This Is This

Last week if you had bet against me you would have got pretty good odds, but I’m here to tell you that they’re not taking any more bets.

I am feeling streets better and never stopped getting on with doing my thing. Thank you for all the very cool messages - they rocked when I couldn’t. Like I said, my dip was brought on by nothing circumstantial and it wasn’t an attention seeking thing, This is a blog, OK? It’s what goes on in my mind, even when I think that I am sinking down.

I have learned some valuable lessons, the most important of which I will now relate in what could become possibly a new feature.

DIY Tip Of The Week

Say you’ve removed a shower curtain rail from a bathroom wall. You’re going to possibly have holes in the tiles where the fixtures were screwed in.

As every handyman/woman knows, Polyfilla is the home decorator’s best friend after swear words. It comes in a tube. You can get different colours. Wood effect! Quick drying! Fine surface for a glass-smooth finish! Waterproof! Exterior formula! It does everything. It fills cracks, crevaces, crannies, and crags, leaving you free to paint over or drill again. It allows you to paper over the cracks literally but not metaphorically and it is wonderful stuff. Forget houses - it has held marriages together

So after you get yourself some Polyfilla, you’re going to want to fill those holes and smooth them off so the surface is flush with the tiles. Then you’re going to leave that to dry, downing tools and telling your beloved: “I can’t do any more until that dries. Fancy a cup of tea?”

After several weeks, when you are absolutely certain the surface is dry, get some very fine sandpaper and rub it gently over the top. This must be fine grade so that it does not scratch the surface of the tiles but is abrasive enough to wear down the dried Polyfilla to give you a perfectly flat surface.

Now you will notice that dried Polyfilla has a matt finish, whereas tiles are often shiny. This difference is more noticeable in rooms with harsh lighting, such as bathrooms, or areas where the surface will get wet, as in, say, bathrooms.

If you are a bit of a perfectionist like myself, you’ll want to give the dried Polyfilla a glaze somehow so it shines like the white tile around it. You may also be reluctant to go to the hardware store to buy a tin of something for three areas the size of your thumbnail. You may perhaps be thinking of things you have lying around the house which can glaze an area of this size.

However, it would be a mistake to rifle though your wife’s nailcare box to find a product such as Revlon’s Hardwearing French Manicure Clear, because not only will she not approve, you will look stupid. Because although it does make the area shiney, for some reason it reacts with the dried Polyfilla and turns it a pale shade of yellow.

This does not happen straight away. No - the colour changes after a couple of minutes, so you’ll probably find you have applied nail polish to all of the carefully prepared areas before the colour starts changing before you eyes. And if you’ve never put nail varnish on anything before, you’re probably going to get it wrong and it will be all gloopy and messy and rubbish because you won’t know what you’re doing.

Not only will it look bad, but you’ll have to explain to your beloved when she returns home what you were thinking when you started touching up your home improvements with nail polish.

Anyone who did this would probably feel very annoyed at themselves for a while afterward, which is why I make it this week’s DIY Tip Of The Week.

Stay thinking.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 9:05 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a comment yourself.