What Katie did next... I’m doing my best, but my DIY skills leave a lot to be desired
Renovating her cottage is not going as smoothly as she’d like, but Katie is enjoying the challenge
Between the squirrel invasion in the attic, the bad cooking, the freezing cold house and the panicking over bills, the work on my cottage continues. Now, if I could go back to when I was living in my caravan, muttering complaints about the outside loo, I’d grab myself by the shoulders and scream: “Enjoy it while you can!”
When it comes to the big jobs, those far beyond my skill set – the dampproofing, the plumbing, climbing up on the roof to check just how rotten the fascia are and where the squirrels are getting in – I get a professional to do it. But otherwise I’m willing to try doing most things at the cottage myself. I spend days painting and nights watching YouTube DIY videos, taking crashcourses in how to plaster and how to reseal a bath.
In the garden, I fashion a driveway out of what was a mud swamp and a rough streak of concrete: digging and flattening the earth, covering it in weed matting, then raking over gravel from Jewson’s, neatly surrounded by sleepers. Did I make that sound easy? The reality involved sliding around in the mud and rain, screaming and spending hours doing back-breaking shovelling to move the gravel into place.
Although the end result isn’t nearly as slick as a professional would have managed, I’m still thrilled. Mostly because now I can get from my car to my house without having to negotiate an assault course of ponds.
Inside, having painted one bedroom light teal, I set about revamping the bathroom. I repaint the wooden walls pewter grey and, pleased with the result, head back to Homebase in search of matching tile paint.
At first, I feel very pleased with myself for having discovered this shortcut. Painting tiles is far, far cheaper and definitely seems less work than trying to retile the lot. However, I quickly discover the drawbacks. Tile paint is not at all forgiving. Soon, heavy drip marks are bulging all over the walls where I’ve slathered it on too thick. My attempts to reseal the bath are equally anarchic, leaving me with fat, uneven white lines around the tub and up the wall, and palms thick with a sticky mess that I can’t manage to scrub off for a week.
Still, I make up for the mess by finding a beautiful matching porcelain bathroom set in white with blue flowers curling around it.
In pristine condition, it’s being given away for £100. “I’ve never felt this way about a toilet before,” I tell Martin, as I drag him with me to help collect it. He isn’t convinced, muttering about “old ladies’ taste”. We stand back to admire it in my newly painted bathroom. “Actually, it looks rather beautiful”, he admits.
When I can, I tempt friends over to help me with the work, bribing them with bottles of wine and my famous pheasant pancakes – the only dish I can cook. Luckily, soon even this becomes impossible as I set about ripping out the kitchen.
Together with Martin, I knock out the spider-ridden cupboards, banging them with hammers and finding them so soft and ancient, they crumble apart easily, ready for me to cart them off to the tip. With my friend Indy, after a few glasses of wine, we rip the tiles off the kitchen walls with the pink crowbar an ex-boyfriend gave me as a joke (thanks, Dicky!).
Laila comes over to help me paint, watching with curiosity as I bang together some shelves. “What do you think?” I ask, standing back to look at my work. “I think,” she says, “that symmetry is overrated.”
My aunt comes over to stay with her wife. They take one look at the bedroom I’ve recently finished doing. “This is all going to be repainted,” they say. And then they show me how to do it. My aunt kneels on the floor with me, showing me how to use Polyfilla and nail the skirting board back into place. I learn what “cutting in” means and the reason why you have to use gloss paint. They spend 24 hours painting my room to perfection, and I finally appreciate what a proper job looks like. So, that’s one room down, now I only have to do another five.
At times it feels like I’m winning, at other times the house is such mayhem that I am not sure if I am making it better or not. “It’ll get worse before it gets better,” my friend Cecily warns. Now, I see what she means. There are halfopen tins of paint in every room waiting to get knocked over and spew Florentine Red all over the beige carpet; there are hammers to be tripped over and wire wool to be stepped on with bare feet. The kitchen looks worse than the one in the old derelict pub I lived in.
Everything is one step forward, then a thousand leaps back. Every job I do reveals another job that needs doing, or creates one I didn’t originally have.
I find a beautiful lamp for the sitting room in a charity shop, with a chiffon shade and a bulbous pink flower stalk, but after a day it blows. I buy beautiful antique brushed-gold taps from eBay for the kitchen, only to find they don’t fit. I take the tiles off the kitchen wall and pull off so much plaster in the process that I’m left with a fat, angry orange strip in their place. I paint the downstairs bathroom only to discover the cornice has been replaced by one carved out of polystyrene.
At times it feels overwhelming. In other ways, I enjoy the challenge. With every mistake and problem I encounter, I learn something new, a skill that I didn’t have before.
I take my broken lamp to the light shop in Frome and the nice man behind the counter takes the time to teach me how to fix it. I go home and, delighted, fix every other broken lamp I have.
With every mistake and problem I encounter, I learn something new