DIY

Take a Step Back, and Ask for Help

Advice from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood for the stressed DIY-er

As a little girl, my foster daughter loved Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, an animated show on PBS with characters inspired by puppets that I grew up watching on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I loved watching Daniel’s adventures, too (possibly more than she did?).

Daniel Tiger and his family often sing songs to help with challenging situations in their lives, and these songs helped our family quite a lot, especially the song with the lyric that reminds kids: “If you have to go potty, stop and go right away!”

My favorite song is the one about coping with frustration: “When you’re feeling frustrated, take a step back, and ask for help.” (You can hear him sing it in the short clip below.)

I’ve sung this to myself many times. I even remember my daughter singing it to me, though she got a little creative with the lyrics. “When you feel you frust-a-rate,” she would sing over and over.

Well, it’s eight or nine years down the road, and I still hear the frustration song in my head sometimes. Probably it would help me to call it to mind more often because the advice almost always helps me.

Coming up against my DIY limits

I love do-it-yourself projects, but I have limitations in terms of my skills and sometimes my patience. I’m a patient person in many ways, but I do get frustrated with tasks that are difficult for me.

When it comes to bigger household projects, my skills pretty much extend to painting. I can tape, patch, sand, paint with brushes and rollers, and so on. I have the necessary supplies, too. But when it comes to spatial stuff like measuring and configuring and building, I tend to make errors even when I “measure twice and cut once.”

I stumble sometimes because I think I should be able to do such-and-such task around the house, but the truth is that I don’t have the equipment or skill to do it, and I don’t always want to invest the money and/or time to be able to take it on independently.

More to the point, I’m not always the best person for the job. I’m not even always going to be the cheapest because in my inexperience, I may have to re-purchase stuff or call in help later on anyway.

Moving toward acknowledgement and acceptance

I’ve had a couple of jobs at home that have been on my mind for a few years. I’m embarrassed to admit this because one of these jobs involves a hole in the drywall in the dining room. The entire dining room, in fact, needs to have the drywall repaired because it had been covered with that 1970s-era fake wood paneling that looked like dark pieces of wood with black vertical lines between the boards.

My brother helped me remove the paneling a few years ago, but I didn’t get around to removing all of the glue residue from the walls. Let me tell you that they used a lot of glue to attach paneling back then. So there are these thick streaks and clumps of dried glue all over the drywall.

A few years ago, an ex-girlfriend and I did sand (and sand and sand some more) and add multiple coats of primer and then paint in my entryway where there was also paneling, but over the years I’ve realized that we couldn’t totally cover the glue residue because it’s so thick and dark — I can see it in places behind the paint, troubling me like a ghost.

I kept telling myself, hey, I can do a better job in the dining room, and I did sand and prime one wall, and it looks all right, but I know I’d have to add texture and paint a dark color to conceal the ghost of the glue and have a finish that looks more professional.

And even then, how professional would it really look? I learned how to add texture with a paint roller when I did the entryway, but it’s kinda blah, honestly. I don’t feel excited about the possible final result that has been floating around in my thoughts.

So this whole project has been on my mind, on the back burner, just simmering there. I let myself settle into inaction through a combination of guilt, shoulds, overwhelm, and frustration.

Finding motivation, with a little luck

Finally, I had a random call from a friend a couple weeks ago that helped me gain perspective. She’s just wrapping up a major project at her condo that involved her needing to find some reliable remodeling help when water leaked into her unit and the contractors brought in by her homeowners association didn’t fix the problem.

Turns out my friend knows a great person for drywall repair, someone she trusts and who helped with investigating and fixing the entire issue at the condo rather than just going along with the contractors who were patching things up as quickly as possible (only to leave water damage in the walls!).

I asked my friend for this person’s name, and after a couple of texts back and forth, the trusted drywall person came over the other day and gave me a reasonable estimate for the project, along with some ideas that will end up making a big difference in the flow between my living room and dining room. Not only will she replace the drywall, but she’ll install a new light fixture for me and scrape the popcorn ceiling so that the room will be more continuous with the kitchen (which already has a smooth ceiling).

Suddenly, while reflecting on the estimate, I could see this part of my home in a new way. With a relatively small series of repairs, I could have a much more restful space for eating meals. I can also see reasonable possibilities for further painting and redecorating in the kitchen that I actually could DIY as the walls in there are totally fine.

By asking for help, I ended up being able to see other possibilities to continue to make the space here more personalized and livable according to the ways that fit my lifestyle and my girlfriend’s, too. She has had a lot of positive influence — and she also has been mindful that sometimes I need to come around to working through household projects at a not-so-speedy pace.

Progress leads to more progress

I also have been researching home repair professionals on the Thumbtack app and found someone else who is going to help me with another long-overdue project to repair my carport and patio covers. It’s not often that I get a burst of energy to ask for help and make calls and have visitors to give estimates, so I’m glad I went with it when the motivation came to me.

Personally I think a lot of the DIY ethic has to do with connections with others. We don’t have to do everything ourselves. By finding people who can help us, we sometimes free up time and energy to do other things that we feel more enthusiastic about doing.

I have saved a huge amount of money by doing some DIY projects like painting the exterior of my house, but I also had the help of family and friends on that one, and I had three weeks off between summer and fall quarter one year where I could paint a little each day.

If I had more money, I would probably have hired more help more quickly. The worry about spending held me back, too. But again, I realized that sometimes people can help us if we find the right people. I didn’t need a big contractor who didn’t want my piecemeal jobs — I needed to find people who are interested in smaller jobs, and they are out there though it sometimes takes some looking around and/or a bit of luck to find them.

As my girlfriend reminds me, I also have her help: I don’t have to do or pay for everything on my own. I’m used to saving up for years and paying for things myself, one little project at a time. I can let myself accept her help, too.

Who in your life is there to offer help if you stand back and look at your to-do list from a new perspective? People sometimes have ideas, connections, experience, etc that you’d never know unless you asked.

I’m reminded of Timpoa’s story about fixing her septic system with some insight from others to offer guidance. Sometimes necessity means that we do much more than we imagined we could. Sometimes we step back and see what we truly need and want to do, and we call in reinforcements where we can.

I had to accept my own limitations and acknowledge my frustration so that I could ask for help. I know that I have other strengths, and I know that it’s not a weakness to need help from other people. I’m so glad that I paused to listen to what Daniel Tiger has been trying to tell me for many years now.

For more on all sorts of DIY ideas and projects, please see The DIY Diaries. For more about what I’ve learned from my foster daughter, please see the story below.