So, today’s post is a little bit different from the norm. Let me start by saying I’m incredibly inexperienced when it comes to DIY. That’s why three years after I moved in to my house, there are still no proper blinds up at my windows and after two years of being a freelancer my home office is still incomplete. As much as I want to create a Pinterest perfect workspace, I’m very aware that DIY is hard. A few weeks ago I decided to take things into my own hands and do a little bit of DIY around the house. Tired of living without shelves in the shower and staring at bare office walls, I decided to pop online and buy everything I would need to finish all of the jobs in one day. It was a disaster. So when Oak Furniture UK got in touch and told me that a quarter of us abandon DIY projects before completion, I thought I’d share what I learned from my day of DIY and how you can complete those pesky jobs without exerting too much energy. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
1) Have a plan: In hindsight, I think my DIY projects failed so miserably because I didn’t take the time to create a well thought out plan. If I’d have had a plan from the beginning, all of the things I needed for the DIY jobs would have arrived in time to actually complete the jobs, the fittings would have actually matched with other fittings in the house and I wouldn’t have ordered bathroom shelving instead of shower shelving. (Apparently glass shelves in the shower are a total no no).
2) Don’t skip steps: DIY is time consuming and it can be tempting to cut corners. However, this is what led me to lose one of the teeny tiny parts that came with the shower shelving (that wasn’t actually shower shelving) that ensured I couldn’t send it back and get a refund.
3) Youtube is Your Friend: Youtube isn’t just amazing for beauty tutorials. There are tutorials for all kinds of things and so if you find yourself stumped by scary looking instructions that you can’t make head nor tail of, you can be sure that someone has done a tutorial on Youtube. I found a handy tutorial that showed me how to install shower shelves. What YouTube can’t do though is make sure you are installing the correct product (which I was not).
4) Don’t be afraid to ask for help. One of the biggest mistakes I made was presuming that I could do it all myself. The fact is, even if you manage to put together the 4056 different parts of those shelves, it is going to be more time consuming than you think and there’s only so long you are going to give it your full attention before drifting off to watch Orange Is The New Black or worse being sucked into your favorite beauty blogger’s YouTube videos (Hello October I’m looking at you) only to realize it’s now dark and you haven’t eaten for hours. Bribe your friends into assisting you with snacks: DIY isn’t actually as fun as it seems so my advice is to rope in as many friends in to helping as you possibly can and everything is better with pizza.
5) Know your limit: If you haven’t used power tools before, don’t jump in to the deep end. There’s only so much a YouTube video can teach you and some jobs should be left for the pros.
Do these things only happen to me? Share your DIY disasters in the comments!
*This post was a collaboration with Oak Furniture UK but as always the opinions stated are my own.
