The Systems Administrator was in London today, catching up with old colleagues. I thought that while the coast was clear I would have a go at mending the door of the woodshed. It is a small and not very well built shed, bought from one of the DIY stores where it was hugely discounted on the grounds that it was slightly scuffed. It's a garden shed, not a dining table, and a few scratches didn't seem to be a problem, so we snaffled it up. It is bolted to the end of the house, since the time it blew over in a heavy gale, almost crushing a Haws watering can but thankfully not hitting any of the cats, and we keep kindling and coal in it, while it helps screen the dustbins and bags of stuff waiting to go to the recycling centre.
Its tongue and groove doors are only nailed together, and not screwed. They would probably have been fine if we were tidy people who always shut both doors after fetching kindling and wood, but we are not tidy people and after a while the lock broke. One door remained permanently shut, bolted at the bottom, while the other ended up open half the time, as the replacement latch the SA made kept slipping. The door kept flapping, and as is the way of flimsily nailed together things left to flap in the wind, it broke, the two outer tongue and groove panels and the diagonal brace down the back of the door parting company from the three inner panels and the brace across the top.
I would occasionally ask the SA to mend the woodshed door, thinking it looked rather derelict to have it dropping to bits by the outside tap, just next to the kitchen window. The SA was not that bothered by the door and suggested removing it. The next time I mentioned the woodshed door the SA sounded even less bothered, and I got the impression that it did not feature in the SA's mental list of the top one hundred outstanding domestic tasks. I didn't like to keep mentioning it, not wanting to descend into nagging. Instead I thought, if you want a job done, do it yourself.
Up to a point. I am not good with almost anything mechanical. It is my own fault, I suppose. Lacking interest or confidence I haven't learned how to fix things, and that lack of competence becomes self-perpetuating. Easier and safer to ask somebody else to do things, especially when the SA is a pretty good all-rounder at carpentry, electricals, and basic plumbing. But I had a bag of assorted nails left over from assembling the beehives, and the afternoon stretched in front of me. How hard could it be to line up five pieces of tongue and groove and bang nails through them to reattach them to their original supports?
Only moderately hard. I retrieved a claw hammer from the workshop without trampling on any baby robins, found a pair of pliers, and extracted the old nails. Holding the door together while nailing the pieces in place initially seemed to require three hands until I got the hang of it. I struggled with the bottom of the door where the end of the original cross piece had rotted, but improvised with an offcut from the workshop. It is after all a garden shed, not a dining table. I haven't yet discovered whether my repaired door will shut, since I haven't removed the columbine and tansy that have seeded themselves in front of the shed, but even open it looks tidier in one piece than hanging off in three parts.
I waited until the SA was out partly because I am so painfully slow at these things, and become clumsier if I think that anybody who knows how it should be done is watching. And because I didn't want to appear to be engaging in a sort of active passive aggression. Look at me struggling to mend this thing, when you could do it so much more quickly and easily. I just wanted the door tidied up.
My success ended with the shed door, though. This morning I bought two eight foot lengths of batten so that I could repair the temporary barrier we put up by the chicken house when we let them out, to discourage them from wandering up the side of the wood where the foxes are. It's a low panel with plywood squares at both ends, battens top and bottom and wire netting in the middle, that the chickens could leap over if they really wanted to, but they don't bother, and top and bottom battens had broken so that the panel kept buckling in the middle no matter how carefully you balanced the ends against the hen run and a patch of nettles. I'd asked the SA about that a few times, but we didn't have any spare battens in stock and nothing happened. But nailing the new battens to the ply did not work. The panel was too big, flexed too much when lifted, and the nails kept popping out, while the humidity climbed through the eighty per cent barrier and my head began to ache fiercely.
When the SA got home I asked, very nicely, if he could possibly mend the chicken gate. The SA, presented with the materials for the job, agreed. I don't think he was as impressed as he might have been by the woodshed door, but there again, it never bothered him in the first place.
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