Bollocks! Fuck! Arse!

[MitziK]

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.

Some of these men are dangerous when they get an idea in their head and eventually get off the sofa to do something!!!

Ah, he manages fine with everything else.

He's just shit at translating concepts from idea to 2D, to 3D and then back again. And doesn't do navigation/reading maps/plans. I gave him my trackball because he was struggling with trackpad or mouse.

I think what goes on in his head is like a projector. Single screen only.

My head is fully three dimensional, with specific locations for particular things - when it comes to something like 'build a shelf', I can see the finished shelf in front of me, the exploded diagram and then a list of equipment, supplies and instructions on my right hand side about four foot away from my body, IYSWIM. And a selection of images showing Farrow and Ball type paint colours is retrievable from directly over my left shoulder. Quick quarter turn to the right and you've got a virtual representation of the DIY cupboard, leading on to a 3D map of the southeast and routes to various Hardware stores and pubs I'd rather be sipping a G&T in the garden in rather than trying to ignore him and his DIY

Unless of course, he'd qualify for diagnosis on the basis of constantly buggering up the crockery shelf. Every morning, I come down and put plates and bowls in neat stacks. Every following morning, I come down and see he's precariously balanced plates on bowls and big bowls on top of small ones and shoved glasses in gaps. And repeat...

Apparently, back in the dark ages when they did aptitude tests for 11 year olds, my score came out as 'wrong' because a) nobody ever got that high on 'mechanics' tests (which way would Cog C turn? type of thing) and b) I was a girl. He says he had similar, but didn't even attempt the questions.

This sort of thing is where our similarities - and there are a lot of them - pale in comparison to our differences. He'd probably bitch about how everything has to have a plan, everything has to be ordered in advance and that I burble incomprehensible gobbledygook at him like 'the big plates stack at the bottom and the teaplates go on top'.

@MitziK Your posts are a work of poetry, making me laugh, and shudder in equal measure

OH would never tackle the job of hammering a picture hook into the wall without first purchasing a De Wolfe £300 self bifurcating sprocket flange in enormous heavy rubberised case. Cordless obviously so we have to trip over the bastard charging for a few days before the project can commence. Once nail is lodged in we are all summoned & have to drop whatever we're doing to gasp at his excellent workmanship and wax lyrical on his attention to detail. We then have to listen to a 10 minute diatribe on the different methods that lesser mortals might have resorted to and why his picture hook is vastly superior.

I quite like the sound of the De Wolfe self bifurcating sprocket flange, myself...

But in reality, it would be flush mounts and command hooks.

Loving this thread.

I am currently cursing Homebase as they do not have shelves short enough for my newly decorataed bathroom walls. I have slats of wood in attic from old shelving units but not the full diy skills to fix them together, wood for brackets nor a workbench to ensure straight cutting to length. Also I need a hammer drill as its an outside wall and my good ol drill just cant get through no matter what drill bits I use as I discovered in other rooms . (N.B. look on Homebase site to add to my list of things to collect.)
I wish I was better at DIY but if anything could possibly go wrong it usually will with me, but saying that I did all the shelving in my old house and they were up for donkeys years. Think its just this house thats cursed!
Keep the tales coming they are really making me laugh and I think when the stories are told in such an affectionate way its ok to laugh.

MitziK my DH is a weird combination of you and your husband - show him a complicated DIY job and within 2 minutes he will have a diagram in his head like you and a 57-step pathway to perfection. Show him a crockery cupboard however and somehow the big heavy plates end up balancing precariously on side plates. It's very mysterious.