/2020 17:04

your cat chases a stick? Wow

Judashascomeintosomemoney · 23/04/2020 18:22

Do you think you could take him back for a bit?
Sorry, no can do. As you can tell by the delay, I’m enjoying myself without the worry that while it’s all gone quiet he’s rearranging a shelf/cupboard/ whole fucking outbuilding somewhere. Cheers OP 🥂, thanks for having him

MitziK · 23/04/2020 18:31

He's not the brightest of cats. I hold the end and drag it about a bit in the grass or on the patio as though I'm fishing for Perch and he stalks and pounces on the end. He has been known to try to retrieve one between his remaining teeth before now, but as he is the kind of elegant, agile and graceful feline that can sit on the floor and fall off, that usually ends with him trying to attempt a pole vault and tripping over one end of the stick.

Update: He's lost the saw. No, I have no idea how DP has managed this in a two bed semi. And no, I haven't hidden it. I have a feeling that he's decided to squirrel it away in the spare room with everything else I can't find when I need it and, like the furry acorn eaters, promptly forgotten what he's done with it.

I am staying downstairs.

There are crashing noises emanating from the spare room. I do not enter the spare room. It is a place of anarchy and chaos, boxes within boxes within shopping bags and scattered about with wild abandon, a teenage boy's room without the unpleasant smells and suspiciously crunchy socks. I would ask 'how can you find anything in here?' but the answer would be 'I stand up and generally trip over it'.

Ah. Quiet. He's been distracted by whatever the hell it is he's listening to on headphones. My recording headphones as his mysteriously disappeared and then were broken when I asked for mine back as he'd lost my wireless earbuds

I do rather like him and the cat not necessarily in that order - but his wish to do 'things' without proper planning, organisation and making a clear space within which to work makes my teeth itch.

OP posts:
GrannyD57 · 23/04/2020 18:48

Would love to see a picture of your potting bench

SpyApp · 23/04/2020 18:54

Stop!
Rewind!
You haven't told us what state he left The Cupboard in.
This, I feel, is key.
One of the many Joy's of having an XH is that my tools and general ironmongery stay exactly where I left them.