A couple of years ago we bought a house. This was, it turns out, an excellent excuse to learn a lot of new skills very quickly.
Since then: painted rooms (picked the colour schemes, rolled the walls), built flat-pack furniture and some things that weren’t flat-pack, laid artificial grass, hung a lot of art, taken on carpentry projects with a woodworking friend, and fully designed and decorated my home office from scratch — walls, furniture, lighting, cable management, the works.
None of this was planned. The house needed things done, I wanted to understand how they worked before paying someone else to do them, and somewhere along the way it became a genuine hobby.
The home office is probably the project I’m most proud of. It’s where I work every day, and it needed to be a space that was calm, functional, and mine.
The DIY impulse connects to the same thing as miniatures and sculpting: I like making physical things, I like understanding how they’re built, and I like the satisfaction of finishing something that exists in the world rather than in a Jira ticket.
The fact that my house is also significantly nicer because of it is a bonus.