I hate to decorate, especially the fiddly bits. Consequently the fat is full of broad expanses of colour, (I have no sense of clash either), so I tend to choose a colour on impulse and then paint an entire room in it. The living room is midnight blue, the bedroom bright orange and the bathroom pillar box red....there are other rooms too, with equally striking themes, but I don't want you snooping around my entire home just yet.
I'm also a self taught bodger. I'll try most things - and make a complete pig's ear of them. Last night was a case in point. Themanwhowouldbeabuilder left more than just a few loose ends behind, including lots of temporary electrical connections in the loft. He had promised to return at some point and fit a proper "junction box". Up until last night I had no idea what a junction box was, (except perhaps that it might be one of those yellow boxes that you're not allowed to enter unless you have an exit at a crossroad - but that would hardly fit into the loft). I tried holding the tools that he deserted to ransom, but to no avail, so last night as the matter has become urgent (you will remember that the flat is on the market and I don't want the buyer's surveyor to find anything untoward) I went to B&Q.
You would be amazed how many different types of junction boxes there are! with lights, with switches, waterproof ones, metal, plastic, big and small....I did what everyone else in B&Q seems to do, I ripped oped the plastic package and read the instructions on several different types. Not that I understood the instructions, but they all seemed to contain the same sort of gubbins, so I chose one that looked relatively simple to use and had a red light on the outside that should tell me whether it was on or off.
I went up in the loft and fiddled around to see if I could work our what I should do, and promptly gave myself quite a nasty shock. Five minutes later, after I'd turned off the electric I came back with the torch and every conceivable tool I thought I would need. I made several more trips, for the pliers..a screwdriver.....a knife.......the junction box (silly me!), all the while discovering the practical consequences of a law physics, heat rises. It was like a sauna up there.
You wouldn't believe the hours of farting around, different combinations of wires (I did look at the instructions eventually, they may as well have been in Hebrew), the sweating, the swearing, the holes in my fingers....I was very proud that I only had to replace the main fuse 3 times when I threw the switch to see if my handiwork did (work). More often than not nothing happened at all, until one blissful moment when the lights came on.
I am genius, I am savant!!