Out on the tiles...

Picture the scene if you will.  I am sitting in my lounge with my feet both tucked into my electronic foot massager (the latest gadget for my arthritic feet).  Reg has his head on my laptop, so I'm fine as long as I don't need to type any numbers.  My jeans are damp from the knee down having walked the dogs in the rain, finally ending up at the allotment to evict some weeds, which has left me with dirty fingernails.  My hair, never at its best when damp, has given up all hope of lying flat and looks like I have been plugged into the mains for an hour.

Thank goodness I was alone.

The husband never asks me what I have been doing in the afternoon when I finish work. He assumes that I come home, walk the dogs, do some pink jobs like ironing or getting a scorch mark out of a pair of white jeans (these belong to son number one and are rapidly becoming life's biggest challenge) and then flop down on the sofa with a cup of tea to write my blog.  He's not far wrong actually, but there are the occasional days when I live in fear of him coming home.

These would be the ones when I decide that a facepack is needed, or that my eyebrows need plucking, or (and this is my personal favourite) my upper lip and chin need waxing. There have been several occasions when someone has knocked on my front door while I have been looking like this, and I have had to duck down behind the window in case anyone looked up and saw me looking like either The Phantom of the Opera or Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses, depending on which area of my face was getting the attention that day.

But a couple of weeks ago, I was doing something quite different one afternoon.  If the husband had come home early and caught me, I would have been in so much trouble, but it was a risk I was prepared to take.

I grouted the bathroom.

Now I am sure that there are many of you out there whose husbands do all the DIY around the house, working their way slowly through a list of 'things to be done' over the weekends.  The husband is not like that.  I will mention something (like the bathroom needing  grouting) and he will tell me that he'll 'get round to it'.  What this phrase actually means is that he'll never get round to it as he has far more important things to do, most of which involve two wheels.  

So having waited the best part of two years, and watched bits of grouting sail down the plughole in the shower, I took it upon myself to do it myself.  Armed with a tube of ready mixed grout, I whacked it in and smoothed it off.  The trouble was, that the floor tiles grout looked rather tatty then, so I did all that too.  If I say so myself, I did an adequate job.

The husband failed to notice what I'd done for three days.  When he finally did, he looked at me with that cute little mush of his, lower lip thrust out, and whimpered, 'You know I would have done that'.  

Well yes, maybe I do.  

But my patience will wear only so thin my love...