Male Egos and DIY

For sometime now I have been in need of a work station with better bench space for marking copious piles of English essays and Geography tests! My current computer console is very compact and neat and suited my previous home exactly, used as it was in conjunction with the kitchen table. Here though, I have had to spread my mess over two rooms and certain family members are starting to get sick of it! (my plan is working mwahahahaha).

Now my beloved Husband is a very talented man with many artistic credits to his name but he loathes and despises DIY. Rather like me in the kitchen, he feels he is not good at it and he is never satisfied with his efforts so he avoids the whole thing. Most repairs around the place utilise ducktape. Efficient but ugly. Anyway, as a result I had asked a friend's husband (who is an excellent carpenter and rather creative himself) if he would help me create my ideal work station. He was happy to oblige and all we needed to do was get the recycled benchtops from behind our shed, down to his house for power sawing purposes. This relied on Husband's co-operation and as a result....didn't happen.

Instead, like a rag to a bull, the concept of another 'man' doing the jobs Husband sees as his 'role' around his domain, spurred him to great heights. Last weekend we celebrated the birthday of our Monarch (hem hem) and received a Public Holiday for our trouble; Himself saw this as an opportunity to create my ideal workstation. He started by cutting the inch and a quarter thick MDF boards down from one metre in width to 800mm, by hand. It took him all Saturday.

By Sunday the masterwork was ready for assembly and was duly attached to the wall. Unfortunately, the months between storing the MDF behind the shed and retrieving it this weekend, had been rainy ones. The boards had warped and any small scratches or chips in the surface allowed the ingress of water, resulting in a welt-like raising of the surface in a less than charming manner. This required a day of sanding and fiddling until by Monday it was ready for 'finishing'. The original board had been stained with a wood effect stain but this was now so badly damaged as to require a new start. We either stripped the MDF or went over it with something else.

Here Husband came into his own. He raided the shed and found a few half empty tins of paint in red and yellow and proceeded to undercoat the whole thing. He spent the entire day layering, overlayering, dragging, adding a bit of orange (found that in the shed too), relayering, redragging
and generally coating the thing with about 8 layers of paint. It now looks like woodgrain again and I for one am amazed by the transformation......however, I suspect it will take a week to dry.

He tells me today that he is not quite happy with the colour, it's a little too pink, and the surface could do with another sand....sooooooooo....I guess I won't be moving in for awhile. Still, you have to admit it looks great for a guy who hates DIY. And the amount of time he's spent! He must really love me. Or really want his kitchen table back :-D