Practicality

Over the weekend, we got a lot of small (but necessary) jobs done, some of which I found to be really quite satisfying. It has to be said, I’m about as practical as a teapot made of salt, so it’s been good to have done some practical “DIYish” tasks that’ve gone smoothly, and had good results, rather than my normal disastrous attempts.

One example of this was that we put the rotary washing-line thing back in the garden. And this time we used a different base, so it went in straight. I don’t know how, but the first time I’d done it with one of those poxy ground-spear things, it’d gone in straight up ’til about halfway in- I know it had, I’d checked it with a spirit level – but by the time it was all the way in, it was angled at about 30° Not ideal, as you can imagine – and it also meant I bore a certain amount of piss-taking about the entire thing being utterly skew-whiff.

The new base we got was one that screwed in to the ground – much easier to do, until the last couple of revolutions, at which point it became quite tough, and the supplied lever wasn’t really up to the job. Still, application of another length of steel through the handle rectified that – if there’s one thing I do understand when it comes to DIY, it’s what leverage and/or fulcrums can do.

Secondly – and this was something that I hadn’t previously screwed up – was the installation of two more water-butts, along with downpipe-diverters, so that water coming down the drainpipe from the guttering gets diverted into the water-butt, until it’s full and then it goes back down the drain. All very clever, I’m sure. Thankfully I didn’t design the bloody things, I just fitted them.

And it was remarkably simple. Worryingly so, in fact – which meant that neither I nor herself actually trusted them to be done correctly until we’d emptied a two-litre bottle of water into each gutter. But lo, they worked perfectly first time.

Even more satisfyingly, having installed them on the Saturday morning, when I checked them on the Sunday following the rainy Saturday night, the butts were full. 100L in 24 hours. Not bad at all. Even if it does mean we’ve now had to buy some more, and they’ll be getting connected together to the current ones once they arrive.