An ode to all the unfinished jobs around my house

Around these here parts, across the lonesome plains and prairies of my own home, I am known as One-Coat Danny, the most feared and despised paint-slinger in the whole dang family.

Anytime there’s a’housepainting to be done, One-Coat Danny gets to work, armed with his trusty ol’ revolver (a cheap roller-brush, so old and dried up, it doesn’t even roll anymore –it just slides up and down walls leaving a long sloppy streak, like a pretentious plate-smeared puree in a rushed MKR challenge).

One-Coat Danny will give a lick of paint to any wall, then think to himself “Great, first coat done. I’ll do a second coat in two hours when it’s touch-dry”.  Two hours later, he thinks again “Hmmm, doesn’t look dry yet, I’ll recoat tomorrow”. 12 years later, he still hasn’t recoated and he tells everyone the walls are meant to look like that. “This mottled faux finish is all the rage,” he says. “It just fills a home with rustic character and natural one-coat charm!”

Of course One-Coat Danny is not my real name. That would be a stupid name to have. My real name is Danny The Half-Arsed Driveway-Paving Imbecile.

Fifteen years ago, the driveway needed paving so I laid a bunch of bricks in a messy random pattern, my own personal, decorative tribute to the ’90’s Gameboy-phenomenon, Tetris. When I finished laying the bricks I thought to myself, “Okay, guess I need to cement them in so they don’t pop out. But that means I’ll have to drive to the hardware store and lug heavy cement bags to the car. Then I’ll have to drive home and lug heavy cement bags out of the car.  Umm… I might just leave it for now, until someone invents a lightweight easy-lugging cement, or someone trips on a loose brick and dies.”

So, my driveway remains unfinished: it’s now a lush botanic wonderland, with millions of weeds growing out of uncemented brick-cracks, thriving on nothing but the oil dripping out of a 2007 Subaru Impreza with an anal leakage problem.

To be honest, I’m known by a whole lot of aliases. Family members also call me The Builder’s Bog Boy: every rotted weatherboard, every cracked wallboard, every termite-gnawed floorboard has been temporarily patched with pink unsanded Builder’s Bog (so that’s about 86 per cent of my house), and one day I might get around to fixing it using a renovating technique known as “properly”.

For a weekend I was known as The Incompetent Flock-Wit after I tried to remove ugly flocked wallpaper from a bedroom, got halfway through the job, then ran out of steam, physically and literally (the wallpaper-steamer was on a four-hour rental).  And for a while there, I was Danny One-Day One-Shovel One-Hole when I tried to dig a herb garden, lost interest, and now we have our very own thick goopy backyard peat bog.  Millennia from now, archeologists may find me buried in there, a perfectly preserved procrastinator with mild ADD, who must have fallen in accidentally when walking past in the dark.

Or was he pushed?

Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a TV series on ABC3.