A victory for feminism. Sort of
Yes, I have painted my own shelves. No, I did not enjoy a single minute of it
I have a new and, I suspect, annoying, habit. Every small DIY task I accomplish is now a victory for feminism.
Using an electric drill to make a hole in the bottom of a plant pot? Up there with the 1967 Abortion Act.
Assembling a raised bed for the garden? (A very badly tooled raised bed, with several screws that refused to screw but just whirled uselessly in their off-centre holes?) That was the Representation of the People Act all over again.
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I bombard friends and family with terrible photos of these minor achievements, accompanied by the strong arm emoji and speculation about when I will develop a Y chromosome.
These jobs are, for me, a big deal. Using power tools and reading instruction booklets rewritten from the original Korean by an early version of Chat GPT do not come naturally. Don’t be fooled by the fact I own an electric drill. No one was more surprised than me when I found it in a cupboard. My neighbour, an engineering lecturer, had to help me identify its bits.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. Growing up, I thought I would become the kind of badass who took up arc welding as a hobby and fixed her own car. Instead I struggle to open the bonnet. The lever has moved every time I look for it. What I see underneath remains a mystery.
To my own horror, I prefer embroidery and knitting to anything involving molten metal. The closest I come is using a USB-charged device to light my scented candles. I wanted to be a boundary-pushing warrior woman. I’m more like an Amish wife.
None of this would matter if I lived in a large household where there was an spectrum of skills and talents. I would arrange flowers and roast aubergines while others maintained, renovated and enhanced the homestead. My eye for colours and ability to make bottom-of-the-fridge soup would be appreciated. Celebrated even.
Living alone, however, means that I have little choice but to do at least some of these tiresome jobs myself.
With a very bad grace and a good deal of bad language, obviously.
I have spent the last month painting shelves. Before this bruising experience, shelves were a bit of an afterthought. They were just - there. Or they were a punchline, something that husbands promised to put up, then collapsed under the weight of a few paperbacks. Now shelves are my whole personality.
Finding myself without a husband but with many paperbacks, plus photo albums and huge files of yellowing newspaper cuttings, to say nothing of a a vast collection of robots, art glass and coffee pots all requiring storage and display, I was forced into action.
By action I mean messaging a random joiner and giving him a lot of money to build me unpainted shelves made of solid MDF. What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing has gone wrong and the shelves themselves are excellent and sturdy with plenty of room for several decades worth of accumulated words, photos and campy old shit.
But, for those who don’t speak building materials, MDF is functional manufactured board, greyish and unattractive. I had agreed to paint them without a second thought. There was paint in the cupboard. How hard could it be?
Turns out it was extremely hard, as well as annoying, time consuming and fiddly.
Bookshelves have more sides and angles than a geometry exam.
The huge deep shelves in what I have renamed the Amazon warehouse were particularly trying. There was very little room to manoeuvre a ladder. I am not quite tall enough to reach the least accessible corners. There were a lot of bad yoga positions and worse language as I stood on one leg and aimed at the back wall with a long-handled brush.
Shallow floating shelves - I have three different kinds of shelves now, and can tell you the differences between them all - were straightforward. The horrendous job was the next door chimney breast.
This was painted a depressing dark green, like a sad Christmas tree. It looked like an upended snooker table with an electric fire at the bottom.
Covering the green took four rounds of heavy duty professional undercoat and three more of an off-white called, unfortunately, Fluffy Bathrobe.
I’m not convinced that the Christmas tree is completely out of its misery. In some lights there seems to be a greenish cast to the wall. The edges were particularly resistant to fluffy bathrobe. But it is as finished as it’s going to get.
It struck me, as I debated undercoat layer five, that it’s particularly hard doing these things alone. It might be called Do It Yourself but it is much easier with a supporting cast. In a solo household there is no one else to exclaim how much better it looks already, to point out missed bits and applaud every millimetre of progress.
For Do It All By Ourselfers there is no cheering cup of tea, or sustaining hot meal while coat two dries. With no one else to put the kettle on it’s too easy to power ahead, hangry and dehydrated. At one particularly low point I realised I had not actually lost the will to live. I just needed a sandwich.
From my one-legged perch at the top of the Amazon warehouse, I also wondered what would happen if I fell and banged my head. How long before anyone noticed that I hadn’t updated them on my latest triumph of anti-patriarchal painting?
For now, the brushes and rollers have been washed (by me). The paint has been put away in the cupboard (by me) and the repellent leggings I wear for decorating are drying on the line. The masking tape is still in place, the telly awaits repositioning on the mantelpiece. I will get round to these in my own good time.
In some ways it’s a relief to commission my own shelves and paint them whatever colour I goddamn please. I don’t have to negotiate with anyone, or have an awkward conversation about whether or not we can wait another year for them to get around to doing something about the leaning towers of storage boxes in every room.
But it is also exhausting. Making every single decision. Retrieving every single bit of painting kit from the gloomy cupboard. Stopping painting to go and buy a missing bit of kit. Spending Saturday night actually watching paint dry.
I love my new shelves and they are a victory for feminism, paid for and painted, if not built, by me. It’s just that victory is not as sweet as I thought it would be.