Oma Koti

Truth be told, I’m pretty rubbish at DIY.

After many projects went disastrously wrong, this was an easy conclusion to come to. I can’t even build flatpack without misplacing a screw or ending up with a wonky bedpost. But that’s okay. Aspiring to a level of perfectionism only seen in magazines and Instagram posts completely defeats the purpose of learning something in your own time, under your own steam. And admitting to being rubbish at something feels refreshing in an age where the aforementioned perfectionism is treated as a prerequisite to any skill worth having.

But let me back-track a little. In September 2019, my partner and I finally bought our first home. It was a long, slow, hair-pullingly frustrating process which had begun eight months before. We’d been living in the narrow, modest ground-floor flat for nearly two years as tenants but now, after a lot of wrangling over shares of freeholds and buildings insurance, it was finally ours. Home ownership, which might once have been treated as a normal milestone of adulthood, is now a distant dream. I was thus determined to waste no time in realizing the vision I’d spent two years cooking up of what this place could be, given a little love and a bit more personality.

Most people who’d never owned a property before might have started small, dipped a toe into the trials of painting and decorating to test the waters. I, on the other hand, dove in feet-first from the moment the contracts were exchanged. I’d always dreamed of a bright red living room filled with tropical greenery, but the reality was a little more shambolic to begin with. At the time I was working the late shift as a valuer in second-hand book depot. I’d get up just before noon, weave as nimbly as I could past stacks of furniture that I’d evicted from the end of the flat which currently looked like someone had been murdered in it, add another coat of paint, eat breakfast (or possibly lunch) and go to work, often still spattered with red paint. When I got home just before midnight, I’d put another coat on before bed and admire my handiwork. The tin claimed two coats would do the job. After the sixth I stopped counting.

A week later it was finally finished and, while compliments from friends and family came in thick and fast, they were tinged with mutterings of ‘you’ll never be able to paint over that’. I didn’t care. I’d lived with the beige and cream nightmare that was our existing color-scheme for far too long and I still feel immensely calm when I walk into it. Red isn’t generally thought of as a soothing color, but we tend to forget about the deep crimson shade we see behind our eyelids when we’re dozing in the sun. To me there’s nothing more relaxing. But rather than put my feet up with a book and enjoy the atmosphere I’d created; I had a larger challenge on the horizon.

You know those carpets that are so scratchy they leave a mark if you press your hand against them for more than five seconds? That was pretty much what we had. Across the entire flat. Even the communal entrance hall was carpeted, and hundreds of stomping feet had created quite a bit of confusion about what color it was even supposed to be. The rest of the carpets were what I can only describe as a greying shade of puke. Naturally, they had to go. I worked in sections, cutting back areas of carpet and underlay with a utility knife, then ripping up the rotten plywood sheets underneath. The resulting floorboards were coated in layers of grime, but a hired orbital sander revealed beautiful reddish planks of honeyed pine, a staple of the décor at my parents’ house in Finland and a deeply nostalgic texture.

By this point we had a puppy so she complicated matters. Removing carpet can be enough of a job without a bouncy 4-month-old Samoyed under your feet. And so, a silent agreement was reached. Well… I don’t know if I’d call it an agreement. Whenever my partner took the dog out for more than an hour I’d set about the carpets with relish. Which carpets and how much, I wouldn’t know until I started. Often my partner wouldn’t know this was going on until after he arrived home but when it was done, we marveled at how much better the hall and living room looked.

I was equally uncompromising when it came to the kitchen. It was to be Dutch orange with open-shelving (dust be damned) and a hard-wearing linoleum printed to resemble a meadow. We took what a lot of my Scottish friends would call the ‘fur-coat-and-nae-knickers’ approach to the design; with cheap base units concealed behind beautiful custom-made birch-ply doors and drawers. I spent the week before they were installed priming and painting thick pine planks that would become the shelves and learning my way around a hole-saw. This particular hole-saw was almost the exact width of the base of a lightbulb and had only one role to play. I had managed to replace the previous light fittings with six pendants and had set aside two cake-tins, a colander, a jelly-mould and an old circular cheese-grater to create lampshades from. Amazingly, they didn’t look half as ramshackle as I was expecting, but I learned the hard way that drilling into thin metal and sending shards of it flying in all directions in a room where you prepare food is a really bad idea.

