I am in a war of attrition with the house. And the house is winning.

Let’s get this right – I’m not what you’d actually call a creditable DIYer. Which is a shame, because my dad was a builder by trade and could pretty much do anything.

What that essentially means is that I’m caught in that terrible limbo between not actually being able to fix things properly myself, but not being able to afford a stream of tradesmen tramping through the front door to fix stuff for me.

The house seems to know this, so has of late taken delight in making stuff not work so it can watch me struggle to fix them. Last week, after the high winds, it was the fence (as I briefly touched upon in last week’s column).

Armed with a cordless power drill that manages to retain about ten minutes’ worth of juice before packing in, a pocketful of screws, a hammer and half of a washing line, I set to re-assembling the broken panels. Several hours later, it looked all right.

From the garden side, that is, which is fortunately covered with reed screening. From the back... well, let’s just say the fence is like a swan. All graceful on the top, but paddling furiously to stay alive under the water. The fence is doing all the work from the back end. And it ain’t pretty.

Then the kitchen cabinet lights went. Two of them together. I thought this was just going to be a case of replacing bulbs, which isn’t a picnic in itself. The bulbs are tiny little things that can easily snap as you try to wiggle them out or in to the fittings.

I took out both bulbs and replaced them. Nothing. Were the replacement bulbs bust? I took out working bulbs and tried the new bulbs in them. They worked okay. I replaced the old bulbs in the test fittings. One didn’t work. This went on for quite some time until I was left with not only incontrovertible proof that two of the light fittings were totally bust, but I’d managed to goose a third in the process.

So the light fittings are awaiting further attention. The house, seeing that I wasn’t going to do any more work with the electrics, then decided to throw a blocked toilet at me. I watched a YouTube video in which a man wrapped a plastic bag around his floor mop and attacked the toilet with it.

“Don’t even think about that with my new mop,” said Mrs B. So I donned a pair of marigolds and attacked the toilet with a plunger. It seemed to work. Seemed to. You can never be too sure about these things.

It’s all getting rather too much. I’m starting to wonder if my dad’s DIY genes have skipped a generation, and if so, how soon I can reasonably expect my son to start handling all this sort of stuff...