10.11.2017

Household Jobs Even Hardened DIY Janes Should Avoid

Moms are virtually indestructible. We’re the most resourceful people on the planet and deal with more crisis management in an afternoon than a lot of multinational corporations do in a year. Being a Mom is hard enough when you have the support of a husband, wife or partner but single Moms by nature have to be superhuman as they’re often the only line of defence when things go wrong. As such, many Moms (both attached and single) tend to be true autodidacts teaching themselves new skills on the fly as and when crisis emerge. Fixing a leaky faucet or changing a tyre become the order of the day for a busy Mom; just another challenge to be weathered with grace and resolve.

In this light, it’s no surprise that handy Moms soon gain the confidence to take on virtually any task, but as capable as you may be there are some tasks that are best left to the professionals. If something goes wrong with any of the following, don’t let your curiosity or pride endanger your health.

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Roofing

For obvious reasons, rooftop repairs are dangerous. In fact one third of all construction related fatalities are caused by falls from roofs. Even if you feel you have a head for heights, you’re unlikely to have the necessary safety equipment that a roofing company has that’s required to do the job safely and to a reasonable standard. Even if you’re able to scale the roof to fix a leak, you’ll lack the stability to carry out a comprehensive repair and your basic survival instinct may encourage you to rush the job to the extent where you smear caulk on the affected area, eyeball the repair, consider it ‘good enough’ and hastily climb down. Come the rain, however, the leak may come back.

Major plumbing modifications

Capable Moms will no doubt be comfortable tinkering with U bends, repairing leaky pipes, changing washers and plunging away at blocked toilets. These are all fine as they’re basically modifications to your existing plumbing infrastructure. When it comes to major plumbing modifications, however, it’s certainly best to enlist the aid of a certified plumber. Extending hot water lines, for example, involves changing with copper pipes which need to be blowtorched. Even if you can get hold of a blowtorch, it takes an experienced welder to avoid leaving the kinds of tiny gaps in joints that, while they may be invisible to the naked eye, will let tiny jets of water through resulting in extensive leakage that could go unnoticed for days, weeks or months and result in extremely expensive repairs later down the line.

Knocking through walls

The prospect of knocking down a wall may seem like a whole lot of fun (as well as being a great stress-relieving exercise) but walls can be deceiving. Some are simply partitions to protect our privacy, while some are load bearing and therefore crucial to the structural integrity of your home. If you don’t know which is which, you could bring the floors above crashing down on your head with extremely dangerous results.

Even non-load bearing walls can contain gas pipes, electrical wiring or water pipes that may prove disastrous consequences if broken.

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