I might wind up doing a lot of apologizing if I apologize for every boring post here, so I won’t. But feel free to skip this one and my feelings won’t be hurt.

Just a few things I’ve discovered about DIY recently:

• Gloves: latex for most jobs, heavier duty chemical-proof for solvent-based stuff. Really nice not to get stuff on your hands. This applies especially to tinkering with mechanical stuff (bike). No grease under fingernails. Get a big box of latex exam gloves.
• Recycle brush cleaners: I clean paint off brushes in an old jar, then put the used spirits in old jars with lids. After a few days, the paint comes out of solution and clumps on the bottom and sticks to the sides - the spirits can be re-used. This is also a great tip for cleaning bike parts, for instance in gasoline. Used gas can be filtered through cheesecloth (or old teeshirt) to remove large fragments of grime.
• Paint stripper: stay away from this horrible stuff. It burns the hell out of your skin on contact. I’d consider using it for restoring old furniture or something where you can take your time and just work on small areas, but not for removing lots of paint off woodwork.
• Stop at near-perfect: I realized at some point that the trick to doing things that require smoothing such as plastering and the like is to stop just short of perfect. There is always that moment when it is just about perfect and you think you can just smooth that bit a little more and it’ll be perfect, and then you screw it up worse. I’ve decided the trick is to learn to know just how close to perfect you are likely to get, and then stop right there.