A spot of relatively simple DIY this weekend. Or, as they call it up north: DIT — ‘do it theesen’. Some call them home improvements; we’ve taken to calling them home impairments. Read on and you’ll soon get the picture.

All we’ve done is replace our library’s net curtains (or, to be more precise, our tab-topped voiles) with venetian blinds. The library curtains have caused many an annoyance. First, though, I should explain what I mean by ‘our library’. It might sound like one wing of an Elizabethan mansion, with six-foot-thick stone walls; however, it is roughly ten feet by ten, full of books and, since it is also full of a table, also doubles up as a breakfast dining area.

The window is about eight feet long by two feet high and you have to stand to be able to look out of it. Strange as it may sound, though, we like it just the way it is. It lets in plenty of light, but if it were much bigger the library, being south-facing, would get too hot and bright in the summer, so we’d end up having to part-close the curtains anyway.

The only real problem with the library window is its length, which meant we had to buy three sets of blinds; and we shall still have to make a couple of adaptations to finish the job (about which, more to come soon — with photos). For privacy, we tried fixing a net curtain last year, but, after a few problems with attaching fixings to our crumbly 1950s walls (that and a good helping of drill-incompetence on my part), opted instead to hang a couple of voiles. The only way to hang them (or so it seemed to us at the time) was to thread them along an eight-foot length of heavy-gauge green gardening wire and loop the ends of the wire over our ’stylish’ aluminium curtain rail. I know what you’re thinking: It all sounds a bit tatty.

Guess what? You’re right!

Only a fortnight ago, we were all set to put up a set of vertical blinds. Proper fixing instructions never arrived from the suppliers, despite repeated requests, so we eventually returned the blinds and got a refund. The country might be in a recession but it seems some companies don’t care about losing a sale. Their loss, not ours.

And so we gravitated towards venetian blinds. We bought three, used two in the library and will use the third on our upstairs landing, where we currently have a thick chocolate brown curtain. Meanwhile, we also found some blinds we bought over a year ago — when we had an under-powered drill that wasn’t much use for doing DIY work. This means the kitchen will finally be getting blinds as well.
Compromise, hack and fudge we might, but eventually we do get round to getting those little jobs done. Honest!