The day we needed some DIY help!

Last Updated on : 22nd May 2014

There are big DIY projects and there are little DIY projects.

And Mr NappyValleyNet is rubbish at all of them.

That may sound like a criticism but it’s not, its simply not in his (or my) DNA.

This was perfectly illustrated when we moved into our new home and tried to put up some shelves.

He trotted off to buy “tools and materials” and returned with some MDF, a tube of glue and a circular saw.

If you don’t know what a circular saw is, and it’s important for this story, then it’s one of those circular blades with really jagged edges that is driven by an electric motor and spins at about a billion RPM.

James Bond “baddies” use them to kill people.

So I went off to make a cup of tea and whilst he “set up” a mutual friend popped around to borrow some CD’s (it was the early noughties).

We both walked into the living room, where the CD’s were kept, and were greeted with the sight of my husband, all six foot four and 18 stone, naked apart from a pair of boxer shorts and a tool belt.

He was using the circular saw to cut the MDF and was dragging the spinning blade *towards* him.

There are many many reasons why this is spectacularly dangerous.

From a lack of protective clothing to a lack of technique to a lack of safety awareness (he was cutting the wood on a coffee table with no clamps securing it to the surface) this story still makes me shudder with what “could have been”.

My friend, equally horrified, calmly walked over to my husband, took the saw out of his hands, switched it off and packed it back into it’s pristine cardboard box.

Then, without saying a word, he walked outside and put it in the boot of his car.

We’ve never seen it again.

This is a very long winded way of explaining that for some of us, because we’re too busy or too rubbish or don’t have the proper tools, DIY and home maintenance is a bit of a nightmare.

But that’s OK.

Because for people like us there are firms like Multiserve.

We had them around a few weeks ago. There was no emergency: no blown fuses or gushing pipes, just a steady build-up of jobs that neither of us could tackle.

The new fridge needed plumbing in, the shower was gently leaking and the basement utility pump was on it’s last legs. Nothing urgent but they weren’t going to fix themselves and if ignored, there was a chance they’d escalate.

The day we needed some DIY helpSo one spring Thursday morning a bright orange van pulled into our road (no need to handover parking permits, they’re all pre-registered) and our handy man got to work.

Pumps were ordered and installed. Walls were opened up to fix leaks, (through a bedroom wall to cunningly avoid breaking tiles) and then re-plastered and repainted. Fridges were plumbed in (much to our children’s delight who now drink ice with everything) and all of it done calmly, safely and without argument.

What I found especially useful was that many of these jobs needed more than one trade. The shower alone involved plumbing, plastering and painting. As opposed to me having to decide what was needed and then coordinate a number of different suppliers, who all work to different agendas and timetables, I could simply outline the problem and then disappear to make tea and fetch biscuits.

I could go on about how much they tidied up after themselves, about how they diagnosed that one of our pipes was clogged and backing up into our washing machine, about how the leak was more severe that we thought, but I won’t. Because the whole beauty of a service like Multiserve is you don’t actually need to know anything, apart from their phone number.

Multiserve are also available for full refurbishments and larger construction work and have recently launch a ‘waste removal / clearance’ service.

www.multiserve.co.uk

Call: 08000 612002

 Note: Disclosure: Multiserve is a NappyValleyNet advertiser but I ordered the service as a paying customer and paid the full price.

The day we needed some DIY help

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