Trevor Laffan: Dad was a DIY master - sadly, I’m not a chip off his old block

Both of my regular readers here will know by now I’m not gifted when it comes to using my hands.

I’m not a DIY enthusiast because I usually end up getting frustrated. I never seem to have the necessary equipment for the job at hand, but even when I do, I mess it up, so I figure it’s easier and cheaper in the long run to call in the experts at the start.

I should have some bit of talent because my father, Reg, was very skilful. By the way, I called him Reg for as long as I can remember. Never called him dad.

Some people found that strange, but it was just the way we were, and we were very close. My mother was Ceil to me and never mam, but that’s another story.

Anyway, Reg was a plasterer by trade but a tasty man when it came to woodwork too. In fact, he could turn his hand to anything. I suppose that was because he also had something else I’m not blessed with, and that’s endless patience. So, if he didn’t know how to do something, he stuck with it until he figured it out.

Back in 1982 when Gaye and I were having a house built in Cobh, Reg made a teak front door and frame for us. He went off and sourced a large plank of teak and brought it to his workshop and set to work.

I have no idea how long it took him, but he cut it and planed it, sent shavings flying in all directions, used a router on it, and it eventually turned it into a beautiful door.

At some point in the proceedings, the router slipped a fraction and left a mark on the bottom half of the door. It was only a small nick, but it annoyed him.

I didn’t even spot it until he pointed it out to me, but once seen, it couldn’t be unseen. With a job like that there is no delete button, so we were stuck with it.

I grew to love that mark and looked at it regularly over the years, and it gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling because it reminded me that this door didn’t come from a factory. It wasn’t mass-produced.

It was a one-off piece made by my father’s hands, and he did it for me. Even if it was possible to cancel the blemish, I wouldn’t have touched it.

That was more than 40 years ago, and I can’t remember if, in the midst of the stress of building a house, I expressed the gratitude it deserved or if I showed the finished article the respect it merited. I can only hope I did, and I hope as well that he knew how grateful I was.

I didn’t inherit his talent, and I’ve come to accept that now. Like I said, I don’t have a great relationship with DIY.

Years of experience have convinced me that when the manure collides with the fan, it’s easier and cheaper in the long run to call in the experts. Horses for courses and all that.

We had an incident at home recently that left me with a bit of work to do. Without going into too much of the gory detail, it involved a little spillage.

Anyone who has ever had a colonoscopy will know there is a bit of preparation that needs to be undertaken before the procedure. You have to drink a couple of litres of a solution the night before to flush out your system.

It’s not the most appetising of drinks, but you have to get it into you over the course of a couple of hours and then prepare yourself for an extended vigil in the loo.

Some of this liquid ended up on the bathroom floor after a minor episode of vomiting. Actually, it was quite a lot and a small amount of it seeped down through the floorboards where the bathroom tiles meet the bedroom.

It landed on the sitting room ceiling below where it formed a yellow/green stain about the size of my hand.

It stood out and was hard to miss, but it formed an almost perfect map of Cyprus, which was kind of strange given our attachment to that part of the world.

I left it there for a while because I actually enjoyed looking at it. There was something homely about it, but eventually, I was instructed to get rid of it.

So, I got my stepladder, some white emulsion paint, a paint brush and set to work. It took all of a minute to cover up my little map, but I could still see it.

No problem, I left it to dry for a bit and gave it a second coat, but lo and behold, it was still visible.

It took me longer to clean the brush than it did to do the patchwork, but I left it dry overnight and applied another coat the following day.

Another two coats were added later, but it was getting worse. The emulsion was thinning the stain and spreading it wider.

I got a tin of undercoat paint from the shed and a tiny little roller and attacked it again. This time though my map had grown even more.

Cyprus was turning into a map of the world, and I was covering an area the size of a pizza box.

I repeated the process the following day but now the damaged area was the size of a fridge.

My map was finally beginning to fade, but by now I had almost painted the entire ceiling, and I can still see the damn stain.

Maybe I’ll grow to love it like the nick on Reg’s door.