To expect DH to carry out very basic DIY?

[NikkiMartin]

How on earth do you get your respective OHs to pull their weight?

Presently want to shave my hair off, sell up and move to France - alone!

I had the opposite problem: my ex thought he was fantastic at DIY. It was truly awful, I used to come home from work to find a wall knocked down, or all the skirting boards removed. He damaged our house structurally so much that I had to reduce the selling price after I'd kicked him out.

Get someone in to do the things you can't do, OP. And consider how much of a dead weight your DH is.

Thank you everyone for your responses. I'll reply properly soon, but off to work. From what I get the general gist of I should stop trying to make him care/ do things he has no interest in. That's something I'll maybe just need to accept for my own sanity. For the painting incident ^ something similar, in a small area requested to be painted - he'd painted side to side with a brush, impressionist style.

My frustration is just that we bought a house together. I thought that ideas of oh this is my responsibility, this is my home, my own place - that would kick in and give a sense of urgency or basic motivation about a home's upkeep. We aren't in a financial position where we can pay other people to do things.

It's not the case that I do the DIY and he does everything else. We both work full time, and I have a second job from home too, and study.

Thank you kindly to everyone who corrected those who thought I was a sexist maniac.

Your friend's husbands do things that are important to them. DIY is not important to your husband and you cannot make it so. Now, be honest, when you were planning to buy a fixer-upper, was it mostly your idea?

What is he doing when you are doing the DIY?

My DP hates DIY. And I am rubbish at it...
We pay a handy man.

Did you sit down prior to buying the fixer-upper and discuss the work that needed doing: what tasks, what order, how they’d be shared, timeframes etc? Was he enthused at the time and has just gone off the idea as reality hits home, or - as your last post maybe suggests - you just assumed he’d want to do all the work once you owned the place? Could it be that you were really enthusiastic about the idea and he just went along with it? If he’d said upfront he wasn’t that keen on the work involved, would you still have gone ahead and bought it?

That's a very common situation I think, when our daughter had just started school her teacher daddy wouldn't listen to her read because he'd being doing that all day!

Many years ago when plumbing in a washing machine was a complicated job, before plastic fittings and so on, our neighbour was a plumber. His wife invited me round for coffee and when I got there and we'd got our coffee she switched off the water, got out a hacksaw and cut through the pipes under the sink! 'Now maybe he'll get round to plumbing in our washing machine'. I forget the outcome.
My brother is an electrician, it wasn't uncommon to see bare wires poked into sockets because he hadn't got round to putting a plug on the end.

I thought that ideas of oh this is my responsibility, this is my home, my own place - that would kick in and give a sense of urgency or basic motivation about a home's upkeep

If he's not interested at this early stage then it's never going to happen. I've been married to someone for thirty years with this cba attitude and it's soul destroying (and yes, itwas him who wanted a fixer upper, not me). Time to put your cards on the table, find out what each of you want from the future esp if you are planning in children and do a proper division of labour.

I can see you posting in a few years because he's expecting you to do everything after maternity leave including holding down a full time job.

I do everything myself and all my diy painting fittings etc.
I learned myself with books and youtube.

My XH enjoyed doing DIY. Unfortunately he wouldn't lift a finger to do anything else whatsoever, and thought that putting up a set of shelves, painting a wall and building a bookcase over five years equated to looking after the kids 24/7, cooking, cleaning, gardening, washing, and shopping for the duration.

He's an ex and I now do my own DIY even though I hate it and am very bad at it. It's still easier than putting up with a tosser.

If you've let it go on for two months while just nagging him it's not that important. I do all the repairs and diy as DH just isn't good with those things. He does other things I don't like to do as a trade-off(trash, mowing, car washes). Try something like that. If he's interested in doing nothing AT ALL to help out as a unit, well that's another kettle all together

I really don't know how to do much in the way of DIY, so in our house my husband does most of that stuff. He doesn't have much interest in cooking, so I do most of that. Its nothing to do with our genders. It's because we have our own individual strengths and interests.

Not sure what shaving your hair off has to do with anything though!

You don't. They have to be really interested in doing something to care about it.

Do you care about things you don't enjoy or have any interest in?