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Home > DIY SafetyWhat is it about home DIY that turns usually intelligent women into risk takers of almost kamikaze proportions? Take for instance a common evening occurrence in Sapphic homes up and down the country: I’m sure you’ve been there – you’re just about to settle down with that new Sarah Waters’ novel that you’ve been dying to get your mitts on – you’ve poured yourself a few units’ worth of Shiraz Cabernet and then just as you get to the first word – phut! The light bulb blows and you’re pitched into semi-darkness. You utter something unrepeatable under your breath, take a swig of wine and tilt the book toward the window and the fast-fading light. You get a couple of paragraphs read – the book looks promising – the light is anything but. Finally giving up, you march out of the room to get a chair from the dining room. You place it under the light and then go in search of a bulb. You finally find one hidden in the back of the cupboard under the sink – you’re not sure what wattage it is but hey, it’s a bulb. Back under the offending darkness you take your shoes off and climb onto the chair (you don’t want to be standing all over your dining room chair with your shoes on after all!). Your house just happens to have high ceilings but standing on your tiptoes on top of the Pears’ Encyclopaedia that you just added as a booster, you can just about stretch up enough to kind of push and twist the bulb even if you can’t really get a good grip of it. Finally! It falls out into your hand. You throw it onto the sofa - you don’t want to get down just yet, it was a bit of a challenge getting up there in the first place – it bounces off the cushion onto the floor. Typical, you’ll pick it up when you get down. Time to check the bulb you found under the sink and stuffed into your shirt pocket. It looks the right fitting anyway, if a slightly different shape.  Back on your tiptoes again you can just about manoeuvre it into position even if you can’t quite manage to get it in as tightly as you’d like. The fact that the bulb is now on isn’t helping, but at least it works. You decide that it’s good enough and wobble your way back down to ground level, standing on the original bulb with your extremely vulnerable unprotected foot – ouch! See? It’s relatively common at home, standing on an encyclopaedia on a chair to change a light bulb, but apply the same scenario to your workplace and as soon as you get within a foot of the book on the chair you’d have been hauled over the coals under the Health and Safety at Work Act! Where was the risk assessment? Where was the competent person? Where was the sense?? And wine, quite frankly, is completely out of the question. We may moan and groan about health and safety in the workplace but deep down in our rational psyche, we know it makes sense. Sense though, when at home, seems to desert us even before we have made the decision to do-it-ourselves. Why is that? What makes us think for example we can paint a ceiling without eye protection and everything will be okay – we won’t spend the day in casualty with a scratched cornea? What makes us think that we actually don’t have to think about our health and safety in our homes – because god knows, the stats don’t support that notion! According to RoSPA 234,295 DIY-related accidents happened in our homes in 2002 - the latest full-year statistics available, and 62,361 of them were accounted for by us women! For a gender that prides itself on its pragmatism, we’re clocking up the accident stats at a rate of knots! I have a theory though that us Sapphys could lead by example on this one, and turn the tide of dangerous-DIY to a more harmless past-time. With our penchant for power tools combined with the sagacity of our sex, we could do something extraordinary that could significantly decrease DIY-related accident statistics in the home. Yes, it’s the rocket science of risk assessments – it’s applied common sense. Sense – don’t go home without it. Originally published: June 06 |
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