It is a home truth that if you try nagging your husband to finish any DIY job he started six months earlier, your pleas will go unheeded.

However, if you reach for the drill, saw or paint pot and announce you're so fed up with waiting that you're going to get on with it yourself, your man of inaction will leap to it faster than you can say Handy Andy.

I've only just discovered this very useful tactic. For if there's one thing my husband loathes more than DIY, it's me doing DIY.

It's true that I have an attention-to-detail deficit which is not easy to live with if, like my husband, you're a perfectionist.

I don't mind unevenly hung wallpaper or accidental splatterings of dark wood stain on beige carpets.

I probably wouldn't even notice, especially if I were the culprit.

But this is the sort of thing that would give my husband sleepless nights, high blood pressure and an overwhelming desire to rip everything out and start again.

This is not the best course of action.

The problem with his method of working is that he spends so much time doing the preparation (remember, the key to DIY success

is preparation, preparation, preparation) that he quickly loses the motivation to actually get on and do the job.

If something should go wrong, no matter now minor, he's likely to slam down his tools and take time out

for tea and cakes. Then he has a nap. Then it's the next day and the task is forgotten.

There have been a few occasions when I've considered taking up where my husband has left off , but until now I've respected his need to get the work done in his own particular way, no matter how long it takes.

The other day, however, I could see no harm in announcing I would finish painting one of our bedroom walls which had been re-plastered much earlier in our marriage.

All it required was a slap of emulsion. Perhaps it was the way I said "slap" which set the alarm bells ringing.

"No, no. I'll do it," he said, leaping to stand between me and the shed door.

"But why?"

"Because you're careless."

"But this is the easiest job in the world," I said, miffed. "And I've done a helluva lot more painting in the house than you have."

"Yeah, and look at the state of it it."

This resulted in a bit of a slanging match, with me reminding him that he didn't know the difference between gloss and emulsion until I'd explained it.

"I did too," he said. "One's paint and one's wood. Ha, ha, ha."

Conclusion? He had that wall painted within 24 hours.

Now he's busy making some skirting boards for the hallway, filling in a hole in the kitchen floor and doing the finishing touches to our new bathroom after I'd threatened I'd tackle all these myself too.

This all goes to show that if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well before someone else makes a hash of it.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.