Just like any of us, I have my limits. I’m not a plumber, electrician or carpenter and there were plenty of jobs I wouldn’t have touched if you’d paid me. I was happy to offload anything involving large expensive tools I didn’t own, rewiring or a wallpaper with complex pattern to someone who knew what they were doing but I’d watch online tutorials before making that all important ‘nope’ decision. When I’d finished painting, sanding, finishing, planting and ornamenting every other inch of the flat it was time to throw in the towel when it came to the bathroom. At the time of writing, I’ve meticulously selected everything from the brass towel rail we collected from Dorset to the light switch and taps, but it’s in someone else’s hands now.

When it comes to DIY, we’re all told ‘a bad workman blames his tools’. While there’s some truth to the phrase, not all tools are created equal. I bought the majority of the contents of my toolbox as cheaply as possible, usually when my budget was particularly tight, and it doesn’t take me long to spot the difference. A garden trowel I bought online, supposedly welded carbon-steel, snapped clean off its handle at the first bite of our stony Sussex clay-soil. The box on the back of my palm-sander intending to catch dust falls off at the slightest movement, not a great feature when the main body of the device vibrates constantly while switched on. I’ve lost count of the number of times the drill has struggled to make any progress at all in our rock-solid 120-year-old brick walls but the whole experience had made me extremely attached to those few tools that never let me down.

I come from a long line of women who pride themselves on being useful. It manifests differently from generation to generation, but the principle remains the same. While my mother is always ready to offer a sympathetic ear and think of a quick solution to seemingly unsolvable problems, my nan, true to form as a no-nonsense Finnish peasant, couldn’t care less about hypothetical problems but will have a pair of warm woolen socks knitted in an instant if you complain that your feet are cold. Both have relied on three things that were in turn gifted to me; a metal Bernina sewing-machine happy to rattle out curtains, pillowcases, quilts, clothes and even dog-toys with minimal grumbling; a large claw-hammer, as sturdy and dependable a tool as you could ever hope to hold; and a pair of scissors, bought in Finland decades ago, that are still going strong.

These scissors and I spent hours in each other’s company when I created a mural on the sloping ceiling under the stairs. It was the only vaguely vertical surface in the house not covered in photos, prints and other knick-knacks so I thought it was high time it got a makeover. Using a scallop-tile as a template, I gathered up the wallpaper samples and spares we’d had lying around for months, cut hundreds of semi-circles, gelded the whole expanse of wall with gold leaf then stuck them over the top. Were some of the widths slightly off? Definitely. Have some spots not been glued properly so the gold-leaf dropped onto the floor, the dog and anything else passing underneath? Probably. Did it take hours out of my day when there were twenty-five far more pressing jobs that needed doing? For sure. But in the time that I spent sat on the sofa, scissors in hand and a pile of wallpaper-sample scallops at my feet, I came to the realization that there would never be another home in the world like this one. And that made it worth every second.

There are other benefits to taking a slow, slightly haphazard approach to decorating your home. I’ve never been able to resist the draw of the second-hand, so I struggle to walk past a Kirppis, car-boot sale charity shop or even a skip without having a peek. Just before Christmas last year, I came across the body of a guitar sitting in one such skip, outside the school where I was working at the time. It had no strings and the laminate on one side had come unstuck from the body making it as good as useless. Half-useless. After months of tripping over it and wondering why I bother to bring home such rubbish, it hit me. I’d seen the bodies of old guitars used to create shelves and wall-art but I decided to go one step further. I cut it down the middle, lined the remaining half, filled it with plants and hung it from the ceiling with four chandelier chains. Despite my partner bashing his head on the tuning pegs more than once, it’s become a real feature of our home and a credit to upcyclists everywhere. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the cello-neck I found in the same skip.

To begin with, I didn’t know why I put myself through the ordeals I did when every splinter, every papercut and every thumb-bashed-with-hammer told me I wasn’t cut out for this. The binary between procrastinating and doing, between idealism and realism or just between ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ and ‘I’m going to do this by…’ is one that I usually find myself on the wrong side of. For every 50 projects I plan, a mere six or seven get completed.

And yet nothing gives me greater pride, even when the flat (as at the time of writing) is a patchwork of unfinished projects and discarded tools, than taking it all in and knowing I’ve made it happen. The satisfaction may only last a few seconds before I’m brought back down to earth by the mountain of things that remain incomplete, but I’ll take it. There may still be stripped back chairs unwaxed and areas of floor un-sanded but when I’m gazing into the raised pond I built or choosing a novel from our bookcase, with shelves the exact right height for both compact field guides and hefty art tomes it’s all a fitting reminder. I’m pretty rubbish at DIY.

But someday I’ll be great.