"Do It Yourself" joke

A do-it-yourself enthusiast has been banned by his wife from taking on any more tasks after causing about $30, 000 of damage. Christopher Andrews, 21, a pensions administrator, has left a trail of destruction in their two-bedroom terrace house in Wiltshire, south-west England.

While trying to change a washer on a tap, he went up into the loft to look for the stop-crock and disconnected two pipes, flooding the house. He later returned to the loft to look for the television aerial and crashed through the ceiling, showering plaster on his wife who was ironing.

When he wanted to lay a carpet in the bedroom, he knocked out the light bringing the roll of material into the house. He cut a large hole in the carpet rather than move the bed. Andrews once blacked both his eyes when a wheel brace slipped as he tried to change a punctured tire on the couple? s car.

He ruined a kitchen work surface by trimming off so much of it to make it fit that it ended up far too small. In his hands the electric drill becomes a dangerous weapon. He cut his leg badly when he dropped the drill as he tried to rehang a broken garden gate. Then, while trying to put up a coat rack in the hall, he drilled through an electric cable sending out sparks that set fire to the curtains.

This made him more safety conscious. When he decided to put some speakers on the walls he turned off the electricity. Then, unable to understand why his electric drill had stopped working, he took it apart to see if he could fix the fault. Having failed to find anything wrong with it, he tried to put it back together again but by then he had forgotten where all the pieces went. He went out and bought another drill and was about to take it back because it didn? t work when his wife arrived home and reminded him that he had turned off the electricity.

Mrs Andrews, a job training manager, said she had had enough. "Chris will have a go at absolutely anything," she said. "But in his case DIY stands for Dangerously Incompetent Yob?."