DIY Diatribe

I have a problem with DIY. A love/hate relationship. I love the countless television shows that cover overnight transformations and entire house renovations compressed into 24 minutes complete with innocuous music, time lapse cameras and chirpy voiceovers. I love the magazines that compare the painfully bland origins of a project with the miraculously fabulous final result. Who doesn't love a before and after?

So what's to hate? The net result...Instant Experts. The ones who have seen a 3 minute segment on how to build a deck and are suddenly equipped with all they need to know to convert their 2 bedroom cottage into a 16 bedroom palace. They're usually the ones who also draw up all the plans themselves and forget to include a bathroom. Or stairs. Or windows.

My dear former neighbour was an Instant Expert. He renovated a house with no prior experience and no professional advice. He took all the worst aspects of his first house with all the worst aspects of my parents house and combined them together. He didn't realise he was doing this of course, but humans are cursed with not only being incredibly adaptable, but also as creatures of habit. We're much more likely to notice poor design than good design, but we adapt so quickly that soon it doesn't matter either way. Until of course a snob like me walks in and is completely aghast that the bathroom connects directly to the kitchen.

The most frustrating trait of an Instant Expert is their incessant assertions that their DIY work is somehow an extension of them, some kind of physical manifestation of their soul. They're so passionate about this that they'll likely send themselves to the glue factory if you ask why laundry is in the bedroom cupboard.

This unrelenting passion doesn't align with the fact that the Instant Expert is an obsessive collector of images of other peoples homes and other peoples styles. In attempting to express themselves through the supposed personal process of DIY, they are in fact just expressing their complete lack of self, or their desire to be someone else. There is nothing unique or individual about the Instant Expert, they just want what someone else has in order to express themselves.