Christmas DIY Panic

16th Dec 2014

Among all the preparations for Christmas Day – now less than a week awa y – there are none more pressing and important than finishing the “doing up” of that room in your gaf that you’ve been meaning to get around to for ages.

A project that seemed like it would take barely a week when you mulled it over with a friend who fancies himself as a carpenter at half time in the county football final in October has now passed through all statuses from “tipping along nicely” and “ramping up a bit” to “all out panic stations” and now “we may have to cancel Christmas”.

Christmas is a time we all associate with putting our feet up with a glass of Raza/Tanora/Murphy’s and enjoying our families, cheesy films and a few silly long and drawn out board games – but many of us cannot rest easy at the thought that a certain cranky uncle-in-law or a pernickety grand-aunt might see or, God forbid, comment on the slightly unsteady sink in the bathroom or the three piece suite that has seen five World Cups with the tactically placed “throw over” that covers a cigarette burn on one armchair. Oh the potential shame of it!
 

Oh look what Santy brought!

The very need to do up a room is a perpetual desire inherent in many Cork families that seems to come from Saint Finbarre himself – he wasn’t happy with his place in Gouganebarra to the extent that he went and founded a new city and spent most of his life working on a church (and in fairness it turned out well but Finbarre is clearly directing things from above – the renovations on his beautiful cathedral seem to never end!).

Calendar events are the biggest inspiration and motivation for DIY projects, particularly religious ones like a ‘The Stations of The Cross’ which must have been one of the biggest drivers of DIY store sales in Ireland over the last few decades.

The lost commandment was surely:

“Thou shalt not host The Stations of the Cross without spending the ten preceding weeks drilling, power washing, chimney sweeping, tilling, grouting, plumbing, wiring, sanding and painting as a sacrifice for the Lord.”

And that’s before we even talk about the sleepless nights over sandwich making and cake baking.

Spending your Sundays worshipping at enormous cathedrals of DIY in the suburbs are much like Jesus’s walk into the desert – a bland uninteresting place where penance is the order of the day but thoughts of better, more improved places to come fill you with hope that the end of your misery may be imminent (just don’t let the old doll stray into the area where kitchen units are displayed or she’ll be plotting your next project before you’ve finished this one!). Even the gates of Heaven must need a coat of paint every couple of centuries.

When the toolboxes and drills have been put back into the garden shed the last few days also involve frenetic bouts of high tempo power-hoovering which has to include sucking up all the dirt behind kitchen cabinets, the pesky hard-to-get-at dust in between appliances and of course the grey clingy stuff that lives behind radiators.

You know you’ve definitely got caught up in too much pre-Christmas cleaning and DIY when you are seriously considering removing the radiators from the walls just to be able to hoover behind them two hours before Midnight mass on Christmas Eve.

When one major project, like the suiting room, is finally “done” it’s not uncommon that praise for it from friends and family members is responded to with “yeah, it was a long few months but we really wanted to tackle it before we redo the bathroom”. The bathroom?! Yeah, erra it hasn’t been done up in ages and herself is mad for a “bee-day”.

The self-perpetuating DIY projects are given another boost by Santy when his gifts are opened on Christmas Day: a set of extra-toughened drill bits, a pump action screwdriver and a new hacksaw. You should know when you get a packet of rawl plugs in your Christmas sock that you may have a problem…

‘Oh now they’re going to be dead handy for when we start on the spare bedroom in January!’