I’m no expert when it comes to DIY. Enthusiastic amateur I’d say.

I fumble my way along, guessing how things should be done, and generally learn the hard way.

I needed to do some more filling today to plug the holes I’d left from my poor skirting board fitting skills.

My filling knife however was caked in gunk after a few years of not being cleaned properly. I kept it clean when I first got it, it was new and I took good care of it. Somewhere along the line though I got lazy, and did a half-assed job of cleaning that knife. The first bit of dirt that stuck proved to be a perfect home for future gunk to bind and the effort of cleaning that knife just grew exponentially.

I spent a bit of time trying to clean it but it didn’t take me long to realise that I could spend an hour trying to clean it and there’s every chance it would still be too dirty to do a good job. I just had to bite the financial bullet and buy a new one.

I’m writing this as a reminder to myself that if I can just keep my knife clean, I may never need to buy one again.

Like I said, I’m no expert at DIY.

I’m a software engineer so I don’t face these kinds of problems.