Home Maintenance ... DIY ... My DH .... and Me ....

[Ghosty]

I need to have a little moan ... I hope no one minds ...
I very very rarely moad about DH as he is a great husband and father in so many ways but when it comes to DIY he drives me absolutely potty and I need to vent!!!
Problem No 1
It took 5 months for him to decorate DS's bedroom ... 5 MONTHS - but I couldn't interfere or help as it turned into a row ...
Problem No2
A couple of months ago we had a leak in the roof. I wanted to get a roofer to fix it ... but no, DH said he could do it - he went up on the roof, came down, said he had fixed the problem ...
A few weeks later, after a heavy downfall of rain we had another leak, in a different place ... "I'll fix it!" he says and does the same thing ...
Last night ... another leak (all these are in the dining room) in another place ... so we were up at 3am putting buckets down and wiping up the drips ....
He has very reluctantly agreed for me to ring a roofer but it has taken superhuman effort on my part NOT to scream and lose my temper so I deserve a medal in Tact and Diplomacy
Problem No3
Yesterday morning he suddenly decides to redecorate the dining room ... (same room as the leak) ... no discussion, no planning involved. So he starts ripping off wallpaper ... I bit my tongue and let him get on with it ... DS helped and actually they had a lovely time. Halfway around the room DH discovered he didn't have much lining paper left so off he went to the DIY store to get some ... they didn't have any in stock. So he carried on ripping ... I went out to the shops and when I came back 2 hours later he had stopped ripping and stripping the walls. He had got less than half way, got bored, decided to put up paper on the part of the wall he had already stripped ... so wall paper paste and and left over bits of lining paper everywhere ... and 2/3 of the wall still with the manky old stuff on that is now half hanging off ....
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
The dining room is in the middle of our house btw and not a room that you can shut the door to ....
I managed to tell him that I think his methods and logic are totally back to front ... without a row - but it was touch and go ....
It is now Monday ... I know he won't do any during the week ... he will play cricket on Saturday and it is DS's birthday on Sunday ...
So it will be 2 weeks before anything else is done.
And he reckons the baby's room will be decorated before Christmas ... And his sister and BIL arrive from New York on the 15th Dec ...
And he reckons that he can do a new deck out the back on his own ... this summer ...

Anyone else got a very keen but hopeless Handy Man at home? And how do you deal with him ...

Miserably yours (and heavily pregnant ...)

Ghosty

I know I said a 'little' moan but I got carried away ... sorry ...

Oh Ghosty, what a nightmare!

I know the type well (in fact I can be a bit of a non-finisher myself). However with dp I have the opposite problem - he gets a project and then dd and I don't see him for days until its finished! Sometimes I forget that it can be worse the other way.

I guess the way to deal with it it to hit him where it hurts (his pride). Leave cards for professional painter/decorators around the house and casually ask what colours you should use for the baby's room?

Or, does he have an equally (or preferably more) handy mate? this kind of thing is much more fun and gets done much faster with 2, so you could call the friend, explain the situation and try to engineer a "getting the DIY finished" weekend. Then simply get them a crate of beer and arrange a nice day/wekend out for yourself! (might backfire, this plan).

Lol at the deck though. I think you have to put your foot down there.

Luckily, my DHs ability in this respect is matched by his enthusiasm!

PS didn't mean to boast about dp's obsession with getting things finished there. His latest "important" project is getting a computerised list of all his DVDs....

Ghosty I have one of them! DH never actually starts let alone finishes his projects. The stuff is bought and lies about the place until I get time to do it.

I now snap at him if he so much as mentions DIY which scares him into being quiet!

My dh actually now agrees that for me to make a list of things i wnat him to do eliminates all the "nagging".(!)

If it is on thelist it will get done at some point and if its ont helist fro weeks and weeks then I have cause to get arsey....

He like to cross the things off tho!

Yes I do the list thing too. The secret is not to put too many things on the list, otherwise it confuses them, poor things.
I do the list in order of priority to me and do a brand new one every so often. That way they don't realize that they are being nagged.

We have given up and admitted that we are no good at diy and we hate it. So now we get other people to do it or it doesn't get done at all! It used to cause so many rows.

Message withdrawn

If you murdered him you could probably get away with manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility - since he has temporarily unbalanced your mind by his torturous DIY methods!

5 months WOW you are so lucky,
As for stripping wallpaper, well that job falls to me, including tiling, painting, decorating,t&g,sanding,filling, flooring basically anything that does not involve a drill. I refuse to learn how to use a drill otherwise I will be doing all that too, because I have a bone idle lazy dh.
My dh does not even start a job let alone finish it. The only way I can get my dh to diy tasks (that I cant do) is bribery of a night in the pub when he has finished the job

Ghosty, I do sympathise, but I'm afraid I am a bit like your dh. I do all the DIY around here and sometimes you know that if you don't just fit in a few hours here and there it will never get done. It's virtually impossible to do when you are tired, too.

My dad and brother are roofers and they fix things many times before leaks are cured, in some cases. It's because often it's impossible to find out the exact spot of the leak (water travels in between the layers of the roof), so they have to do what they think they need to and wait for the next rainfall to check the effectiveness of what they've done. They also cannot fix roofs until they are dry - a fact which people often don't understand.

However, if the roof is leaking in three places it sounds like you might need a new one altogether, or a new waterproof membrane if it is a flat roof.

My house is half done too, some rooms look beautiful, others I am ashamed of, and I have to admit it does bother me. But at the end of the day, real friends will understand if you have been too busy to finish it, notice the progress you have made, and then focus on you and the real reason for their visit.

Thanks for all your kind messages ...
Just a little update for you ... DH has finally agreed to have a roofer fix our roof - good job too as we have had a lot of rain in the last few days and now our dining room is strewn with buckets and we live in a sieve - yesterday it actually rained INSIDE!!!

So, we had a quote and it is $3000

Not sure about the decorating though ...

DH asked me last night what colour I wanted the living room ... so I took a deep breath and told him in no uncertain terms that he HAS to concentrate on unfinished jobs before he even thinks about taking a brush to the living room!!!