I’m really not too fond of DIY stores. When god was handing out home assembly abilities i was at the back of the queue. I have vague memories of putting together a dining room set when i was a teenager and then that evening my grandmother falling to the floor as one of the chairs snapped beneath her. I also tried to assemble a barbecue in Hamburg recently which was a complete disaster. So as you can imagine, i was a little bit nervous when my brother and I went into homebase to pick up a grill for my birthday. We found an absolute bargain - £19.99 for a full size BBQ. Assembly time 15 minutes. Brilliant! The staff were helpful and the check out queue was tiny (for a saturday).

Amazingly we assembled the barbecue in no time at all (Although we didn’t quite hit the 15 minute target) and the barbecue still stands in one piece. :)

This is my local DIY store, and the only place within reasonable walking distance to buy paint and other similar household stuff (I don't have the luxury of a car, and what you cannot carry is unlikely to balance happily on the back of a motorbike).

It's fairly sizeable, with a large car-park, and is indeed something of a surprise to find in this part of London: at one time, the former railway yards lining the Warwick Road were relatively under-developed. Homebase, a telephone exchange and a petrol station were the only buildings amongst a sea of temporary car parks. No longer: a huge apartment block hems in one side of the car park (not so nice for their views...) and the telephone exchange is ripe for redevelopment. How long before someone eyes up the car park?

Anyway, for the time being the store itself has a pretty reasonable range of items covering paints, electricals, plumbing, timber, flooring, with a large kitchen, bathroom and furniture showroom upstairs, a lighting section and garden centre. As with other Homebase stores, they sell kitchenware and a limited range of cheap furniture, too. The range is not as large as out-of-town stores, but it suffices for most of my needs.

It's let down by its staff - if, indeed, you can find one, as they seem to be rarer than an endangered species here. If you are lucky enough to get a fleeting glimpse, they are usually rushing past on some errand. Customer services can be equally quiet, or have queues to the sole operative. Once you corner one, they vary from the friendly and reasonably helpful to the gormlessly unhelpful. The garden centre also looks a bit sad: I guess the turnover in this urban part of London is simply not high enough to ensure that the plants are kept in that healthy 'just left the nursery' condition.

An oddity is the architecture: although it's really just another shed, they have tried very hard to do something interesting: somewhat bizarrely, they have chosen an Egyptian theme. The car-park has a row of 'bud' columns screening it from the road, and the wall of the store itself has faux-Egyptian murals in the concrete, outlined in gold paint. Perhaps future generations will laud it as architecturally interesting, if it lasts that long. For now, it just looks quaintly odd.