When it came to DIY, I’d always felt helpless. A broken dishwasher fixed that

Early this year, at a dinner with friends, someone suggested we share a 2022 moment or achievement of which we were proud. Normally I’m too embarrassed to think, let alone talk, about myself in such a way, so I tend to deflect. “Well, I avoided prison once again!” I might say. On this occasion, however, I had something to share that may have sounded like a deflection but, in fact, wasn’t: “I fixed our busted dishwasher.”

“Nice one,” they said. “What a man.” I could tell, however, they weren’t as impressed as I was. I didn’t blame them. Someone else at the table had just spoken about their recovery to full health after months of chemo- and radiotherapy. Hard to top that. At the same time, my friends weren’t fully aware of my origin story and, thus, couldn’t appreciate how far I’d come.

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My father couldn’t, or at least never did, change a light bulb. Nor did I ever see him wielding a hammer or operating a drill. Instead, it was my mother who’d do what she could around the place with what little tools we had – if only to avoid inadvertently engaging the type of tradesperson who can detect a homeowner’s lack of expertise the way a shark can smell blood in the water.

As game as my mother was in tackling small jobs, and even bigger ones like painting, she was no expert, and therefore not in a position to, Yoda-like, pass down her skills and wisdom on the DIY front. As a result, I grew up, like my siblings, with no fix-it skills beyond giving a recalcitrant gadget a whack with the flat of my hand in the hope I’d scare it back into working order. This is not something I really thought much about until I later became a homeowner and discovered how often things break or simply give in to exhaustion. I suddenly felt ill-equipped to fix things like listing fence posts, loose guttering, cracked plasterboard, sticking doors, malfunctioning appliances and the like – especially since my tool kit held little more than a bent hammer, a screwdriver, and a
catastrophe of loose nails and screws.

My feelings of inadequacy were amplified by my father-in-law and a mate. The former, over for dinner, would often put down his knife and fork and cast his eye around our crumbling edifice and declare that something “needed doing”. He’d then appear days or weeks later in overalls and do it himself, while I made him cups of tea and tried to tell myself that my feelings of emasculation were a social construct.

My father couldn’t, or at least never did, change a light bulb. Nor did I ever see him wielding a hammer or operating a drill.

My friend, Greg, a mechanical savant who grew up watching his father pull things apart and put them back together again, would service our car or bikes in a pristine workshop he built himself, and gently suggest that some of the repairs he was doing I could learn to do myself. “If I could swap my skills, whatever they are, for yours,” I’d tell him admiringly, “I’d do it in a heartbeat.” We’d then discuss whether being handy was down to nature or nurture, and we decided it was a bit of both. No doubt, just as Mozart was born with a gift for musical composition, some of us are born with a natural aptitude to repair broken toasters, glitching circuit boards and leaking radiators. “But you can teach yourself some simple things,” Greg would say encouragingly.

Over the years I’ve done just that, with varying levels of success, though things are trending positively. Appropriate tools make things easier, but half the battle is being judicious about which jobs you choose in the first place, and having the patience to see things through without taking shortcuts. What’s also helped, enormously, are YouTube tutorials uploaded by modern-day heroes. Some are so thorough I’d be confident of removing someone’s gallbladder if they were there to talk me through it.