Blast from the past: decorating disasters!
Every issue, Yours writer Marion Clarke will be reliving the best bits of our lives. This fortnight she has been giggling over your tales of DIY calamities
To surprise me after a stay in hospital, my husband once hired an electric sander to sand the pine floors of our new home. Instead of achieving a nice smooth finish, he lost control of the machine which gouged a deep furrow right across the floorboards. Never the keenest of DIY types, we gave up and covered the wood floor with a fitted carpet. Hazel Moysey wanted to give her husband a pleasant surprise when he came home from hospital, too: “One evening when the children were in bed, I thought I’d emulsion the ceiling. I put the ten-litre can of paint on top of the stepladder, climbed up and dipped the brush in. It overbalanced and the whole lot went down on the carpet! “I mopped it up and the next day bought a rug to cover the stain. I didn’t tell my husband about until a long time later.” Doris Taylor had to act equally quickly after she decided to paint the curtain pelmet: “When I got down from the ladder, I accidentally knocked the tin of paint over. I scraped it off the carpet and put it back in the tin, then covered the mark by putting the settee over it. My husband didn’t find out until we were moving house and the carpet had to be taken up. He did laugh and said he’d wondered why the paint had hairs and bits of fluff in it!” When Monica Brown’s husband was painting the landing and stairs, she made him a cup of coffee: “Instead of putting it down beside him, he accidentally put it in the tin of paint. Undeterred, he took the cup out of the tin and carried on painting with the paint mixed with coffee!” Some of your stories about hanging wallpaper (or failing to hang it!) are pure Laurel and Hardy slapstick. When Carol Harper and her husband decorated their hall they used a plank propped on two chairs as they didn’t own a stepladder: “Up on the plank with the first piece of paper, I found I couldn’t quite reach so I suggested we moved the chairs and plank further along. He obliged by pulling one of the chairs from under the plank and placing it further down the hall. “Of course, I went tumbling off the plank straight into the paste bucket which went flying into the living room, where it spilled all over our new floor. Even after this unfortunate experience, I still enjoyed hanging wallpaper, but always made sure that hubby was out of the house first!” It was Jeanette Young’s dad who came to grief when he attempted to paper their front room ceiling in a pale blue paper with clouds on: “He put it on the ceiling and pressed it in place, but when he got to the other side of the room, the long strip fell
‘He was wallpapering when he came down the steps and put his foot in the bucket of paste’
‘I scraped the paint off the carpet and put it back in the tin, then covered the mark by putting the settee over it’
down and wrapped itself around him. I was supposed to be helping, but couldn’t stop laughing as he looked so funny (although he didn’t see it that way)!” An even more embarrassing incident befell M Hubbard’s father – who was a decorator by trade. “He was wallpapering when he came down the steps and put his foot in the bucket of paste. He tried to kick it off (with the paste going everywhere) but his foot was wedged. The more he struggled, the worse it got. My mum and I couldn’t help him as we were laughing too much. By the time a neighbour came to the rescue, the air was blue!” A certain amount of cursing inevitably accompanied many DIY jobs, as Mrs W Rafter recalls: “We were going to paper the back bedroom when my husband was called away on business for a few days. Bored with being his dogsbody, I decided to try doing it on my own. “When I’d finished, I asked my 12-year-old sister if she thought it was all right as my husband was such a perfectionist. Her reply was, ‘You’re a much better paper hanger than he is because you sing all the time you are working and he just swears’.” Probably not given to swearing, but definitely not a perfectionist, Evelyn Deboo’s aunt went for the easy option: “Unable to move the furniture in her bedroom, she papered around it. What a mess it looked when she moved!” Susan Bell’s DIY effort also fell short of perfection: “Many years ago when we were first married, I got tired of waiting for my husband to put some new handles on the lounge door, so I did the job myself. Several hours later, my husband came home from work. Expecting him to say, ‘Well done!’, the comment I got instead was, ‘They are on upside down. What’s for tea?’!” Valerie Reilly wishes she had taken photos of the living room she and her husband created in the Sixties. “Wanting it to be different from our parents’ décor, we chose a beachcomber theme. “We painted the ceiling dark blue with nets hanging down containing shells and glass balls. We built a bar in the corner and made a curtain for the door out of bamboo canes. We also painted the radiogram navy blue and it became a great party room. I’m sure my grandchildren think I made all this up!”