My rise to power tools: how I conquered building-trade skills
Anything builders do, from grouting to sanding, Philippa Stockley has learnt to do better (except carry a full hod of bricks)
The world can be divided into those who know how to use a slot-headed screwdriver and those who use them to prise off paint lids – which is at least better than ruining a silver spoon. A third group neither knows nor cares about the difference between a cross-head and a slot-head.
I’m a proud member of the first group – a DIY obsessive.
While it’s still true that more men than women like doing do-it-yourself, many men are useless at it, while many women are very able. I’ve always been someone who enjoys dexterity. Now I’ve hit 50 and am still a penniless writer and painter, the skills are more valuable than ever as a percentile of my personal GDP. Every time you do a job, it saves £20-£35 an hour – the approximate rates from labourer to electrician.
I do everything: grouting, lead-work, sanding, painting and mixing paint colours. I’m a lime-nut and make limewash, tinted with earth pigments. I do small carpentry, and put up large things properly with a hammer drill. I make simple light fittings from standard components, and happily re-cartridge dimmer switches, bleed radiators, unblock drains. I make beeswax polish.
But you need space. My everyday toolkit needs a cupboard. The mother lode – of wrenches, chisels, mitres and clamps – inhabits a small chest.
Actual building is out. Vertigo aside, I could carry only two bricks up a ladder, compared with a man my size prancing up with a half-hod or even hod. Physical limitation is the unavoidable but celebratory difference between the sexes.
Still, I once re-leaded a potting-shed windowsill. Mind-blowingly heavy, lead has a life of its own when unrolled. Bossing (shaping) it takes skill, not to mention strength. My sill was functional, but it made me look at beautifully moulded, old lead roofs with real respect.
What I (usually) enjoy doing is the everyday stuff all old-house owners must
attend to regularly. A bottom sashwindow rail needing sanding and filling, anyone? Front door peeling? Incipient wet rot dinting an external shutter (one to dread)? If you don’t do it yourself, you pay someone else to do it – and not necessarily better.
I once had a boyfriend who boasted he couldn’t wire a plug. He didn’t last – though what I sacked him for was cutting a loaf straight onto a tablecloth I’d just hand-hemmed with tiny stitches, which had taken hours. In three seconds, he slashed it with three lines, like shark gills.
One of the great DIY myths is that someone – of either gender – good at sewing will be hopeless at drilling and grouting. Another is that a man who can’t wire a plug has a trust fund or is gay. But anyone who can’t wire a plug misses the thrill of doing a job neatly and well. That first time you strip a cable to reveal bright fresh copper? Magical.
My father taught me to try DIY; to enjoy, get handbooks and learn. One of those legendary men who once populated Ladybird books, he strode home from his mystic office and fixed things at the weekend. Workmen – or work people – never came; he tackled it all.
He had been an army engineer and his mind was brilliant. He designed and built cabinetry, and also went up on the roof or down stinking drains. He turned things on a lathe. He taught himself engraving; me about paint-drying conditions, and how to clean paintbrushes properly. Painting is my speciality.
As the third daughter, perhaps to him I was the nearest to a son he would get. On Saturday mornings I learnt basic timber joints – and to watch. I’ve always found it marvellous that one can first make something, and then make it even more beautiful, perhaps with paint or fabric. Much of this is easily learnt and, as with cooking, one gets progressively better.
My early induction also taught me to learn from mistakes: never be put off, but solve the problem. My father and I spent absorbed hours at the cleared dining table, making cardboard and paper things such as Möbius strips and fiddly but captivating hexahexaflexagons. Then came a model owl kit, destined to patrol my bedroom. I was ten. Bringing the bird alive from flat to 3D was fun. I carried on unsupervised and glued wing sections, weighting a dictionary on top, to dry. Next morning revealed a ruined table and ruined book. Solvent had gone into them instead of evaporating. For years, the table bore mute witness. I have treated solvents with respect ever since.
Accepting your own limitations is the other cardinal DIY rule. I am rubbish with a saw. When some people knit, a straight piece turns out like a bootee. When I saw a straight line, it looks like the serpentine line Hogarth drew in the ‘line of beauty’.
Above all, there’s the intense, ungendered pleasure of problem-solving, skill and good work; the pride of ‘I did that’; the Scrooge-like pleasure of saving.
And the joy of slot-headed screws put in so that their grooves are either perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical. Nothing less will do.