Just call me Handy Andy.

I think I have an addiction. I don’t smoke or take drugs ­– heck I’m 40 and I’ve never been drunk. Nonetheless, addiction has found me. It crept up slowly. I didn’t see it happening. One minute I was hanging a picture on the wall, the next asking for a nail gun for my birthday.
 
The problem is, I think I may be addicted to DIY.
 
There wasn’t much of a DIY scene in our previous house. It was a new build, so everything was already shining, new and freshly painted. I enjoyed the odd touch up, a shelf here and there. All good, innocent fun.
 
Then we moved. To an older house. An older house that needed work. I started browsing Pinterest, followed house renovation accounts on Instagram, then Stacey Solomon moved house and I was done for.
 
She also moved to a fixer-upper (albeit four times the size and hundreds of years old) and her Instagram stories were my gateway. She was painting and sanding. Ripping up carpet and tearing off wallpaper. It all looked like such fun.
 
Soon, I was tearing the 90s floral wallpaper feature wall down, painting the downstair’s loo tiles and booking in trades (only for things that, if I attempted, could prove fatal). Ordering wallpaper and paint samples and booking my dad in to teach me how to change light fixings.
 
Today, when I should have been writing, I was furtively searching Screwfix for a thing called a ‘cable channel’. The joy of finding the right width was better than anything you get at the bottom of a bottle of Moët. I’m guessing. I obviously wouldn’t know.
 
My ever-accommodating husband watches from a far. Ready to step in to hold a spirit level, unscrew screws that haven’t been touched in 30 years and order wood from the timber merchant when I chicken out. He paints the parts I can’t reach and pops his head into rooms I’m to check I haven’t been gassed by paint fumes or accidentally uncovered asbestos.
 
We’re getting our biggest bit work done in a few weeks. Actual builders are coming in to knock walls down and rip out the kitchen. I’m hoping I won’t be pressed up against the door like a Victorian orphan outside a pie shop, longing to have a go on their sledgehammers (oo-err).
 
Maybe, instead, it will cure me of my obsession. Watching the professionals at work may make me see the truth of my own inadequacies and urge me to hang up my electric screwdriver forever. Or maybe not. I’m guessing not.